Product design question
How would you improve Notion?
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What this question tests
Tests product improvement thinking for a flexible, power-user-heavy productivity tool: identifying a specific friction point and proposing a fix that respects the product's existing strengths.
How to approach it
- Identify Notion's core strength and weakness: extreme flexibility is its differentiator, but that same flexibility creates a steep learning curve and slow performance at scale.
- Identify a specific pain point: new users often feel overwhelmed by blank-page flexibility with no clear starting structure, and heavy users experience performance slowdowns in large, complex workspaces.
- Prioritize the higher-leverage problem: onboarding friction likely affects a larger share of the funnel (new user activation) than performance, which mainly affects a smaller set of power users.
- Propose the solution: smarter, more contextual templates and guided setup based on the user's stated goal (personal notes, team wiki, project tracker) rather than a blank page by default.
- Also address performance as a parallel workstream: optimize loading for large databases and nested pages, since power users churning due to slowness is a real retention risk.
- Define success: new user activation rate (reaching a meaningful first workspace setup) and reduced churn among large-workspace power users.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies the core tension precisely, flexibility drives both Notion's appeal and its onboarding friction, rather than proposing a generic 'simplify the UI' fix.
- Separates the new-user onboarding problem from the power-user performance problem, since they affect different segments and need different fixes.
- Proposes goal-based guided setup as a concrete mechanism, addressing the blank-page problem without removing Notion's core flexibility.
- Chooses activation and power-user churn as the two success metrics, matching the two distinct problems identified.
Common mistakes
- Proposing to simplify or restrict Notion's flexibility broadly, which would undermine its actual core value proposition for existing power users.
- Treating onboarding friction and performance issues as the same problem with the same fix.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you avoid making guided templates feel restrictive to existing power users who like the blank-page flexibility?
- How would you prioritize performance work against onboarding improvements if you could only pick one this quarter?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop