How Mixpanel built a custom engineering roadmap in Notion

hi everyone thanks so much for joining this morning or this tonight wherever you're from um i'm already so excited to see uh all the places that everyone's calling in from in the chat so keep uh keep that up my name is andrea i'm gonna be your host today and um we have vijay here as well from nick's panel vijay do you wanna wave and just say hi hi everyone vijay here uh really happy to be here talking to you all awesome um so just to introduce myself i'm on the marketing team at notion and um i get to do awesome things like interview customers like mixpanel and bj's team and just help people understand like what's the best ways to use notion to solve your problems and and work better together um and then just a quick housekeeping item if for some reason um we're having zoom problems or like bj and i drop off the call just down the line for five minutes to give us a chance to rejoin um and if we don't rejoin by then then we'll just reschedule the rest of the session so i just don't want to leave you guys hanging if that if anything happens um and cool like i said uh we have vj from mixpanel's engineering team here today and super excited to go through his team's notion setup and and get the insider tour so uh vijay i'll hand it over to you to introduce yourself yeah uh hi everyone i'm vijay i lead a couple of engineering teams at mixpanel as a as a tech lead manager um primarily focused on building really great products to help our customers get insights from their product data and so specifically i lead two teams one that's focused on our core analytics platform to make it really fast and delightful for people to use and the second team is focused on query performance to make our our queries return quickly and cost efficiently and i'm really excited to be here today to show the team's workflows and and really hope it's helpful to other engineering product and design teams that are looking to get their teams organized in one tool yep definitely and i think um it'll be great bj to hear from you like what were the challenges that you were facing in terms of just getting your team your team's workflows um productive and efficient and then like how you actually did that in notion um so that you know other people can get inspiration who are on product and engineering teams like you said uh cool so you know before we start some of you on the call may not be familiar with notion or mixpanel so just wanted to explain quickly notion is you know an all-in-one workspace for notes uh projects wiki etc so basically we're building software to help teams be more productive and do it all in one space and you know reduce the the tool overload that we all seem to be facing these days and then mixpanel is a product analytics platform that makes it really easy to see how your users are interacting with your product so really excited for us both to be here um cool let's just jump right in um so vijay can you um tell me a little bit about like how did this all start like why did you start using notion yeah definitely so i actually started using notion mostly for personal use just for journaling and task tracking and just you know my daily life and i've tried a bunch of task tracking tools before i think one of the things that really stood out with notion was the fact that uh it appealed to the engineering in me a little bit it's like super customizable and i could kind of optimize it for my workflows so i really liked it and just brought it to my team at work um earlier this year back in february and um was just kind of like hey let's let's try out this new thing for task tracking and you know writing up project docs for our upcoming projects and um i think yeah given that the team was engineers they saw the power and flexibility of it uh and it kind of just ballooned since then uh especially when we all had to go completely remote uh in march for dudekovid um it sort of became like the central place where we talk like where we put all of the things that we would have otherwise said verbally in the office we were we wanted to get our knowledge organized in one place and it kind of grew from there where other teams noticed we were using notion wanted to try it and gradually i think in june or so it made sense for us to just go enterprise wide and get get the whole company on notion just to have the benefits of having all of our information in one place and in one tool that everyone knew how to use um so it was really helpful to rally people around the same goals the same projects um especially in the time when we're working from home most of the time yeah that's an awesome story i mean um we we hear that a lot or like one team starts using it and then slowly like it it spreads to other teams because it just makes so much more sense for everyone to be in the same place when we don't have like a physical office right right exactly it's good yeah it it yes it's nice to have one place that everyone's updating and when everyone knows how to use the same tool it really helps um get in sync yeah definitely um and i can imagine like from like working on product and engineering teams like you have to be talking to so many other different cross-functional teams right talking to sales and marketing like making sure everyone is aligned so when you don't have all that like ambient information in an office then um you need something to replace that that feeling right right exactly exactly yep um so this is awesome what tools were you using before you had notion and like what were some of the reasons why like those weren't cutting it yeah definitely so i think we like probably many many startups that are growing i've tried on a whole bunch of different tools and and use different ones for different use cases like we used confluence for the wiki use case we used google docs and drive for um for long form documents we used jira for um for task tracking and and frankly it it kind of just became this free-for-all where different teams used different piece bits and pieces of these for particular use cases so it became you kind of had to understand how a team works before interacting and communicating with them which which gets quite tricky especially at scale um and so yeah i think the the need to rally around one thing was was definitely one big selling point of notion for us um and in particular it's just that whole like you don't have to do an extra hop to figure out what what is this other team using for test tracking it's just okay it's a notion somewhere i know i can just navigate the hierarchy and find it um so in particular at mixpanel i think the main use case that really took off was uh the wiki basically like a hierarchical knowledge base that sort of everyone in the company can self-serve on information from any other team i think that that was definitely the the big one but we also use it for for test tracking and long-form documents as well very cool um yeah i know we hear a lot of our customers start on um something like confluence but then it sounds like the same pro like same problem that you were having where like you know people will be updating different things and then like you don't know what's actually accurate and like that's even worse than if people like didn't weren't creating any documentation because now you just have like a mess of stuff right right exactly it's it's like a lot it's like years of kind of tribal knowledge sort of encoded into these tools which is hard to reason about yeah um do you so like the way that you describe the story was like oh just my team started using it and then like everyone else started using it just it just seems so like magical right um but i think maybe for a lot of people on this call who are working at large companies and are like okay maybe i'm really like bought into using a new tool like ditching our old stuff but like how do i convince everyone else um do you have any like tips for how you manage the transition yeah i definitely made it seem easier than it was um for a while there was just like a meme that i was that notion guy at the company so it definitely was not a seamless transition i think uh yeah starting bottom up and like proving value with the team was really helpful i mean even for me to just validate with this thing actually like it works for me does it work for at least like one other person or five other people um the starting bottom up was good i think the other thing is just being really explicit about what are the cross-functional use cases that this like that a tool like this has and being creative about that like one of the cool things about notion that appeals to my engineer's mindset is just that you can customize it a lot and you know build a system around information and so if you can use that to solve a particular problem like that we'll talk about later for example is the the product roadmap like how do we centralize engineering product and design is saying here's what we're building and go to market is self-serving on that so like making that use case super clear is really helpful like this is a specific thing that will be better um and the last thing i'd say is it was really tempting for me to just migrate everything from confluence or google docs or whatever into notion and i actually think that that would have been a bit of a trap to try to just do that all at once because then we would inherit a lot of the the sort of like cruft and debt that we had accrued in in the other tool um and it was worth the effort to just kind of comb through everything like just do one big pass and just figure out okay these are the ten percent of things that are uh definitely like valuable and active and and the rest we can just keep it an archive somewhere and if people really need it we can migrate it but it turns out most people don't need it and it lets you start off really clean which i think the cleanliness and simplicity of it uh definitely is a selling point for people yeah it's like spring cleaning basically right just taking that opportunity yeah exactly it's um yeah exactly nice um yeah it's kind of like when you're gonna get a new laptop and you're like should i just migrate everything over should i just like start fresh right and it's like a nice feeling when you're like okay let me just move over the things that are actually useful and important and like let's leave everything else but keep it somewhere safe in case we ever need it right right exactly it's yeah it it's really easy to move stuff later anyway so it's it's like my personal like philosophy around this is to just like simplify a little bit extra and and um yes it'll be a random request like oh i don't see this anymore and then great you can just add that back and it's fine so it ended up working out really well to simplify that way right um cool so you know just that i think that's great background to understand like why you made this switch right um and can you just talk a little bit more about like what were the general problems or challenges that your team was facing that like notion has really helped to solve yeah i think two big ones um the main one is we were all going remote and i think we just can't rely on the the standard kind of ad hoc means of communication in the office anymore we have to have something a bit more centralized for some like every decision that we make um it's it's important not only for like new hires that are coming in and kind of feeling lost from from the get-go from working remote or even just it's you know memory is very short like slack is a very short-term memory like you'll write something there and completely forget about it so it was just good to document every decision with a bunch of context in the right place so people can find it the second one is being able to communicate across the company like we're a global company we have um you know several hundred employees across engineering product design sales marketing and it was just really helpful to have one place where we can communicate so everybody knows what everyone else is working on and where to find that so i think those are the two two main things yeah that makes a lot of sense um i think like one of the things here in this in this gif like what we'll go through in the demo is like oh you can actually organize your information in intuitive hierarchies so like you know people can kind of self-serve by themselves and go find the information that they need even if they're not on your team right even if they're like a go to market stakeholder they can kind of peek and see the details for themselves so i'm looking forward to seeing you show that the whole road map situation and how people actually use it yeah definitely the hierarchy is is key yeah um so do you want to just uh you know let our audience know today like what we're gonna go through and like what do you use notion for primarily yeah sure um so i think the three main use cases we'll cover is um how we how we build our customer roadmap and and kind of it's something that engineering product and design keeps alive and the rest of the company can self-serve and consume from so that there's kind of one central place for what are we building um the second is sort of a daily driver use case uh kind of like a virtual whiteboard for how we run standups and and kind of manage tasks side by side especially since we're not in a real room with a real whiteboard it's it's great to have kind of this virtual setup in notion um so that's that's what we'll primarily cover today cool um great and then i let's just dive straight into the demo um but right before that i just want to see if there's any questions um because i want to make sure we answer those let's see so from um michael why did you switch from confluence um can't you do exactly the same things in confluence so i think um vijay you you explained a little bit already but do you want to maybe like go into a little more detail on like what specifically were the pain points in in confluence yeah sure um i think there's definitely an element of just usability in ux that if a tool is delightful it's you will want to spend more time in keeping it up to date and i think that's more of just a psychological element of um maybe at some point confluence reached some breaking point where it was too complicated but even just day to day it was it was not like something super easy and intuitive to use with nice shortcuts and the ability to drag and drop things and rearrange hierarchies when they became stale so i think just ux making it easier to clean up constantly is definitely one thing the other thing is it being all in one meaning you would have tasks in the same place means it's kind of a forcing function to confront the mess every day because you have to go and like look at your tasks and update them all the time uh because that's just like your daily thing and and then there because those are linked to wikis and linked to other pages you again have this incentive to keep things clean um i think the other thing is is just customizability of um being a like a lot easier being able to start with a simple to-do list and then turning that into a board and then making each of the page you know the cards in the board its own page and then making that a hierarchy etc is just uh it's kind of a more intuitive base i think in theory you could do all the hierarchy with with confluence it's just many more clicks and um doesn't you know inspire joy so that's yeah definitely oh yeah we hear a lot of times like confluence is where ducks go to die um and i think like the the nice thing about notion is like you have infinite levels um and again like they're very intuitive and you can link everything together right so you have a task that's related to meeting notes that's related to this bigger project that's related to this spec and like all of them are together and bundled in that context so it's really easy to find um cool let's we'll have more time for questions later but wanna give enough time to go through the demo so i'm gonna stop sharing my screen um and bj do you want to start sharing yours sure yeah so i can i can walk this through cool um yeah let's start with your road map do you want to just like um kind of walk us through and then um maybe like point out the most useful features yeah sure so basically our product road map is this is this page that within it has um a database in notion which is basically a way to kind of organize a collection of of information and the way we visualize this database is um so first of all every row in this database is a project and this is kind of like high level this is it's not like you know every task that everybody works on but it's more what are sort of like each one of these is initiative that two to three people are spending you know six to 12 weeks on so it's kind of what are the high level things we're building as a company um and the way it's organized here is is by status or availability so it's really clear you know what are things in research what are things that we just have internally versus in beta or ultimately generally available for all of our customers and um yeah that's that's the core of it it's um basically a way to organize like what are we building and what's coming up next yep um and it's nice to have this faq here right for people who are not like working in it every day and kind of see like oh how do i use this like what does um uh what can i expect something to shift i feel like that's the one where like people just keep asking on slack right so this now they can just go in and answer the question for themselves right um yeah very cool do you want to click into one of the cards and just show us what you include inside each project yeah sure so as i mentioned this is kind of meant to be a high-level crisp outline of every project we work on uh basically it's like where we get super clear about what problem we're uh solving what what directionally does the solution look like capture kind of a long tail of questions that people might have and serve as a collection point for those questions and basically anything else that's that's kind of relevant to the team that's building it different teams have their own workflows within a page sometimes like for example we do retrospectives after everything we build so we kind of go in and as we're building it we just keep it keep it alive with um what stage we're in and what what day so that we can refer to that uh and then the other important thing that i found cool about about this is basically that the this project page is kind of the root node if you think about all the information or about a project as kind of a tree of information uh this is kind of this page is the root note of that um and so all of the relevant you know tech design docs for this project design the visual design um maybe like videos about how it works they all should be kind of um rooted at this node and the thing that's important about this is that information kind of information naturally has its own lifetime there's a bunch of information that's specifically relevant to this one project and it should kind of move along with the project as as we move this project page along as i'll show a little bit later and so it's really nice to just have one place to talk about this one the unit of work and have people ask questions and and self-serve on the information that's awesome yeah i think um this is a common thing i see in like all of our customers road maps where like you you literally like dump everything relevant into this one card so like you never have to go searching for any information ever again right you know like anything that's related to pie charts you put it in here um any questions that were asked in slack you put it in this app like this nice faq toggle list that you have everyone knows like okay on september 3rd this is what we did on october 15th this is when it went to closed beta et cetera um so this is this is really awesome to see yeah exactly it's yeah it's really nice as compared to a bunch of scattered docs some of which are like here was the initial you know design dock and then somewhere else the tech design dock and somewhere else is something else um and it's yeah it's nice to have it unified yep um there's actually a couple of great questions that people are asking so let me see uh muhammad is asking who updates the board's last pages um does each person manage their own cards do you have things only certain people can update so it's kind of a three-part question but it's a good question sure yeah so i think the hierarchy of notion lends itself well to this where if i just go back to this product engineering so basically we have these top level pages for each kind of group at mixpanel so this is product engineering and within here it it's mostly update we use the permissions feature to basically allow you know edit access for people in product engineering to keep these things up to date and for everybody else in the company it's read-only or comment only and within these you know we have all the things that product and engineering would care about and if you go you know even deeper like individual teams have their own kind of team home page and again similarly here like people on the specific team keep it up to date um and and and go from there so i think it most people have comment access to everything and then like full access to modify whatever is within their kind of tree of information in notion nice um yeah like you can also assign a lead or like a dri a directly responsible individual array and then like everyone knows in that card like oh vj is the one who owns pie charts like ask vj all your questions right um so if you use like a person like yeah like the lead up here is ileana garcia so then you know like ileana's the one in charge um and should be updating everything there's a couple other great questions um i think there's a couple on so robert or let's see vishal is asking for the roadmap can you see a month-by-month view with tags such as design investigation delivery and then benz is asking do you use the new timeline view for your roadmap and um i think both these questions are asking about the same thing because notion actually just released our timeline view which i hope is really exciting for everyone so um bjg have you have you tried it at all yeah i tried it immediately so i think uh we haven't converted our we haven't made a view for this for our project roadmap in pr primarily because we're still you know kind of a startup and quite nimble so we don't we don't really obsess about like the dates between when something shipped to going beta to going ga however we do like at least while we're building it however we do do that after we've built it when we're kind of retrospecting on how did something go and um usually so we have actually a separate table that links into this table uh called retrospectives that just basically has like okay for each project when did we start when did it reach each stage you know what is it like what were we working on for what periods of time this year and could we have done better and for that we we now use the timeline view and it's been super great to just see like you know at this point we had like this many things in flight like maybe we were doing too many things at once or you know these things should have been sequenced a bit better or whatever but it's it's it's pretty cool um i would recommend checking it out yeah that's awesome and like you know if you have this roadmap and you have um like a deadline uh property then like you can actually just create a new timeline view and it'll start automatically associating um the gantt chart view with that deadline so vishal i hope that answers your question you can see a month-by-month view of like all your projects um rivo's asking uh you mentioned this roadmap is meant to be high level so where do you add and maintain detailed requirements so i think vijay you you showed that very briefly right like at the bottom yes so right i think yeah so this top level page is pretty high level uh any any sort of like long long form requirements um we you can just add that as nested pages underneath here uh that that are rooted from this node uh we also found it kind of useful to just collect like questions even before we've answered them just like here are things the solution will ultimately need to you know handle for or solve for and this faq that um people at the company can actually like leave comments on and actually add to themselves so that we we can just keep track of what is the running list of questions that anyone at the company has about this as our requirements evolve so yeah typically we use a mixture of this faq which is more crowdsourced and we will obviously write like a formal requirements thing and then leave it under this page um that's awesome uh amanda is asking and actually this like dovetails with my next question um so what happens like when um you know the the pie charts project either changes status and then what happens when it's done yeah sure so when it changes status i mean we just kind of do this ceremonial dragging of it over to the the next status and move it along uh eventually when it's done we will drag it into ga which is just another status i just happened to hide it because we have we ship a lot and we have a lot of things under g8 so that that column will just grow forever uh so it's kind of just like a quick resting place for all the things that we've shipped and in terms of how we you know communicate that more broadly um so people can definitely follow this page and subscribe to updates but what we historically did was send an email internally at the company to just celebrate hey we built this thing here's who built it you know give them a high five or like a virtual high five as it were um and now and previously that would contain all the details of what we shipped now it's become this is kind of the living source of truth for that and the email is just a pointer into notion that says hey for more information check out this card which is nice because as things move from status to status like things change about them and it's it's important to have like one living source of truth there but yeah to answer the question we just drag things along and then usually send an email with a link to the notion card to celebrate that we shipped it yeah um that's great too because i think um the second part of amanda's question was like how would someone find the specs even when a project has been done right but the nice thing in notion is like you don't delete anything you just like drag into ga and then yeah you can click here um and then anytime you can go into the archive and find all the stuff again but it also like keeps all the um you know only the active information on the the top level board right right exactly right okay um cool and then let's i just want to make sure we answered everyone's questions um after your fee so hubert's asking after your features go live do you move the product page information elsewhere or keep it in the same place i do distinguish between live features and ones in development so i think that's the same question right like all the live stuff is in ga correct yeah okay cool um great and then let's see i think my last question on the road map is like how has this set up just changed in general like how does it change how the team works yeah i think so first of all i i don't it's it's definitely not um kind of a magic wand process that suddenly everybody's really disciplined about about writing these and and putting this in one place it's it's definitely it's still work right you still have to write this in a clear way and organize information underneath it but i think it as the tool it gets out of your way to do that i think the main main thing is that we are really upfront about uh here's what's in what stage and and because it's kind of put centrally and and really easy to communicate to the whole company we're really committed to keeping this live because essentially it minimizes all the random or i guess again i'll do an engineer explanation like you have we have all these we have n people in product and engineering and m people and go to market and if you don't have a central place for them to self-serve then it's you know n by m amount of communications going on uh versus there's this one place we can all update it other people can self-serve and there's not you know hundreds of slack dms going on um and then so i think that's a big one people can just go see it and just link to this and kind of self-serve on the information and um lastly i think the whole when we like previously that the final snapshot of what what did we ship was just in that email that we would send out to the whole company and i think that definitely had problems where when we shipped something to beta and ga like we'd have multiple copies of that email and there's anytime you have copies of something information goes out of out of sync so having it in one place definitely helps keep things in sync yeah that's awesome it's nice to hear that there's not like now you don't have like 50 slack threads with like a different people asking you different questions um and it's just it's a lot more organized right and people can come in and like you said it self-serve um i'm just looking at god these questions are great guys keep them coming um let's see so michael had another question about so without jira how do you manage um user stories epics features bugs how do you assign them to correct team and prioritize uh and then he also is asking can you also measure number of bugs per project so i know that's a lot maybe we can answer the first one yeah um so i think for daily task tracking i think that's something we can we're probably going to cover in a few minutes but basically i can maybe i can just jump to that since the question is so relevant to it uh basically each team kind of manages their own tasks somewhat you know in their in their own way this is how we manage tesla we have our own task database that's specific to our team and we we create stuff so i think it's slightly different than jira in that there's not uh it's it's not the case that somebody else is assigning tasks to us directly into our our task database uh that that's i think there are there is a system where like if support gets a ticket they'll they'll escalate that to somebody and then we'll create a task but um that's it's a lot of it is just keeping track of what what's what we're working on and capturing interrupts and taking stand-up is that period of time where we categorize that on our our local teams task board and kind of keep that independent from all the other teams so that everybody can use the system that works best for them so that makes sense yeah yeah that makes sense actually um bj just to also point out um another great thing is like for any card on a board you can link it to another card in another board so like it's called linked databases right so say you set up your roadmap board for like the high level projects like pie charts but then under pie charts you have like so many other small granular tasks so you can actually link them to the pie charts one so that that basically like models the the epic story um uh hierarchy that you have in jira and like in notion you can just choose however you want to do it but if you have like smaller things within a bigger project it's very easy to link them together yeah that's that's definitely true and i think you can use the rollups feature to basically say okay how many bugs bug cards do i have linked to this this main card and just come like summarize it as a count and you can see like okay this this one produced you know 10 bucks or something so yep exactly um and you can also even this is a lot more advanced but you can also like set up percentage done right so like if you had 10 uh bugs for one car then like if 8 out of 10 are done you can see like the 80 percent um so that's that's a little bit more into how you could um if you wanted to bring over more stuff from your jira workflow then you could replicate that in notion um great so yeah awesome questions guys i think we're gonna move on to um i know vijay already is showing us the the stand up but um awesome to see your roadmap which again you said houses all your big projects on your high level overview that anyone can access so um did you want to kind of go into more detail about this day-to-day stuff like your stand-ups and the more granular tasks yeah definitely so yeah this is more of the you know a couple of times a week we we our team meets for stand up and again i think this is our team's workflow not every team at mixpanel uses this exact thing we everybody has their own kind of custom setup um but it's it's i think directionally similar so yeah the main idea is we each stand up has this this kind of standing fixed agenda and um in each one somebody is taking taking notes about you know the updates for that that stand up what tasks are complete or blocked or or pending and any and follow us up on any follow-ups uh so i guess yeah there's there's a few things i can um go over here um so like the the the main thing to think about is that this is basically like our virtual whiteboard as if we were doing stand-up in in a real office with a real whiteboard where everyone can give their updates we write everything down so if someone misses it they can still still find the information we can follow up on things that need to be followed up on and we have this nice sort of setup that works for us um yeah this is awesome so like i guess seeing this um from my perspective it just it seems like it helps to just keep those big projects on track and like make sure okay like we're actually shipping at the speed that we want to um and then also like you said during covid times right for remote work like this kind of just helps to over communicate with your team right instead of just assuming like everyone knows what's going on um i also see like it's it's great to see like you have a pretty lightweight template right like it's mostly tech space it's not too fancy because it's what you need for for a um twice twice weekly stand up um can you talk about this like agenda you have here and and like i see you have under big project status like uh pie charts is this um linked back to the road map exactly yeah so yeah but basically every every stand up um follows the same sort of template so one cool feature about blood notion that we use quite a bit is this template feature where if you have a kind of standard note taking format for a particular recurring thing like stand up you can define this template button that if you click it it'll generate whatever you want so we use that to just kind of generate you know like every stand up we'll have updates from everybody in the team and discuss any top-level items or follow-ups so that that part is kind of nice and yeah the big project status is just to kind of remind us like okay here's the big things that we're working on and what stage they're in and like i mentioned before having this linked here makes it really easy like if for example one of the updates is oh we just launched this to everybody it's super easy to go to pie charts and update that status to ga and then go right back so it kind of having it in one place kind of helps keep keep things in sync at all times um the other thing that's kind of cool is the the follow-ups piece where it's kind of just a lightweight mechanism where you can just kind of remind someone to you know follow up on api or something and the idea is that you know at the next stand up presumably this will turn red because it's overdue and we'll check in on that follow up and see see how it went so it's a good good way to to set reminders for ourselves in in one place um yeah and and then finally the uh the task table is just so that you know everything we're working on is mapped to some tasks here and again given that the notes and the tasks that they refer to are in the same place it's super easy to keep both up to date with respect to each other so um it's super easy for for me to just say oh this sounds like a task like we can just add one here assigned to that person and and go from there yeah that's awesome um it seems like what you have here let's see monday last wednesday so do you just keep like the most recent ones like where do you put the old ones yeah it's a good question so um yeah i mean obviously it's very simple and text-based so we can just actually drag and drop into this toggle list here which kind of hides all of our historic it's kind of an archive of all of our historical standups i i prefer kind of this like flat structure rather than kind of nested like okay this was the previous month and whatever because it's just nice to if i really need to go and refer to this i can just open this and control f in the page and find what i need to look for um but at the same time it's it's you know easy to manage to just direct over yeah i'm seeing a um this pattern of like basically hiding the archive but having it still be like very accessible right um so you just have this long tail of information and the other thing that i like about your setup here i've seen a couple of other like different daily stand-up templates is that like because it's flat like this it's very much a dashboard so you can kind of just look at it from a glance and know what's going on with your team so that's very that's very smart design right yeah i think that yeah that's that's one of the cool things is we i mean we didn't even start up start with this like we had a completely different workflow and then we've like really iterated on it as we've you know progressed through remote work to arrive at our kind of like perfectly well-gardened dashboard but every team has their own kind of workflows so it's easy to customize yep um what did you do before you had this template yeah so we i mean when we were in person we didn't actually even take notes and stand up which was again just a luxury of being being all in the same room so yeah we actually just came from mostly doing like very little or any start standup process to to this um i think we there was a time we were just using jira there was time we were using like a spreadsheet to manage tasks for some reason but i think just the the simple text based thing works works really well for us compared to those things yep um that's awesome and then i think like the nice the other nice thing i would call here is what you were demoing earlier right it's like when you're talking if you're standing in a room together like of course you're talking to each other and talking like oh we should follow up on this or do this action item but i guess like if you have this white board in front of you it's really easy to um immediately like create a task and then like actually assign it and then set reminders to check on progress so you're actually moving forward on that that item right exactly like if yeah if like a bug comes in we can just do something like this um open it and assign it to somebody and you know add some context here and we're you know we're off to the races um and that's that's that's really nice to be able to do it in one place yep um cool and yeah i i again i think like it's nice that this task board isn't too over featured or too technical so it seems like pretty easy to to create and manage not only like you know it does it doesn't have to be just the product engineering team who have this sort of setup like i'm on the marketing team we have something pretty similar um so it really is like nice to see like you can just customize it for whatever you want right yeah exactly um great so we are let's see we have let's uh answer more questions i i see a bunch coming in so i think we answered some of them so mike and helen were asking i see past dams how do you organize this i think we answered that and do you keep a history of your previous stand-ups or does this page just get updated every week so yeah i think it sounds like you just put everything in the archive right right exactly yeah okay um let's see so pedro um actually sebastian is asking how do you track hours spent on the tasks so i don't know if you want to answer that for like the more granular ones or maybe go back to the roadmap pj yeah um we don't really track at that level of granularity i think we could we could achieve that effect if we basically um maybe like viewed this as a table and it just kind of had like a like an automatically one was it created and then at every um stand up we that it's you know the task is still going we could just update it with like how many hours were there and and again using the roll ups thing join it to the project roadmap table and figure out like how many hours were spent collectively on this uh we aren't quite that organized but um that's that's definitely possible um yeah yeah you can use the rollup feature again um and i you know we're gonna send a bunch of templates like specifically for engineering tasks um to everyone's inboxes so i think i'll make sure to include one that has those uh the the our property let's see so um pedro is asking how long do the project live in the roadmap from research to ga do you break projects so they have similar durations and avoid being like too huge or too small yeah that's a great question um yeah i think in general it's just um kind of good principle to to have have them be similar duration just so that uh yeah it's also just like good product design to like minimize scope and and not kind of absorb it forever so yeah i think most of these are on the order of six to 12 weeks um obviously there's there's something again it kind of varies per team but we're trying to trying to centralize on that amount of scope um and then yeah we like i mentioned we just drag things over and eventually when something's ga it just ends up in here so out of the way but still still accessible yep um sorry i'm gonna throw you more questions because there's just a bunch coming in um uh hubert's asking do you centralize all the go-to-market documentation like training docs launch plans marketing on these same product pages or is that all housed in a separate centralized location within the notion workspace yeah that's a good question um i think we we typically do some of the for for most features that are fairly lightweight and don't have like a big sort of marketing go to market um process behind it we typically house it in inside like for example i don't know if that's linked specifically in the the page that was here but uh in the pie charts page but we would have for example like what is the email that you want to send to your customers if you want to invite them to the beta and who is the what is the table of customers in in the beta for this feature it's definitely a trade-off like that for for some of the bigger like for example our marketing team might want to have a marketing calendar that they want to you know cross-reference projects in and so they can always link to like they can have that as a separate thing that they manage and link to our projects from there uh but this is more like just for us to say for this project like what is all the work and marketing and reach out and everything that's done for it and what templates you use it should all live live here mainly from the principle of when this thing goes to ga all of that kind of follows with it and it's not left like lingering somewhere else so that's that's the main principle but it's a trade-off yeah yep um actually do you want to open the sidebar just to show them like how it's set up where like uh marketing has a wiki right so um yeah yeah like marketing yep so like you know external calendar um there'll probably be like uh this isn't this is not like an exact oh yeah not external editorial calendar um so this is not like an exact replication of um your mixpanels marketing team um but i think this is like actually for notion like our my team um in marketing when we do launches we do the exact same thing like we'll have a calendar of like okay here's all the launches that are happening and then within each card we'll be we'll link to the the product roadmap um which is accessible to everyone um just so people have the full like they have the launch plan but then if they want to know like what's actually shipping and what's the scope and the requirements and the user stories they want to know how to best like describe what's shipping then they can go to the to the roadmap so again everything is is linked together cool um let's see one more question i think we have yeah time for one more question then we're gonna have to wrap up it's uh it's it's gone by really fast but um thank you guys so much for all the really um really really pertinent questions um okay let's get one from thomas how do you integrate user feedback into your roadmap noticed a user research stock earlier so i don't think the user research doc is spilled out but vijay if you want to talk a little bit about that yeah sure so uh that's a great question i think user feedback comes from a bunch of different channels and uh we and a lot of it comes from salesforce and a few other systems so we actually have like a job that standardizes that separately in google sheets and you know just waiting on that notion api but the the main the main purpose of that user research table is to collect um basically like each row in the table is a like a customer call that we've done uh either with a prospect or our customer and the the nice thing about that table is that i don't yeah i guess it's not filled out but um yeah maybe there's a there's a template for it as well online the idea is yeah each row is a customer call it has a link to the video uh maybe the video password optionally and uh because each row of the table is it's also a page you can kind of put all the notes from the conversation and leave comments and and do all that on that and that's really kind of democratized user research like it's really easy for someone to just go to the user research table look at all research that's related to you know one particular class of features that we've shipped and actually listen to the calls so it's just kind of like a log of every call we've had and notes from those calls so that's been pretty helpful for us yep um and we can definitely send a user research template in the follow up so i'll make a note to do that um great we have one minute left if anyone wants to stay over um but we're just gonna wrap up here so um vijay thank you so much for just walking us through everything um i know this this is this is a lot to throw at everyone but hopefully it's just it's been a little bit helpful to see inside like an actual um workspace actual working workspace um for vj's team um i think i have one you know last question for you if there's one thing that notion has really enabled for your team that's been the most impactful like what would you say that is yeah i think it's it's mainly having one place to go for all sort of work-related knowledge and um it's really the all-in-one piece that's been really helpful for us especially in remote work time so that's that's been really great for keeping a team of our scale in sync and kind of like up to date with the heartbeat of what everyone else is working on yep yeah it sounds like just from everything you've shown me it's like everyone not just the engineering team but like across the company just has a better grip on you know what we're shipping and why at all times which i think is um a challenge for like any company right yeah definitely um and yeah it's still not without its challenges i think we still have a lot to figure out but uh notion's been pretty helpful in that regard cool that's great to hear um um cool and then vijay did you want to talk a little bit about uh your the mixpanel team yeah sure so um yeah i mean i hope this has given you first of all yeah i hope this is helpful and it's giving you kind of a glimpse of of how we work and organize things in mixpanel um we we're obviously a very product-centric product heavy team and i really care about building a great like fast delightful product analytics experience for for customers building uh for our customers who build products themselves so we're really building for teams like just like us and that's that's a really exciting place to be and work so if you're if you're interested in joining us um you can check us out mixpanel.com mixpanel.comjobs or or just message me on linkedin um and yeah really really happy to to have done this uh with notion yeah thank you so much bj um if you can just i'll just share my screen really quickly um just to give people a couple links cool um so yeah thank you so much um everyone for joining today and really really appreciate the caliber of questions coming in i hope that we were able to answer at least some of them um so yeah just reach out anytime i really encourage um anyone on the call here to visit um our notion.slash enterprise especially if you have a really large team bj is on our enterprise plan and has been talking about how you know i hope you've seen through this call that for a large team it's really helpful to have um the enterprise features or reach out to us at salesnotion.com um just want to leave you with another confirmation that we will send the recording to everyone here who registered even if you didn't attend as well as a ton of other resources and i made notes to send specific templates that pertain to the questions that were asked so um please check your inbox for those and um that's it thank you so much for joining everyone um and you know have a good morning good rest of your morning or rest of your good night uh wherever you are cool thanks guys bye bye

Channel: Notion

Views: 2,499

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: zRCQQvkAfLw

Length: 47min 52sec (2872 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021