How I maximize productivity as a product manager with Notion

My 4 steps to set up Notion for personal CRM, meeting notes, tasks and weekly dashboards

Hello Friends!

I’m Fionna, a product manager, YouTuber and late-night FM DJ.

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There isn’t a perfect manual for all the different types of product mangers. But what if I told you that I’ve found a near-perfect tool that helped me become a more productive product manager?

What’s the tool?

Notion! A powerful productivity app and my staple answer to the interview question "What is your favorite app?" 😆

To figure out why it's great for me as a product manager, let’s first take a look at what I do and where Notion takes the 👑.

What I need to do well on my job?

Generally speaking, product managers are responsible for delivering a product or service to users. The product, responsibility, scope, platform could vary, however, there will be people to connect, meetings to attend, and to-dos to track while (most likely) managing multiple feature areas.

Out of these, where can Notion help?

Let’s map them out:

People to connect → Personal CRM table

Meetings to attend → Meeting note templates

To-dos to track → Kanban boards, formulas, tags, dates

Multiple feature areas to manage → Dashboards, weekly overviews

Sounds good on paper, but how to make these happen?

Here are the 4 steps I took to set up mine that does it all.

Step 1: Set up what you need

Personal CRM

When talking about work, I have to start with the people. I don't work alone, so my teammates are inseparable in my meetings, tasks and growth as a PM. For practical purposes, I can link people in this table to my meeting notes. Another benefit is that I can use it as a reminder to build intentionality with relationships.

When I joined the new team, I set up a "Personal CRM (Customer Relationship Management)" table with everyone on my team with basic info from the org chart. Through talking with them, I jotted down things like how frequent we should talk, what we have in common, and things I can help them with. With relational databases and roll-ups (requires more setup), I can get a sense of who I'm most in contact with and who I need to make time for.

Here's an example of a "customer" page.

Meeting Notes

Product mangers and meetings... we can't get enough of them, amirite? 🤣

Maybe you have a lot of meetings too, but let's not forget why we have them:

1. Make decisions with the right stakeholders

2. Get aligned on decisions / progress: stand-ups

3. Brainstorm

4. Review stuff: specs, designs, customer feedback, roadmap, telemetry

5. Learn stuff: trainings, show 'n' tell, all-hands

6. Get to know each other: if you're like me who just joined a new team, this is crucial

As a note-taking app, Notions meets all my basic needs for formatting notes with headers, lists, and colors. It excels in 4 areas:

1. I can link action items (pre and post meeting) so I get this added context when doing that action.

2. I can add attendees from my "Personal CRM" (via relational database) to not only identify who are the stakeholders, but also track my interactions with them. Fun fact, I was in 49 meetings with my manager last year, mmm.

3. Once I identify the nature or format of a meeting, I can create a template to pre-define the "Purpose", "Attendees", "Pre Actions", and "Talking prompts" so I'm well prepared every time. I'll show an example in step 3.

4. I can link these meetings to my Daily Journal page, and have that rolled up in my Weekly Dashboard. Ooof, that sounds complicated, let me show you.

Weekly Dashboard

This view is what I start the day with every day. Above is my second week on the new job. From the top, I have 3 "Top of Mind" items to remind me what my focuses are, and some shortcuts to frequently used pages.

If there's a way to include colors and emojis to help organize my stuff, you bet i'd be using them.

I created a page for each day (aka my daily journal) and put them in a kanban board with custom cover photos for each day of the week (stock photo + text). Then I added a "top priority" and linked tasks and meetings to that day, so I can see at a glance what's on the menu.

This view came in handy when writing my performance review, because it has everything I did.

Tips

I create the meeting pages one day prior so I'm prepared for the next day, but you can also prep for the entire week if your meetings don't get moved or cancelled often.

Area Dashboard

As I take on more areas, I needed a holistic view of everything I own to ensure that I know what's going on and can catch things that are slipping.

On our team, we have themes that are broken down to investment areas, then to feature areas. For each feature area, I have work items which are the equivalent of a feature. For each work item, I track its status by labeling it "Brainstorm", "One pager", "Published" etc. with notes on follow ups or blockers.

This is the foundation of my Task List (see details in section below), because everything I do daily should correspond to a feature I'm owning. If not, then it's likely that I'm not using my time correctly.

I have a version of this dashboard in my Weekly Dashboard, but I revisit this copy every month to ensure it's updated.

Tips

A really helpful exercise that I did with my manager was to label the % of time I intend to spend on a feature area ("Ideal time allocation"), and the actual % of time I spent on them in the past X months ("Time allocated IRL"). This simple exercise addresses 2 questions on alignment:

1. How much time should I spend on project X? → The priority of this project for me, and for my manager / Team.

2. How much time did I actually spend on project X? → If higher than expected: why, and what can my manager help unblock? If lower than expectation: do I need to recalibrate the time allocated, or my bandwidth is taken up by other projects and I need to decrease my scope.

Tasks

I have 3 views of my tasks because each gives a different perspective and puts the tasks in context which makes it easier to prioritize.

1. By Area

Using my "Area Dashboard" as the foundation, I want to see what tasks I have for each Feature Area in a single view so I don't neglect any areas.

2. By Time (in the context of a week)

I use this view the most and have it in my Weekly Dashboard. This tells me what's important for me to do right now (0 Today), what’s important but can wait (1 Tomorrow), and what I need to get done this week (2 Next). I can rearrange this board if priorities change.

3. By Status

This view tells me where I am with each task and which ones are worth tackling first. Each list is sorted by the task's priority label (ie. from "🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 = high impact & low effort" to "😴 = low impact & high effort"), so in the "Not started" list, I can pick the easiest one to start but will return the most impact.

Step 2: Templatize everything

Who doesn't love a magic button that saves you hours of work? The ability to create templates for literally everything is probably my favorite thing about Notion. For all the meeting notes, tasks or contacts, I have a template for it. Notion has a massive library of templates, I used some as building blocks and customized them to fit my needs.

Step 3: Use it! (with your templates)

I'll use taking meeting notes as an example.

Since I couldn't meet people in person during quarantine, I had ~60 one-on-one video calls with people who I'll be working with so I can introduce myself and get to know them better.

I had the same "Hi, my name is Fionna and I’m new to the team..." intro and the same list questions to ask them. Imagine copying and pasting that 60 times in meeting notes. Naturally, it made sense to create a template. So whenever I have a new "get to know you" meeting, I can just create a new meeting note with that template and a fresh list of questions will magically appear.

Tips

To level it up, remember that "Personal CRM" table I made? I can copy their responses to "top of mind" or "advice for me" in that table, so I can see a summary of what my new team is working on, and what they think is important for me to do as a newbie.

Step 4: Iterate

You're probably overwhelmed by my set up, but know that this was not built in one day. In fact, my first Weekly Dashboard looked nothing like this. I tweaked my setup constantly as I learned more about Notion and my needs.

Notion is still evolving as a tool so should your set up. It's an iterative process and one of the joys that technology brings me.

Note: I realized after writing that what I showed you is quite advanced so I kept it high level… if you can follow these steps, great! If not, please take it as a reference on how Notion could be used, and iterate on it step by step. I also blurred out parts that I'm not comfortable in sharing. If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Some tips for starting on Notion

Notion is highly customizable, which also make it harder to get used to at the beginning. There is a learning curve for many, including myself. But once you got the basics, and start to dabble into relational databases, oof, you can make anything!

• Leverage existing templates, don't start from scratch if you don't have to!

• Use keyboard shortcuts for formatting and navigation

• Use emojis and cover photos if they help you visually

• Experiment with different table views (kanban, calendar, timeline etc.) to find what works for you

• Favorite pages that you use frequently

• Make a home page to establish a base and link pages to it as shortcuts, ie. a Weekly Dashboard

• It’s FREE for personal use, doesn’t hurt to try it out for a week

• Learn from the community of Notion users - Notion Office Hours is a great place to start!

This post is getting really long and you're probably overwhelmed 🤯. But but but I barely scratched the surface with my Notion setup!! There's so many relations between tables and dashboards, formulas and views that I didn't cover. If there's a particular area that you're interested in, let me know and I'll do a deep dive in the future.

I hope this has been helpful as an intro to what Notion is capable of and how I leverage it to work as a PM productively. Questions and comments are always welcome!

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