---
title: "Define Problem Statement: Workbench Blueprints"
description: "Workbench enterprise collaboration platform: enterprise documentation completeness gap."
artifact: problem-statement
version: "1.0"
repo_version: "2.5.0"
skill_version: "2.0.0"
created: 2026-02-21
status: sample
thread: workbench
context: "Workbench enterprise collaboration platform: enterprise documentation completeness gap"
---
<!-- PM-Skills | https://github.com/product-on-purpose/pm-skills | Apache 2.0 -->

## Scenario

Workbench is a Series B enterprise collaboration platform (~200 employees, ~500 enterprise customers [fictional]) competing with Confluence, Notion, Coda, and Monday.com. After completing six discovery interviews with enterprise team leads (October 2025), Rachel V. (Technical PM) drafted a problem statement to formalize the documentation completeness gap identified across all six interviews. The problem statement will anchor the Define phase and scope the Blueprints feature initiative. It translates the qualitative interview findings into a structured format that Sandra C. (Head of Product) and Mei-Lin T. (Enterprise Sales Lead) can use to align on investment priority and timeline.

**Source Notes:**

- Microsoft's Work Trend Index 2023 reported that knowledge workers spend an average of 8.8 hours per week searching for information or recreating documents that already exist.
- Atlassian's Confluence template documentation (support.atlassian.com) describes templates as entirely optional with no section enforcement, establishing the competitive baseline.
- Gartner's 2024 Market Guide for Content Collaboration Tools identifies approval workflow enforcement as an emerging enterprise requirement that current market leaders do not fully address.

---

## Prompt

```
define-problem-statement

Product: Workbench (enterprise collaboration platform, Series B, ~500 enterprise customers [fictional])
Feature area: Document templates and approval workflows (Blueprints)

The problem: Enterprise teams create documents using templates but no tool enforces template completion before a document enters the approval workflow. Result: approvers receive incomplete documents, send them back, and the approval cycle inflates from what should be a same-day decision to a multi-day back-and-forth.

Who is affected: Primarily two personas -- (1) document authors (project leads, ops managers) who use templates but don't complete every section; (2) approvers (department heads, compliance leads) who receive incomplete documents and must either reject and wait or approve and accept compliance risk.

Scale:
- 38% of Blueprints in closed beta reach approval with ≥1 empty required section [fictional]
- 60% of enterprise projects in our customer base lack an approved kickoff document at the time of project handoff [fictional]
- Median time to first approval: 4.0 days [fictional]; estimated 3 of those days are queue time while the doc is bounced back for completion
- Approvers review ~15 docs/month on average; at least half are incomplete [fictional]

Strategic context:
- H1 2026 OKR: expand enterprise customer base from 500 to 650 [fictional]
- Enterprise churn in compliance-heavy segments (healthcare, financial services, government) is 18% annual [fictional]; governance tooling is the most-requested feature in churn exit surveys
- Series C fundraise planned for late 2026; enterprise traction is the anchor narrative
- Competitive gap: no doc-first tool (Confluence, Notion, Coda) enforces template section completion; Monday.com has approval workflows but is not a document tool

Stakeholders: Sandra C. (Head of Product), Mei-Lin T. (Enterprise Sales Lead)
```

---

## Output

# Problem Statement: Enterprise Document Approval Inefficiency Due to Incomplete Template Submissions

## Problem Summary

Enterprise teams use document templates to standardize project kickoffs, vendor onboarding, compliance reviews, and architecture decisions, but no tool enforces template completion before the document enters an approval workflow. As a result, 38% of documents reach the approval stage with one or more required sections empty [fictional], triggering rejection-revision-resubmission cycles that inflate median approval time from what should be a same-day decision to 4.0 days [fictional]. The downstream effect is that 60% of enterprise projects lack an approved kickoff document at the point of project handoff [fictional], creating compliance risk and project delays. This gap exists across every major documentation tool in the market, meaning it is a category-level problem rather than a Workbench-specific shortcoming.

## User Impact

### Who is affected?

Two primary personas in enterprise Workbench accounts:

1. **Document authors** (project leads, operations managers, and team leads) who create documents from templates. They use templates as starting points but skip sections when the required information is not yet available, when they perceive a section as irrelevant to their use case, or when they are under time pressure. Authors are not intentionally negligent; the tool provides no signal that a section is mandatory versus optional.

2. **Approvers** (department heads, compliance leads, and senior managers) who review and approve documents. They are the most time-constrained stakeholders in the workflow and receive approximately 15 documents per month for review [fictional]. When a document is incomplete, they must choose between rejecting it (adding days to the cycle) or approving it despite gaps (accepting compliance and quality risk).

### How are they affected?

- **Authors** experience unpredictable approval timelines. A document submitted Monday may be rejected Thursday, revised Friday, and resubmitted the following Monday, consuming calendar time without adding substantive value. The unpredictability makes it difficult for authors to plan downstream work that depends on an approved document.
- **Approvers** spend an estimated 30-40% of their document review time on completeness checking rather than substantive evaluation [fictional]. When they reject an incomplete document, they bear the social cost of being perceived as a bottleneck. Over time, some approvers lower their standards to avoid the reputation of being obstructive, which introduces compliance risk.
- **Middle managers** (an emergent third persona identified in discovery interviews) absorb a shadow approval burden: they manually pre-review documents for completeness before formal submission, spending approximately 3 hours per week on an activity that is undocumented and uncompensated [fictional]. This shadow layer disappears when the manager is on vacation or sick leave, causing a spike in incomplete submissions.

### Scale of impact

- 38% of Blueprints in closed beta (80 enterprise accounts [fictional]) reach the approval stage with at least one empty required section [fictional]
- Median time from document creation to first approval decision: 4.0 days [fictional]
- Estimated 60% of enterprise projects across Workbench's customer base lack an approved kickoff document at the point of project handoff [fictional]
- Microsoft Work Trend Index 2023: knowledge workers spend 8.8 hours per week searching for or recreating existing documents, the broader cost baseline for documentation inefficiency

## Business Context

### Strategic Alignment

- **H1 2026 OKR:** Expand enterprise customer base from 500 to 650 accounts [fictional]. Blueprints with governance capabilities is the primary feature unlock for enterprise pipeline deals currently stalled on documentation governance requirements. Mei-Lin T. has identified 8 deals totaling $1.8M in combined ARR [fictional] that are specifically blocked on this capability.
- **Series C preparation:** Late 2026 fundraise depends on demonstrating enterprise traction. Blueprints is the flagship initiative in the fundraise narrative [fictional]. Sandra C. has indicated that the fundraise deck will lead with Blueprints adoption metrics as proof of enterprise product-market fit.
- **Competitive positioning:** No doc-first tool in the enterprise collaboration market enforces template section completion (see competitive analysis, February 2026). This represents the only unoccupied white space in the governance dimension of the competitive landscape.

### Business Impact

- Enterprise churn in compliance-heavy segments (healthcare, financial services, government) is 18% annual [fictional]. Governance tooling is the most-requested feature category in churn exit surveys.
- 8 enterprise pipeline deals ($1.8M combined ARR [fictional]) are currently stalled because prospects require template governance and approval workflow capabilities that Workbench does not yet offer.
- Each day of approval cycle reduction across the customer base saves an estimated 1,200 person-hours per month in aggregate document rework [fictional]. At the target median of 2.4 days (down from 4.0), the estimated savings would be approximately 480 person-hours per month across the closed-beta cohort alone [fictional].

### Why Now?

- Confluence, the market leader, has no enforcement mechanism and no public roadmap for one, but Atlassian's Rovo AI agent (announced 2024) could introduce AI-enforced completeness checks, narrowing the window. The competitive advantage is time-bounded, making speed to market critical.
- Workbench's closed beta (80 accounts [fictional]) provides a controlled environment to validate the enforcement approach before GA rollout to the remaining 420 accounts [fictional].
- The Series C fundraise timeline (late 2026) requires demonstrable enterprise traction by mid-2026, making the H1 2026 build and GA timeline critical.

## Success Criteria

| Metric | Current Baseline | Target | Timeline |
|--------|-----------------|--------|----------|
| Median time to first approval (days) | 4.0 days [fictional] | ≤ 2.5 days [fictional] | 8 weeks post-GA |
| Blueprint approval rejection rate | 38% [fictional] | ≤ 15% [fictional] | 8 weeks post-GA |
| Enterprise accounts with ≥1 active Blueprint | 0 (pre-launch) | 200 of 500 [fictional] | 6 months post-GA |
| Enterprise churn (compliance segment, annual) | 18% [fictional] | ≤ 12% [fictional] | 12 months post-GA |
| Author-side Blueprint abandonment | N/A (new feature) | ≤ 20% [fictional] | Guardrail; ongoing |

## Constraints & Considerations

- CRDT-based co-editing (using Yjs) is required for enterprise real-time collaboration, but CRDT library selection has not been finalized (spike planned for December 2025). The spike outcome may affect the Blueprints build timeline if significant architectural changes are needed.
- SSO/SAML integration is a deployment gate for enterprise IT security teams; Blueprints cannot ship to enterprise accounts without it.
- Template admin experience (designating sections as required) must not add operational burden; if admins find the feature complex, adoption will stall before authors ever see it.
- The closed beta cohort (80 accounts [fictional]) is the only available test population before GA; the experiment must be designed to produce statistically significant results within this constraint.
- Approval workflows must support account-level customization (different enterprises have different approval hierarchies); a one-size-fits-all model will not pass enterprise procurement evaluation.

## Open Questions

- [ ] What is the minimum viable approval workflow for v1? (Single-stage approval vs. multi-stage approval chain)
- [ ] Should required sections be enforced at the authoring stage (block submission) or at the approval stage (flag incomplete sections to the approver)?
- [ ] How should Blueprints handle partially saved drafts: can an author save progress without completing all required sections?
- [ ] What is the right default: all sections required (opt-out model) or no sections required (opt-in model)?
- [ ] Is Confluence template import feasible for v1, or should migration be manual with guided instructions?
