Jun 1, 2022
Product Deep Dive: Notion — All your work in one place.
Here it is! My first product deep dive/review ever and what better way to kick off this journey than to review a product PMs obsess over: Notion!
This product review will delve into:
- Notion as a product — what it is and where the value proposition lies
- Core mechanics of the product and company
- Sameer as CEO — his thoughts, opinions, and questions.
Let’s get straight into it.
Notion as a product
What is Notion?
You may or may not have heard of Notion. The company has gained significant popularity over the last few years with many people including myself discovering the product over the COVID-19 quarantine.
I downloaded Notion on a whim last summer and have used the product for the last year. To be blunt, it has changed my life. To be more professional, it has changed how I organize myself.
Put simply, Notion is your all-in-one digital lifespace. The keyword is lifespace — I’ve found Notion to be a great organization tool that permeates beyond work and into my daily life. Think of Notion as an online room. You have your desk for work, your calendar on the wall for the day ahead, your dumbbells in the corner for workouts, and a closet for organization.
Notion combines almost all of your common work or school needs in one place. It’s Evernote, Google Sheets, Jira, and Wiki combined in dashboards almost like Google Drive.
There’s my description, let’s see how Notion describes themselves according to their website: https://www.notion.so/
“All-in-one workspace — one tool for your whole team. Write, plan, and get organized”
Notion interestingly enough targets teams in its copy. They showcase companies using Notion, how different teams from product to HR to engineering use Notion, and testimonials. They actually don’t even mention the personal version until you’re deep down the homepage.
Notion for Teams is your digital workspace. Notion for Yourself is your digital lifespace. Notion describes itself as a solution to empower teams, offering examples of itself as a Team Wiki, Project & Task Manager, Notes Keeper, and overall method for collaboration.
After reading this, I realized that Notion versus my portrayal of the service aren’t fundamentally different. In fact, the product features are the same. It’s the target audience that differs. I wonder if Notion ever initially targeted individuals and whether financially & strategically it made more sense to target companies and teams. We’ll keep this in mind!
Fundamentals of Notion
To understand Notion, you’ll need to know about pages and blocks.
- Pages — Notion is made up of ‘pages’. This is just a blank page where you can add blocks (more ahead). Pages can be used in all sorts of fashions — I’ve created a dashboard page, a developer wiki page, a calendar page, a habit tracker, etc. Customize it for your needs
- Blocks — Pages are made up of ‘blocks’. There are many types of blocks with the simplest being a text block. Other blocks include a checkbox to-do list, headings, bullets and numbering, quotes, tables, calendars, a gallery, a timeline, and code blocks — my personal favorite. If you’ve ever used a website builder like Weebly or Wordpress, blocks are like the content you add to your page.
With this knowledge, you can build beautiful pages that will organize your work and life. Check out some of these Notion provided pages for visuals:
So does Notion just combine a bunch of products? Does it have an actual unique value proposition?
Yes, I argue Notion provides significant value over many of its contemporary tools. Notion combines various features of other products but builds upon those features.
Here’s my take on Notion’s unique value proposition:
Notion delivers an easy-to-use, efficient organizational tool that effectively carves out an accessible space on the internet for your needs. The only product you’ll need to run your team, your business, or your life.
Let’s break this down because there’s a lot being said here:
- Easy-to-use: Notion is intuitive. The product designers did a great job at building something complex at scale — meaning this product is simple to use if you’d like it to be but can be as complex as you’d like by providing a number of features. How? The product designers focused on pages and blocks as the fundamentals and incorporating a simple drag-and-drop system for moving things around.
- Efficient: I find writing notes in Notion to be very efficient. Click on a blank space and start writing. Need a particular block? Don’t touch your mouse. Notion takes inspiration from commands, specifically Minecraft’s ‘/’ command. You can access all blocks using the ‘/’ button and typing the name of what you’d like.
- Organizational tool: It’s hard to describe something like Notion in a few words — the product is a lot. I used organizational tool as the encompassing word but Notion is really a bunch of things. As mentioned before, Notion combines notetaking from Evernote, calendars from Google, to-do lists from Asana, boards from Jira, and much more. At its core, teams and people use Notion to organize their life.
- Accessible space: Notion is very accessible in a few ways. 1) A simple design that works. 2) You can access Notion using the Desktop app, your computer’s web browser, or the mobile app. 3) Notion is incredibly affordable. Unlike Slack which limits your workspace’s storage, Notion gives you unlimited pages and blocks, access to their newly released API, mobile app, and sharing for FREE. After using Notion for 6 months, I felt like I was scamming the company — this company had provided me so much value, a product I use every day and that helps me in my career progression, and I was paying nothing. I willingly bought the Personal Pro tier which is still only $4 per month.
- The only product you’ll need: This is a bit of a hyperbole but not by much. You genuinely don’t need many other products once you have Notion. 365 days a year, there are only two products I can say that I consistently use: Notion and Spotify. I can’t stress this enough — give Notion a try for a few months and note how much you use other apps like Google Docs, Apple Reminders, etc.
Notion has dedicated users (evangelists)
I started using Notion in early 2020. Now two years later, the product has grown to new users, retained existing users, and developed many evangelists.
The reason? Well, try spending a week using Notion and you will understand. Notion made me feel so much more organized in my life. I began documenting things I learned as a software developer (taking advantage of the ‘code’ blocks), tracking my favorite websites, managing my job applications. And it was all navigable through my personal dashboard.
The idea of your own personal dashboard is appealing — the number one place you go to access different elements of your life. Most productivity and organization apps seem to limit their users as just one thing. Evernote — the place for students. Google Calendar — the place for people with busy schedules. Apple Books — the place for those who want to read via their smartphone.
I mean this makes sense. It’s a fundamental principle in business that companies target specific customers with their products and marketing mix.
But Notion spoke to me as an app that considered the multi-dimensional part of their customers. I’m a student, I’m a reader, I’m a software developer, I love documenting my worldview, I love organizing job opportunities when I apply for them, I like keeping track of my progress towards goals.
On top of this, Notion is leveraging Youtubers to promote their product. Unlike Youtube stars promoting other products, Youtubers who promote Notion come across more genuine. They tend to showcase their own workspace. Whether true or not, Notion as a product makes a lot of sense for Youtube stars and their teams who often have to work on multiple videos, write scripts, edit the videos, and more. The genuine promotion likely leads to a better clickthrough rate for Notion.
Also, with the release of the Notion API, external applications will be able to interface with Notion and that will only enable more people to use the product. I’ve already seen Figma and DeepNote interface with Notion, which allows people who are interested in UI and Machine Learning to use those apps in their personal dashboards.
But it’s not all good: the problem with being a jack of all trades, master of none
My primary critique with Notion is as above — the app is a jack of all trades, master of none.
An Example with Calendars
Notion kind of sucks at Calendar. The way you build a Calendar in Notion is by constructing something called a ‘database’. You can then create a Calendar like the one above.
This is great in theory but the calendar misses some fundamental things:
- The Calendar delivers no notifications about any upcoming items that day
- If you want to add something to your calendar, you have to add it through the database which is a bit time-consuming and complex (in terms of ensuring your database has everything necessary for that new item)
- It doesn’t integrate well into other websites or apps. For example, if I book something with Calendly, I can add it to my Google Calendar with the press of a button. Notion hasn’t reached that scale to where external websites or apps would allow you to do that. A bit of a harsh criticism but it is a factor.
Ultimately, I use Google Calendar to manage my day-to-day schedule because it is organized, convenient, and sends me reminders.
This is the same for a few more Notion features such as general note-taking (other apps enable users to type faster), tables & databases (Airtable does it better), spreadsheets (Excel reigns supreme with formulas and computing), CRMs (dedicated products win), personal wikis, etc.
Notion is like 80% of the way there for these features. But they’ll want to focus on improving these existing features in the coming years — making them better designed, more efficient to use, and approachable for those looking for simple use and complex use.
That last one is important. Early on when I used Notion, they didn’t even have a simple table you could implement on your page. You had to create an integrated database, which was way too complex and became a headache to manage. They’ve since addressed this but they should keep both those looking for simple experiences and those looking for a complex, powerful tool in mind when designing.
Notion can stunt your productivity
Ironically, the pleasure of having a personal dashboard can hurt you.
I’ve seen Youtube videos and posts in the r/notion subreddit, where people showcase dashboards or goal managers that they’ve spent hours upon hours on. It’s fun to check these out or create your own but if you keep fiddling with the design of whatever page you’re working on, it ultimately will take time away from your work and progress.
So try to keep it simple and avoid looking at others’ dashboards because it really isn’t worth your time creating a whole different dashboard just to find another one you like in a few days, weeks, or months.
Don’t let your page design make Notion a productivity killer for you. :)
Final Thoughts — a promising tool with high upside.
Notion is pretty awesome, and I’d recommend you give it a try. I have friends who have tried it and love it and other friends who found it didn’t suit them. That’s usually how it is. Before Notion, I was trying new apps and productivity tools too.
Notion has high upside and I have hope that the product continues to improve and that they continue to listen to their community when building. Enjoy!
