How would you turn around a declining SaaS product with high churn?

You are brought in as Chief Product Officer of a mid-stage B2B SaaS platform ($60M ARR) that has seen revenue decline 15% YoY and gross logo churn spike to 32% annually. Outline your 90-day diagnostic and 12-month turnaround strategy.

Context

The product was historically a market leader in prototyping/collaboration, but modern integrated competitors (Figma/Miro) bundled its core feature set into their platforms.

Clarifying questions to ask first

What is the company's remaining cash runway (e.g. 18 months)?
Is the product being commoditized by a platform bundle or failing on reliability/usability? (Bundled by competitors).

How to approach it

Phase 1: 30-Day Triage & Customer Cohort Diagnostic:
- Cohort churn segmentation (who is leaving, why, and what tools are they switching to?)
- Unit economics audit (cut unprofitable feature maintenance and reduce infrastructure burn)
- Identify the "Unshakeable Core" (the top 20% power accounts that still get immense daily value)
Phase 2: 60-Day Strategic Pivot & Repositioning:
- Stop competing head-on with modern incumbents on their home turf
- Pivot to an underserved adjacent niche (e.g. enterprise compliance, design system governance, legacy format migration)
Phase 3: 12-Month Execution Roadmap (Pricing restructuring, Customer Success retention war room, and AI workflow integration)

Framework: Immediate Triage & Cash Runway -> Churn Cohort Diagnostic -> Strategic Pivot & Niche Selection -> Product Pruning & Refocusing -> 12-Month Turnaround Roadmap

Sample answer

You cannot win a feature war against modern horizontal suites (Figma); you must narrow focus to a defensible vertical niche
80% of revenue comes from a sticky enterprise cohort with specific security/compliance needs
Prune 50% of legacy bloated features to focus R&D entirely on the high-retention core

Action plan: 1) Form Customer Success retention war room for top 100 accounts, 2) Deprecate low-usage features, 3) Pivot product to Enterprise Design Governance & Security System, 4) Restructure pricing to usage tiers

Executive turnaround plan: Triage churn by focusing exclusively on the top 20% enterprise retention core, stop fighting horizontal incumbents, and pivot into a specialized enterprise governance workflow to stabilize ARR.

What interviewers look for

90-Day Diagnostic Framework
Cohort Churn Decomposition
Strategic Repositioning & Niche Defense
12-Month Financial & Retention Targets