— Product should be fun
The product ontology aims to create product knowledge organizations by solveing the product taxonomy risks combining the product development process with business, design, and tech activities centralized in Notion —the favourite tool of they all— reducing entropy during the stages of the process and helping gather product information easily to make smarter decisions, faster.
Designed in 2 main hubs to keep the system flexible enough to let you customize your own, and backed with transversal hubs for ontology and dashboard management:
Hub | Role | Tasks | Databases |
Discovery | PMs, Designers, Analysts | Create and setup tables and information for data analysis and embed external data to gather insights | Interviews,
Benchmark,
Insights |
Delivery | PMs, Engineers, Designers | Create and setup objectives, epics and issues to organize development and deployment | Strategy: objectives, initiatives, features; Operations: issues, cycles, planning |
1. Ontology
The ontology is the control center where admins and PMs can manage informations permissions and sharing with internal teams and stakeholders, as well as importing and maintaining data from the product workspace.
The databases are classified in the four main product development standard phases being more business intensive the two primary phases, and delegating respectively to designers and developers overseen by the PM.
From this hub you can control all the workspace information from one place but if you prefer you can also setup those hubs in teamspaces to be more accessible from the side bar.
2. Discovery
Centralizing research and insights from customers can benefit async collaboration among product teams when is properly organized in tables and dashboards — for instance, imagine an engineer benchmarking the onboarding system of a competitor.
Just using Notion for knowledge management at this phase will only increase information accessibility for multiple activities, but also you can use AI features to summarize interviews and find insights, or Notion websites with embedded forms to interact with customer feedback among others.
This hub is led by PMs, designers, business/domain owners and analyst that will ensure that the discovery inputs are aligned with the business strategy before they translate to delivery items.
3. Delivery
This stage is key as the PM has to translate all the discovery and data inputs into actionable items for technical teams to go from idea to reality in a few weeks or months. We decided to divide this chapter into two hierarchy layers to differentiate roles and activities at strategy and operational levels.
3.1 Strategy
Market opportunities, R+D and customer feedback among others are the raw material to define strategic objectives and key tracking in metrics in workshop sessions with product, business and stakeholders profiles.
Defining strong objectives and key results distributed across multiple product-related departments (marketing, sales, data, etc.) will determine the product features to be included in the producto roadmap for PMs.
This hub is led by PMs and business/domain owners that will ensure that the objectives and initiatives are integrated in the product feature roadmap.
3.2 Operations
Those features validated and prioritized at roadmap level have to be written in PRD alike formats so designer and engineers can work on the solution.
An aligned roadmap with epics integrated with issues properly document will determine the success of your product team at the end of the quarter, so make sure to not only link features and users stories, but using the pages to document features and user story level detail — embedded with tools like Figma.
This hub is led by PMs in collaboration with engineer and design leads to ensure the work is properly estimated and advanced as planned to release new features to the business teams.
4. Data
At the center of every product there is data. We gather data to build performance indicators with native Notion charts, or analyzing user engagement cohorts — that can be also embedded into Notion workspaces with tools like rows.com.
This system doesn’t pretend to substitute local excels or data lakes for detailed analytics but having accountability to those key metrics shared transparently across the teams will boost a more focused attitude towards the product discovery and delivery processes.
Admins and domain owners can create dashboards from data in the ontology as well as from other platforms creating a kind of dashboard catalog to enhance new insight’s discovery.
5. Hubs
Hubs are a new improvement from v3 release that aims to improve product team’s UX with the following sites:
Home: designed for you, just for you. See today’s tasks at first sight, configure your own dashboards, even your own Spotify list…Teams: wiki page —as well as the ontology— with boards filtered for business, design, and technology teams so they can access their work and stay focused.Resources: a suite of resources from well-known sources that inspired to create this system from SVPG, Linear, Reforge, GitLab,NN Group, Lenny Rachitsky, Marty Cagan among others; along with a few product-related integration’s use cases and a database with +40 resources from those references.
