How to Use Notion for Software Development

[Music] this is the only way you should be running product get rid of all of your Jirus stuff get out of that nightmare that fever dream and make it simple I'm not getting paid by notion to make this I feel like a lot of people do that that's not me but I just wanted to share this cuz I used to make a lot of videos about it and let's talk about it so this is using Shape Up methodology it's running six weeks of net new innovation two weeks of either cool down or bug hunting or planning and the way that it works is I've set up a bunch of different things in here and the core of it is you write pitches which are one pagers and it's a research paper about a problem always start in the problem space and each one has a template so we'll take a look at the template how go read the book called shape up you'll get a lot better but you narrow the problem or you find the motivation behind what it is that we're doing always starts there every company ever every idea product service that you've ever seen started with a problem the guy that made the dishwasher perfect example then the second thing before you write the solution is a time box or an appetite it's the amount of time that you're willing to spend to solve for that problem it flips everything on its head you do not want to set estimates at the start because that means you're doing a solution you're trying to figure out everything beforehand but that's not how it works and you're wondering why you run past every deadline it's okay I'm here to help you I've dealt with the same problem that's why I'm so passionate about it so you say okay well based on this problem I'm willing to spend 7 Days on this okay great that's going to constrain what the solution is that you write when you go write the solution you're not doing tick boxes of a million things because that's what you do when you actually go do the work and you open up the code you open up the design you look at the thing that's the actual work doing that now would be stupid so that's when you write out the solution probably a couple of paragraphs and then any rabbit holes so are there things that are in this project that we know are just going to suck we if we go down that way please don't go down that way but if you go down that way it's going to be a nightmare or maybe someone on the team knows that rabbit hole they've been there before and that's their chance to say hey I see you going down that path let me help you out of bounds you can figure that one out what are we not touching and then success criteria so some things will be squishier than others Parker what do you mean by squishy I mean that you can't track everything there will be certain pieces of work that you do not have a metric that goes on a scorecard but if it is possible then you want to be thinking about that you write all these things you spend a bunch of time writing them and then you end up with this awesome Board of problem and you have everyone in your company figure it out they figure out the process of writing a pitch and then you bucket them so in my case with map we're building a platform that's all-in-one productivity and health software that helps you basically be awesome and it has a bunch of products within it so think of the sections of your apps as products different SKS different items my case we have Tas Health an agent that drives the whole thing that represents your Peak self Notes Calendar we have General there will be certain General things like oh I need a sidebar that's everywhere landing page infrastructure and payments you bucket that and then you just have these little statuses so is this an idea you haven't even thought about it beyond the oneliner okay that's an idea needs PM meeting means someone else wrote it but they don't know enough about it to get technical they want help shaping the idea up whole idea of shaping is you start with this idea and it's a big piece of marble and the idea is you need to chip away at it and you're not coming in with a chainsaw you're not tearing the thing apart and getting you know trying get super minute but you're trying to like shape it up a little bit with maybe a a chisel and you need a PM for that and then you have need shaping so I need to shape a lot of these things because I just haven't thought them all the way through and that's what that is and then the pitch is complete so now let's say you want to go and actually do the work you've plan these things out you feel good about them like this one's pretty obvious like I need to make this modal centered I don't even have to write something that's pretty obvious that one's ready all right I'm going to bet on that well when I go and if I have a team which most people do then I would meet with my team and I'd say hey guys me and Leadership me and two other people me and one other person we're going to pick something and we're going to say this is what we're working on now okay cool that goes into the build cycle it's empty right now when you start a build cycle you have six weeks or 30 days to play around with and you set the dates it's six weeks six weeks means shipped you can stick six one weers in here two three weers three two weers split it how you may but each pitch and the time that you bet on it includes the design includes the build includes the testing and the QA and the deployment and all those things it may not include actually going live because if you are a business and you're rocking and rolling just cuz this Dev finish this thing doesn't mean that the rest of the org knows about it there's all these unseen benefits that I hear from people that are adopting this where they're running around with their head cut off because all the engineers you know they're not keeping them in the loop and nobody knows what's going on so one of the best parts about this system is the clarity that it gives to everyone else in the organization it gives a lot of time for strategic thinking so even as a solo founder I fell into the pit of I'm just writing code and I'm going to do it and it's fine and then you don't have Clarity you get lost you start going into different direction because it was not documented and it's super helpful it lets people people come in and study what is going on so if they make a request if they've requested the same thing for a Bitcoin wallet 50 times they're starting to get upset because it's not coming out well guess what hey go go and check this out Bitcoin boy see how these are more important and then they understand and they'll be happy so that is the pitches in the build cycle other things in here get on a Cadence you don't have to do the whole agile thing of like every single day we stand up and we hold hands we do planks and all this stuff no get rid of that get on weekly sinks and Retros weekly sync boom I create a new one Monday morning boom we jump in anything come over the weekend that really is bad that should ruin this cycle if so we need to jump on that hopefully we don't and if your team's large enough you usually have one roaming person that's able to handle anything as it comes in take it away or help on the team so you have a floating engineer and you only do p0o p0o is defined by is this blocking revenue is this hurting the business right now then you jump on it and then you go through your updates that's when you're tagging the pitches that are in the cycle and then you tag the things that we did last week each person has a note about it maybe sorry so updates would be like hey this is what's going on this week whoever's running this meeting we have this event we have this call this thing is happening what did we do last week you're tagging the pictures from last week talking about them yeah we nailed it what are we doing this week hey John do we have any issues here do we need you to meet with XYZ cool any blockers hey we just heard from stripe and because we're doing Bitcoin they don't like us and we got to switch that would be a blocker and then any action items like hey so the meeting so that's the weekly sync and then that takes 15 minutes max and that's awesome cuz devs hate meetings and the people running them hate them too and then retrospectives this is the end of the week and it doesn't have to be cheesy it can be tolerable and uh the way that you do it is what went well what sucked and what are you looking forward to you can give them funny names whatever but typically you have this and then you set the date for it and people can just add their own points and then you go around you say hey John what sucked okay I hear you sounds good let's change it let's not do that next time and that's typically based on the team size maybe 30 minutes and other stuff in here this talks more about the actual shape up stuff it's how you create the one pager you set time with the PM you do the technical spec you have the leadership review them bet on them and then you announce that to the company so we're kicking off a new pitch cycle next week we say boom hey everybody this is what we're doing and you tag the people that wrote the pitches so they get credit people feel good about that they know hey my ideas matter that matters you get happier people retention goes up morale goes up and everyone's a part of it and also the people that are in the field people that are talking to customers know a lot more than you'd think and then the work gets on and you want to make sure that you're tracking everything as well so if you're launching something make sure you're tracking it because we need to see those stats and then if you have a big team with a lot of people involved then before you actually go and launch the thing in your retrospective or your weekly kickoff you also have the person that is typically like a project manager or someone that handles the roll out so if you have like a sales guy you know sales team marketing team all these people they need to get a dock that explains hey we're launching a Bitcoin wallet and they get all the information about it and then that person goes and meets with all the parties who already knew that this was coming and they're getting confirmation that hey this is how it works here's the FAQs here's a video demo all the assets in one notion and then they decide with that project project manager after he meets with all the part what's the date we're going for so they've known it's coming for 6 weeks now they hear hey it's here we did it this is how it looks the person that made the pitch is like thrilled and then they get the date and then the team says okay cool we're launching on this date everyone you know loves IT Crowd Goes Wild and that is how it works I already talked about the bugs when stuff comes up and anything else in here this one's a work in progress but this is how I used to do it where you have an engineering Wiki and time to productivity sucks with new hires Engineers are expensive you want to get them productive fast the fastest way to do that is anytime that you do something that you know someone in the future is going to have to do just start yapping at your computer use dictation go in one of these notes and explain the thing that you just did make a new page ask AI to clean it up and you're done that's it literally eventually this turns into a shell script that a new Dev runs so you don't have that whole thing where you're like holding their hand and you're like oh like your Dev environment doesn't work no you don't want that either not now maybe later this is what it sounds like a pitch gets written people had so much effort put into this but it's not making it then it goes in there example pitches there's some in there cool down this is the period of time between the new work between the build Cycles so these are like refactors these are the things that dev's right that no one in leadership's ever going to pick to them there so when you're in the cool down you're hammering bugs and then you're picking things off like hey we want to switch to V hey we want to refactor these this service sucks let's move uh from this Cloud to that cloud report tracker Parker why are you using it in notion well because it's a non technical platform and everyone can use it try to teach Janet from marketing how to use linear that's going to be the biggest waste of your time she's going to hate you everyone's going to hate you you stick it in here you try to convince them to write some notes in there about you know hey how it happen what were you using they probably won't um this is totally not in the right order but you can see that you have a similar pattern here like oh need shaping this means we don't have enough details on how this thing works we have in progress so people can know what's up we have ready for engineering that's actually first so you have need shaping is like the unshaped idea it still needs info you can tag the person and say hey we need more info maybe a demo ready for engineering means cool this is ready to pick off in progress obvious live in Dev obvious can't reproduce obvious waiting confirmation that means hey we ship this thing can you just double check that everything's good on your machine it's always going to work hopefully but you want a again it's like those touch points matter you're trying to get everybody in the company to love you and then you have completed and rolled out and it's empty right now cuz Math's perfect design tracker boom same thing when you're working with a designer pop it in there there's going to be some revisions you go back and you basically just go back and forth between revision review revision review competition take every screenshot you've ever taken and jam it in there so when you're designing stuff you're not starting from scratch design inspiration I just have that page for myself cuz I have a bunch of landing pages that I want to rip meeting schedule is talked about what we already talked about so Sprint kickoffs Sprint planning uh well no this is actually Retro Retro daily check-ins this is using a slack workflow basically by 10:00 a.m. let people know what's up what are you doing it's not to be annoying it's for everyone on the team don't be so full of yourself and that is the video Everybody if this was helpful make sure you like the video I'll put the template below and subscribe to the channel I'll see you in the next one e