A Product Review: You’ve got the Wrong Notion
What is the latest product you’re absolutely obsessed with and why?Briefly explain what the product is, provide a broader analysis on why it plays such a significant role, and come up with any recommendations you might have for future improvements.
Intro 📝
You might be thinking “ugh another rave about Notion?”. It’s a great product to be sure, but after interviewing close to a dozen users, I realized that there are some very interesting problems with the product, and I’m excited to discuss how we can improve it.
In this post I will
- Establish what Notion is
- Explain why its so great/significant
- Explore user feedback
- Identify painpoints from feedback
- Brainstorm solutions
Let’s get started!
What Notion Is 💼
Notion is the all in one workplace for both teams and individuals.
It treats common productivity tools like kanban boards, wikis, and spreadsheets as lego like building blocks, so you can build productivity tools exactly the way you want them. Everything from simple wikis to even more complicated relational databases.
I’ll be talking about Notion from a business use case rather than a personal one. I choose to focus here because this is where the majority of revenues come from and where I believe the most interesting problems with the product lie.
Why Its So Great 😄
1) One Stop Shop For Your Team ☝️:
Before Notion, when I was at work, I felt like I always had 10 different tabs open, one for google docs, one for asana, for confluence and on and on.
As a result, when I had to find a document, I’d have to waste time searching between different tools, or hunting down someone on slack and waiting for their response and permissions. A lot of friction just to find a document.
By bringing all your teams and tools in one place. Notion eliminates this pain of figuring out “Where is that document?”. The answer is “its on Notion.”
Having this central knowledge store for all your teams is especially important in an age fo remote work, where written communication becomes the primary way to exchange information rather than meetings.
2) Ridiculously Learnable ✍️
You would think that a product with so much functionality would have a dreadfully steep learning curve. In fact, the opposite is true. Notion flattens the learning curve by reducing the number of things that you have to memorize, especially compared to its competitors.
I will give 2 examples of how the product does this via its approach to:
- Components
- Templates
Components
One backslash is all it takes for me to pull up the searchable dropdown of all components in Notion. In contrast, competitors like google docs have clunky tool bars that require me to make at least 3 or 4 clicks before I can place anything other than simple text. The descriptions on the tool bar aren’t very helpful either, so all too often I find myself having to search “how to do x on google docs.”
In essence with one keystroke I have the bulk of Notion’s power at my fingertips, while with competitors I have to learn a multitude of different click sequence.
Templates
Another aspect of Notion that is very helpful is its templates. Now yes, one could praise how Notion has templates that quickly help you learn a variety of different use cases. This is true, but a lot of Notion’s competitors do the same thing. Confluence being a prime example.
The key difference here is how Notion lets you easily preview and edit the full templates before trying them out. In contrast, Confluence just gives you an icon and a one line description before making you commit to a template.
The end result is that with Notion, I know exactly what I’m going to get ahead of time. I don’t need to remember anything because it’s laid out clearly in front of me. With Confluence, I often have to brute force my way and trial a bunch of templates before I land on one that I like. Then I have to memorize which templates are most helpful for a particular situation.
3) Fun! 🎮
Everything in notion is like a lego block. So it almost feels like I’m playing. That combined with its cartoon branding, its clever use of emojis, and endless customization just makes it really fun to use and perhaps is the reason why fan led communities all across the world are popping up. The sheer fact that a productivity tool is generating all this excitement I think is telling.
Now All of this might sound silly,
But it is absolutely key to the Notion’s growth strategy. Because people enjoy using the product so much, they openly evangelize it not only to their friends, but also to their teams at work. And this is what drives Notion’s bottoms up sales success.
How It can be Improved 🛠
For this section, I conducted user interviews, extracted pain points, and came up with the following improvements:
- Live Data Ingestion
- Notion Charts
- Salesforce Integration
- Smart Secretary Assistant
I’ll dive into each solution more in-depth, but let’s first discuss the user feedback!
Collecting User Feedback 👩🏽💻
The challenge with improving Notion is that each type of worker has very different use-cases on the platform. To better understand the unique pain points, I interviewed nine different people from various companies in roles including sales, marketing, engineering, and product.
The companies also varied in size from less than 30 people up to a couple hundred. We’ll see that company size has a big impact on the challenges people face with Notion.
You can see the full notes from my research here (on a Notion board of course!)
Below I’ll summarize the three main pain points that I extracted from my research, as well as potential solutions of how to address each of them.
Problem 1: Lack of live data
Right now all the data on Notion is static. But so much business critical data is constantly evolving: The marketing teams at both companies I interviewed mentioned that they wished they could pull in live data from their various marketing tools (ex Google Analytics) to show how their last campaign performed.
Even though I got this response from Marketing, I could easily see all sorts of other teams benefiting from live data: a financial analyst who might want to pull in exchange rates, a product manager who might want to pull in changing KPI’s. Including live data streams would vastly increase the number of teams and data that could be brought into notion and thus further its goal of becoming the all in one workplace.
Solution: Live Data Ingestion 📉
True to Notion’s no code value proposition, I think the best way to implement live data streams would be to have a form where you type the url of the data stream and boom, the feature automatically creates a webhook, parses the data into relevant columns, and populates your spreadsheet, not a line of code required on your end. (Although we could certainly in future versions allow greater customization with code)
Admittedly, I can see this being fairly high lift and not all data streams can be easily parsed into a meaningful table automatically. I would focus on building automatic parsers for a few streams we think our customers would most benefit from (eg. from specific marketing tools)
Problem 2: Notion is great for tracking a small number of sales leads, but does not scale well
The Sales team at the smallest company I interviewed (less than 30 people) used Notion very frequently. They built their entire CRM with it and tracked all leads in Notion.
However, even by the time I started interviewing companies around size 70, Sales teams had drastically decreased their frequency of Notion use, instead opting for more traditional tools like Salesforce.
When I pressed on why these teams weren’t using Notion more, the general response that I got was that it was too “lightweight” and didn’t offer the same visualizations and analytics that more specialized sales software did.
I am not saying that Notion can fully replace a Salesforce CRM, but I do think there is a few things Notion can do to really improve its value add for growing sales teams
Solution A: Charts 📊
Notion does not have any way to visualize data outside of a table. Obviously this makes life difficult for growing sales teams who need funnel charts to track conversions and bar charts to compare the performance of different account leads.
But quite frankly, I see robust charting as being helpful across all teams. After all, as the volume of data grows, a team needs elegant ways to quickly visualize it. Otherwise, it has to export the data out of Notion and use other applications to chart it, a tedious process for a company that claims to be the all in one workplace.
It is also worth noting that Notion’s competitor, Coda, does include a charting feature, and that is a selling point over Notion.
A charting feature could start out simple. A user simply types what kind of chart and what Notion database they want to link to and then a simple chart would manifest on the Notion page. Charts could be limited at first to a small list (bar, pie, funnel) and slowly expand as we see the need for more varieties.
While charts are useful for all teams, they by themselves will not help large sales teams, that’s where our next solution comes into play.
Solution B: Salesforce Integration 🌩
This might seem boring, but it is vital. As a sales team continues to scale, they will need the help of a full enterprise CRM like Salesforce. Rather than treating Salesforce as a rival then, lets work with them and try to make Notion more valuable via integration.
A connection with tools like Salesforce could allow Sales Reps to create and organize clients without having to leave Notion. This could involve creating buttons, sheets, reports all within Notion. This would allow Sales teams to take advantage of the simplicity and clean design of Notion, while still being able to leverage the powerful enterprise features that Salesforce can offer.
Problem 3: Which documents should I be following ?
The Product Manager I spoke with at the smallest company did not have any serious concerns about Notion. The relative small number of documents within the product teams meant they could easily keep track of which ones were most important.
However, at the larger companies engineers and PM’s alike mentioned that because so many people were on the platform, generating so much content, it was easy to get lost in the noise and hard to identify which documents one should be following.
One engineer actually likened it to the problem of having too many slack channels and not knowing which ones to follow or which ones to leave. That’s actually the inspiration behind this solution
Solution: Smart Secretary 🤖
This smart secretary would sift through all the documents being made and automatically suggest to you the ones that you should follow based off of factors like your team, and keywords of interest. (kind of the way that Slack bot suggests you channels that you may be interested in)
This helps it so that even as a team scales, everyone is on the same page and notified about what matters most to them, whether you have 100 docs or 100,000.
Summary 🎉
Notion is a fantastic tool that is helping to build a better workplace. It’s powerful, learnable, and just plain fun to use.
That being said, we’ve found that there are a lot of use cases, particularly for growing teams, that Notion can do a better job to address.
None of the solutions are perfect, but hopefully they can help inch us closer towards a better future for work.
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time!
— Rishub Nahar
