I like to overindex on the “Why” component of PRDs (in your own words, why do you do this?). So as a result, the Why you see here takes up over half of the document.

I use four sections upfront to answer the “Why” for this offline support feature. In the opportunity section, I focus on why we want to prioritize this opportunity. I call out how offline support directly enables our core value prop of capturing at the speed of thought, as well as highlighting the feature as an upsell opportunity and a highly requested feature by our users.

It's easy to write the opportunity section too prescriptively or too high-level. The important thing here is to make it clear why we wanted to prioritize offline support. Specifically, we call out how it improves monetization strategy, supports the core value proposition, and is an often-requested feature.

A common trap here is framing the target audience too broadly (e.g., an end user of Notejoy). Instead, we want to include empowering, specific details (e.g., power users who use Notejoy for personal productivity, as opposed to merely collaboration). this detail highlights a different use case and the power vs. casual user dynamic.

This was a key insight! Users who want offline support aren't always "fully offline" but rather "intermittently offline." This was counterintuitive, because the team had assumed fully offline was the only scenario where users needed offline support. This insight (the need to sync in an intermittently offline setting) ended up materially affecting how the solution was engineered.

This section with direct quotes from user interviews feels like overkill to some people, but I find it's really effective for trying to build user empathy among the whole team.

We felt this showed how we could provide a differentiated experience compared to competitors like Evernote.

Really strong competitive insights don't just come from direct competitors -- we also drew inspiration from other products with seamless offline experiences.

A common pitfall is just listing out 4-5 success metrics without providing any prioritization. But that ends up meaning that the team can't make effective trade-offs. Instead, I wanted to call out the priority metrics that offline support should move.

We deprioritized the feature usage metric, which meant that the design team didn't have to worry as much about feature discoverability.

Sachin Rekhi

Using this product specifications document helped me get the team aligned on what a solution could look like while identifying tradeoffs as we built a new Notejoy feature for providing Offline Support.

: Our team at Notejoy was trying to spec out a new feature around offline support. The impetus for this work was observed demand from existing users.

: We used this document internally to get the team aligned on what the solution should look like and help them make tradeoffs later on during the design/build process.

: After socializing this document, we worked with engineering to develop more detailed requirements.

Notejoy users are eager to view, edit, and create notes when they don't have an Internet connection, either while commuting, out at a coffee shop, or simply because their home or office Internet connection is spotty.

Offline support has now become the #1 requested feature amongst users in the past year. Similarly, the lack of offline support is now one of the top 3 reasons Notejoy users report for canceling their account.


Beyond satisfying a top customer request and retaining users, adding offline support furthers our core value proposition of capture at the speed of thought. It's critical that Notejoy is available everywhere you go so that whenever new ideas come to you, new tasks surface, or work needs to be captured, Notejoy is the first place users turn to. Lack of offline support is a key gap in our offering preventing us from fully delivering this value. An equally important part of this value proposition is speed. Notejoy wins when it's the fastest way for you to capture your ideas. Faster than pen & paper, faster than emailing yourself, and faster than alternative note taking apps. We want to build offline support in such a way that takes advantage of the fact that all your notes are now stored offline to significantly speed up the experience of browsing notes in Notejoy, both online and off.


Evernote, the leading note taking application, has also established the precedent that offline support is a premium feature that users pay for. Given this, we plan on making Notejoy's offline support a premium feature, introducing a new powerful upsell opportunity for Notejoy and thereby improving overall monetization.


While Notejoy is used widely for both team collaboration and individual productivity, we've found those most interested in offline support use it heavily for personal productivity. They may also use it in team collaboration scenarios, but it's the individual productivity use cases that have them most interested in offline support. This is because in the team collaboration use case, they expect to have a solid Internet connection when actively collaborating with others. The on the go use cases for Notejoy where users are eager to have offline access instead happen most frequently for personal productivity notes.


Offline support is also most valued amongst our most active power users. The casual user who uses Notejoy just in their browser has limited expectations of offline support. But our power users who live in Notejoy's Mac and Windows apps, feel that offline support is table-stakes functionality. This power user use case for offline support aligns well with our plans to make offline support a premium feature.


We investigated how frequently users were hitting the offline state within the Notejoy experience today. We stratified this by number of monthly note views, a proxy for user engagement. This helped us uncover the fact that those most in need of offline support are our most active power users.

When we interviewed users about when they expected to use offline support, they shared all the common scenarios you would expect:

When they are commuting via airplane, bus, or train

When they are out and about at coffee shops and more

We were surprised to learn though that one of the most important use cases was simply using offline support at home or at the office because they occasionally suffered from a spotty internet connections.

 They've been especially frustrated with Notejoy since currently when there is a blip in their Internet, Notejoy becomes entirely unusable until their connection is restored. The key in these scenarios is that they technically have an Internet connection, but it is just unreliable. We'll need to ensure our offline support can properly detect for this spottiness and allow the user to seamlessly continue to use Notejoy.

"Please add this feature, my work flow is constantly interrupted when WFH and have unstable internet connection."

"Really hope this gets top priority. I've lost data twice now due to Notejoy behaving badly with intermittent connectivity, and have already had to start moving my notes back to Bear and Evernote because I cannot afford to lose data. :("

"This one is a must. Otherwise, we can not claim we're using the best productivity tool (how would you be productive if you can't do anything if you're in a bad or no internet connection environment)"

"Offline access is a must-have requirement for segments in New York who are thwarted by underground subway systems. Also, many structures block data and if they don't have their own wifi. You are screwed."

"Helps me prepare for meetings while in a car, train or plane."

"I would like to have this available as sometimes I will need to create/edit notes while I'm at my cabin."

"An absolute must to have all notes available offline. If I'm flying and have no connection, what do I do? Every other note-taking app has an offline mode, and you need to have it too. This app isn't as much use to me as I thought unless you have this feature..."

"It's seriously frustrating. I left Evernote for some equally annoying features. I may go back to them or start looking for some other app."

"Not having this is a dealbreaker for me."

"Honestly, I'm surprised that this isn't implemented yet. It's a must-have feature. The other day I had to work without internet, so I had to create a temporary text-file, and copy it back later into Notejoy, then recreate the formating. That's time lost on stupid things. Please inform us how things are progressing on this."

"I am lucky in so far that I nearly always have Internet access, so offline is not a high priority, but I can understand why people want it. But please give us the OPTION to use the offline feature and do not make it compulsory. Maybe there is even some granularity possible for example to sync only SOME Team Libraries or SOME Notebooks?"

We surveyed the offline experiences of popular apps in the markets we play in, including notes, docs, and wikis. As we researched the offline capabilities in each of these apps, a pretty clear pattern started to emerge. We found that apps mostly fell in one of two categories: online-first or offline-first experiences.

Online-first apps create phenomenal connected experiences that truly show off what the Internet is capable of. But when it comes to their offline support, the experiences felt like little more than a set of crippled fallback mechanisms. Google Docs is an example of the online-first experience. It started the cloud docs revolution by bringing real-time collaborative editing to the masses and continues to be great at this very task. But if you've ever tried to use Google Docs offline, it'll be clear why Microsoft Word is still a far superior experience. First, to take advantage of Google Docs offline, you need to download a specific browser extension that of course is only available in Chrome. You then need to configure Google Drive to sync your files offline. Despite having gone through this setup, it turns out Google Drive will then only sync a recent subset of your documents to your local device. But its a very non-obvious recent subset. For example, if you go into Google Drive's own Recent filter, you'll find that not all your most recently accessed documents are available offline! If there are specific files you want to ensure are available while offline, you need to go to that file in Google Drive and mark it as available offline, leaving the user to remember and manage each and every time they might need a file available offline. Even after you've done all this, you'll likely encounter bugs that tell you the document must be reloaded or for some reason is no longer available offline.


In stark contrast to this is offline-first experiences that truly offer a first-class offline experience for users. Though the challenge these apps face is their actual online capabilities are far more limited than their online-first counterparts. Evernote is an exemplar of the offline-first experience. You can usually count on Evernote to allow you to view, edit, and create notes offline. In fact, so much of the app's capabilities are seamlessly available when you are in an offline setting. However, as a user, you are made completely aware of the underlying sync architecture of the app, as Evernote presents a prominent sync icon in the app to show you the progress of the latest sync and to kick off a sync yourself. Inevitably if you've used Evernote for some time, you'll have run into their infamous sync conflicts which can happen after editing the same note on two different devices. 

Evernote's advice on how to avoid the issue?

first wait for a complete sync to occur before viewing notes

. Tons of users complain in Evernote's forums about not knowing whether they are looking at the most recent version of a note, not understanding why they are running into sync conflicts, or having to wait for a sync to complete. At the same time, Evernote has always had a fairly limited set of online capabilities when it comes to sharing and collaborating on notes with others and fails to truly take advantage of what true connectivity can enable.


One of our core product design principles is "Productivity, meet collaboration." It's this idea that traditionally the tools that make us highly productive as individuals are completely different from the tools that enable us to seamlessly collaborate with others (as illustrated by the stark differences in Evernote and Google Docs mentioned earlier). We want to bring productivity and collaboration together in a single solution that doesn't have the traditional trade-offs of today's disparate tools. As we embark on offline support, we want to stay true to this principle.

To accomplish this, we want to create a rich offline experience that allows you to seamlessly view, edit, and create notes offline, just as the offline-first experiences offered. Beyond basic note editing, we want to develop an architecture that enables us to allow each and every action that you can take in the app offline, like starring, moving, or archiving notes. At the same time, we want to make zero compromises on the incredible connected functionality that users have come to love about Notejoy when they are online, whether it's our real-time collaborative editing, user presence, live Chatter reactions and comments, real-time social notifications, and more.


Another one of our core product design principles is "Intuitive and powerful." It's the idea that the best product experiences require no manuals, are incredibly intuitive to a broad base of users, and yet still find ways to offer a powerful set of capabilities. We felt Evernote, by make sync something that the average user needed to think about it, failed this principle. We don't want the user to generally have to worry about or wait around for syncs. Instead, users should be able to intuitively use Notejoy just as they always have and somehow get these powerful new offline capabilities in their experience.


We can take inspiration from Pocket, a read it later app, which has built a seamless offline sync experience that never requires a sync button. Their instant sync capabilities sync new articles in the background, even if the app isn’t currently open, so they are available when you are next offline. If the article hasn’t synced yet, then when you attempt to open the article, it’ll attempt to load it in real-time from the Internet instead of waiting until it has properly synced as part of the sync flow.

Similarly, Trello built a compelling offline experience by leveraging their implementation to make everything faster, both offline or online. They accomplished this by having the app automatically preload starred boards as well as important cards and boards, ensuring that the next time you accessed them, they were instantly available. We can similarly anticipate highly accessed notes via the Recent and Starred views, and ensure we preload those first to speed up the experience, both offline and online.

We expect launching offline support will significantly improve two primary metrics:


Weekly new bookings - Since we'll be launching it as a premium feature, we expect it will drive significant upsell opportunities, increasing our weekly new bookings

D7 retention - Given offline support has become a top cancellation reason, we expect introducing it will convince more new users to stick with Notejoy, improving our D7 retention rate

Since we are making this a premium feature, we do expect the D7 retention improvement will be muted compared to offering offline support to free users. However, we believe the monetization upsell opportunity will be significant so believe this is the right trade-off.

We don't expect offline support to be used frequently by users, but still believe it will be impactful since it'll create peace of mind for users who know they'll have access to their notes offline when they ultimately need it. 

Given this, we are not holding ourselves to any specific utilization metric for the feature, nor comparing its utilization with other features within Notejoy.

We will track NPS as a guardrail metric to ensure we don’t negatively impact the overall user experience with our offline support implementation.


When user comes back online, seamlessly sync all changes made locally back to server

If multiple users made changes to the same note offline, intelligently auto-merge all sets of changes without requiring user to manually resolve conflicts

New feature product spec for Notejoy Offline Support

Context

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