The single most important feature to launch if I were the PM of Notion🧑💻
Early last semester(Jan-2024) when I signed-up for Krista Gettle’s Product Class. I wasn’t sure what to expect but the title of the class resonated well— "Leading Empowered Product Teams”. It wasn’t until much later that I realized, this title is from the viral Marty Cagan’s SVPG article about Product Management. As a part of this class each of us were a Product Manager for a product of choice, and were tasked with identifying a core cohort of customer(s) and propose a feature for this category and convince leadership about why they should invest in this. It was a great experience simulating each aspect of product management, deep-dive, gather real data, customer insights and iterate on each step. While as a PM we all touch on these concepts daily, the rigorous process applied to each step and feedback iteration cycles from krista and her panel of guests was invaluable. Everything you said out loud was stress tested.
To make things fun and challenging, I picked Notion which was the opposite of Microsoft in some sense. While Microsoft has jumped the Gen AI bandwagon and perhaps has outpaced other productivity players out there, the question was….what can Notion build that would rival the office-365 products? Read on to see, what I came up with and most importantly why…
Defining the Problem
i)Goal & Scoping
One fundamental tenant of product management is to identify an opportunity that not only solves the user problem but does that in a way that is in alignment to the business. Meaning- helps the company further their mission, turn a profit and complement the strategic direction that has been already pursued. Through market research, it is clear that Notion has set its eyes on the following-
#1 Growing in the enterprise market by acquiring several companies (acquisition news)
#2 Released some impressive early AI features with Notion AI with which you can write, edit, ask questions, analyze with an AI that is embedded within the page.
With these two pieces of strategic information at my disposal, it is clear that Notion has set its eyes on expanding their offerings to be the “all-in one workspace” dream for enterprise companies. So, I narrowed down my goal to the following-
“Build a Gen AI feature for Notion that further its pursuit of being the “All-in one workspace”
ii)Users
Identifying a user cohort and classifying your customer base is arguably one of the most important tasks out there. Why, you ask? Imagine you're designing a high-tech blender. If you think your users are gourmet chefs, you'll focus on precision and power. But if your actual users are college students, you might need to emphasize its ability to blend ramen, energy drinks, and pizza into a smoothie. The end solution can be wildly different—think sous-vide settings vs. hangover cure mode!
Digging r/productivity channel on reddit, I found that there is particularly one cohort of customers who share a lot of commonalities(use-cases) with Notion’s users but have a 10X pain on their hands and tend to be power users of productivity suite of tools.
Enter- Consultants
With high-velocity roles that often ask up to 100% of their capacity & beyond- consultants are often overworked. On the other end of the equation their companies need their employees to optimize their workloads to ensure they maximize their billable hours & show-up with the highest level of standards.
To hone-in further, given the type of consultants who use Notion- we highlight a few more characteristics both for the buyer-consulting firm and the user-consultant as below-
To hone-in on the problem of saving time and keeping on top of all projects, a breakdown shows the follows-
Honing into the “project work” uncovers the following opportunity-
iii)User Journey📍
Identify Information: Gathering tasks from different tools.
Summarize: Condensing the information.
Analyze: Evaluating the tasks.
Create: Organizing the tasks into actionable items.
Defining the Solution
i)Proposed Solution
ii) Wireframe
iii) Roadmap
iv) Risks & Alternatives
Final thoughts- This feature when pitched to class and panel audience clicked instantly. We all share the problems of the customer persona discussed above. This feature arguably is the most important one that can have spillover effects to other persona and bring the potential to rival the likes of other enterprise workspace collaboration companies. I’m publish this article today as Notion just launched a very similar feature called AI connector. No harm when the cat(feature) is out of the bag I guess. Lol!
If you enjoyed reading this, here’s a food for thought- If you were slack or asana, how would you feel about this Notion’s capability that can potential hamper the time your users spent on your platform?