At a super high level, a PMF narrative is a dynamic document that encapsulates your product strategy hypotheses along six dimensions: problem to solve, target audience, value proposition, competitive advantage, growth strategy, and business model. I'm a HUGE believer in writing all this out in prose. It forces you to articulate each of these dimensions in an interconnected way, rather than considering them all in isolation. Whenever I send this to someone, the response is typically, "Wow, I thought i had clarity on my business but I've never done something like this.” The key feature of this artifact is that it's a narrative written in prose.

I'll walk through how we created this for the first time, but it's equally important to treat this as a living document that you regularly iterate on as you validate, refine, or pivot each dimension of your product strategy.

The idea for Notejoy came when I was working at LinkedIn. At the time, I was incubating a new sales subscription, which eventually got called LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It was the proverbial startup within a larger enterprise. The idea gained traction quickly, so we scaled up the team, and I went from being an IC PM to trying to shepherd this 500-person organization. And man, did we struggle with communication and collaboration. We couldn't stay aligned despite using all the modern tools and over-communicating.

As the leader of this organization, I really wanted to solve this problem. That's when I came to my initial insight: 90% of institutional knowledge never made it to a doc or wiki. Most doc vendors were just trying to make docs and wikis more robust, adding new functionality like grammar checks and tables. But that was still only 10% of institutional knowledge. I wanted to solve that 90% problem. I strongly believed that it wasn’t unique to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and in building Notejoy, I set out to validate that hypothesis.

Starting with this earned insight based on my existing experience was a really solid foundation for building a company, compared to my first startup where we were just a bunch of entrepreneurs in a room brainstorming a bunch of ideas.

In the next few paragraphs, I dive into three gaps — why aren’t organizations able to solve this problem? I could have simply said, “The problem is collaboration and staying up to date on information,” but there’s a benefit to getting really specific about why. It enabled us to validate whether other people frequently experienced these problems in their day-to-day jobs. It made it easier to structure our validation work later.

It's important to understand the full competitive landscape in your space, including direct competitors, indirect competitors, and adjacent markets so you can strategically consider "where to play" as well as "how to win".

There's a bunch of knowledge housed in these project management tools, but we never actually wanted to compete with them. They have entire structured workflows around tasks. Instead, we saw this as an adjacent market, and we saw an opportunity to partner and integrate with them to create a cohesive solution.

How often we revisit this document depends on our validation cycles when we get new information from customers. Keep in mind updating can mean two things: refining a dimension or pivoting. Most of the time, we’re refining.

Early on, that was very frequent — we were talking to 5-10 different people every week and updating it weekly. Once we were ready to launch an alpha, we waited for enough data before revisiting the narrative. It took about a month to get that product ready and out. Now that we’re more established, we’ve found a rhythm of reviewing it quarterly. We have a postmortem where we look at our OKRs, assess how we did, and reflect on what we learned that might inform our product strategy going forward.

As we continued to validate our approach, this section turned into our original value prop: “A better way to organize team docs.” We got that value prop totally wrong.

In a new product category or market, getting your value prop right is challenging because you're trying to explain something that hasn't existed before. We realized this value prop just wasn’t resonating, so we decided to try anchoring against an existing product category, which led us to the next one: “Collaborative notes for your entire team.” We anchored on the existing product category of notes, but our differentiation was collaboration.

Changing our value prop meant that we needed to add more notes functionality. The value prop wasn’t just about positioning; it was about product strategy. This value prop worked better, but then we started to see a new insight: we needed to win the individual user before winning on team collaboration. That meant a minor tweak to our value prop: “Collaborative notes for you and your entire team.” Again, when we leaned into that messaging, we also had to increase feature functionality for individuals. We started to see broader adoption when we doubled down on the individual use case. Finally, we just took the collaborative part out and that's where we are today: “Fast and focused notes for you and your team.”

I hear all the time, "Worrying about the competition is a distraction. Play your own game and think about your own customers." Here's my take on that: the customer is already considering you against your competition, so unless you have concrete advantages over that competition, you're going to lose. You have to be thoughtful about your competitive advantage when determining where you're going to play.

We wanted to be thoughtful about where our tool could add the most value and was most likely to be adopted, so we considered three dimensions. The first was company size and stage — large enough to have the problem but small enough to be willing to adopt new tools. The second was industry. Different industries have different cultural norms and problems. The tech industry operates differently than a more traditional industry, like oil and gas.

The final dimension we thought about was function. I had worked in R&D organizations my entire career, and my co-founder had worked in go-to-market organizations her entire career. So we knew there was relevance to both of these audiences, but we needed to pick one to go after first. We thought R&D would be a better place to start, because we knew they had a ton of institutional knowledge that needed to be shared. We also noticed that R&D orgs were more willing to try new solutions than GTM orgs, which were much more top-down.

We kept updating this as we started to validate and iterate. When we launched the early beta, we started running NPS surveys to understand who was loving us. But we didn't just look at aggregate NPS — we sliced it by attribute and customer segment. When we looked at that data, we actually found higher NPS from another audience that wasn't initially on our radar: non-tech SMBs like law firms, digital agencies, and real estate brokers. This led us to pivot our target audience, and that cascaded out to all the other dimensions of our product strategy.

The biggest mistake I made with my previous startup, Connected, was not being thoughtful about our growth strategy from day one. I wanted to make sure we didn't fall into the same trap with Notejoy. This time, virality would be built into the very nature of the product as a collaborative notes app.

While we identified our core business model early on as freemium, we realized over time that we needed to be far more nuanced about where the paid gates were in our product. Since we limited free accounts to a maximum of 5 users, we were stuck constantly trading off monetization for user acquisition. We're continuing to experiment with this to try to find a better way.

Sachin Rekhi

Here I walk through how Notejoy created our PMF narrative: a living document that encapsulates our product strategy hypotheses along six dimensions: problem to solve, target audience, value proposition, competitive advantage, growth strategy, and business model. 

A Modern Organization’s Communication & Collaboration Challenges

One of the greatest challenges organizations face when scaling is the exponentially growing cost of communication and collaboration.

Fred Books observed back in 1975 while at IBM that the cost of communication exponentially increased with each additional engineer added to a software project, significantly reducing the marginal output of each added resource. This was due to the additional communication overhead necessary to keep each and every member of the team up-to-date on what others were doing and how their work integrated and aligned with the broader team’s goals. While he discovered this in the context of software engineering teams, the principle equally held true across almost all roles and teams and has continued to do so even in today’s modern day organizations.

Organizations combat this through various communication and collaboration strategies: company-wide all hands, broad communication via email, recurring team meetings with the express goal of reviewing status and disseminating information, company-wide OKR planning processes, significant effort spent by most individual contributors preparing presentations for various audiences, and so much more. While these techniques certainly improve team communication, they come at an extremely high cost: reduction in individual employee productivity.

Despite all of these countermeasures, most employees within organizations still complain that critical business information is not effectively communicated and shared within the organization, resulting in efficiencies, sub-optimal decision making, and overall project delays.

The oxygen to synthesis, the fundamental driver of creativity, is restricted when there isn’t free flow of new ideas throughout the organization.

On top of these easily observed costs associated with inefficient communication and collaboration within an organization, there is an equally important imperceptible opportunity cost: friction preventing the free flow of new ideas throughout the organization. While some still idolize creativity as the result of a single person lost deep in thought having a light bulb idea, the research shows that creativity is in fact maximized in organizations that have the greatest amount of sharing of new ideas across disparate disciplines, levels, and divisions within an organization. The smashing of these raw ideas together to create even better ones, also known as synthesis, is the most predictable influencer of creativity within organizations.

So when broad communication and collaboration throughout the organization starts to break down, so does the very oxygen of synthesis, creativity, and ultimately innovation.

It’s no wonder that larger organizations struggle to keep up the pace of innovation observed in early stage startups.

Lack of captured institutional knowledge results in the biggest asset of your company walking out the door with each employee departure.

Organizations today talk about the considerable cost to employee departures. Yet much of this real cost stems from inefficient capture of institutional knowledge within the organization.

The cost of bringing a new employee up-to-speed is high because there is rarely easily accessible materials within the organization that accurately summarize the current research, strategies, decisions, domain knowledge, and other information necessary to be effective in their new role. Instead the organization relies on meetings with various individuals within the organization to get up-to-speed, wasting both your and their time.

Yet what’s even scarier is the cost of an employee leaving your organization because what departs with them is not just future productivity, but all the institutional knowledge they learned over the years at your organization that they failed to neatly document and share with remaining stakeholders. That institutional knowledge, the most critical IP that your organization has, either is retained through an expensive retention package, or simply walks out the door and leaves you with a clear setback that is bound to evidence itself in slower or less effective future decision making.

Employees are drowning in information overload, struggling to manage and stay on top of their most important projects

In the modern organization there is no shortage of information to process: new ideas, proposals, analytics, customer feedback, competitor news, designs, etc. We are constantly thrown new information all the time and expected to make sense of it. While this would be challenging on any given project, we are constantly juggling many different initiatives in our day-to-day lives. It’s no wonder that most employees feel inundated with information and find it difficult to stay on top of all the details of their most important projects.

While the savvy employees have their favorite productivity solutions, there aren’t yet large-scale adopted solutions that employees can leverage to manage their day-to-day projects.

Employees have limited tools to help them amplify and cultivate their internal professional reputation.

At LinkedIn we talked a lot about professional reputation and how LinkedIn profiles served as the professional identity of record and an incredible way to grow your professional reputation online. So do other tools like Twitter, about.me, and more. Yet what all these services focus on is your public professional reputation, largely outside of your own company with a broader-base of professionals. Yet when you think about it, the professional reputation a professional cares most about on a day-to-day basis is the the professional reputation within their organization. They care how they are perceived by their peers, manager, leadership, and other stakeholders in their day-to-day work. This reputation is going to have by far the biggest effect on their day-to-day success as a career professional. Yet none of the existing tools help cultivate this internal professional reputation. There’s an incredible unmet need to enable professionals to far more effectively manage and scale their professional reputation within their organization. To help them show off their best work, to help them demonstrate their expertise, to help them lend a hand to co-workers, and so much more.

Existing Organization Communication & Collaboration Solutions

While there is a broad spectrum of legacy and modern organization communication and collaboration solutions in the marketplace today, they largely don’t address the above challenges.

Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, Simplenote, Google Keep, Apple Notes, FiftyThree’s Paper

Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps for Work, Quip, Zoho Docs, Pingpad, Box Notes, Dropbox Paper, Slack Posts, Canvas, Notion

Microsoft Sharepoint, Atlassian Confluence, Google Sites, GitHub Wiki, Phabricator Wiki, PBWorks, MediaWiki

Microsoft Sharepoint, Dropbox, Box.net, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive

Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, Google Apps for Work, Zoho Mail

Slack, Atlassian HipChat, Microsoft Teams

Atlassian JIRA, Basecamp, Trello, Asana, Wrike, Pivotal Tracker

Microsoft Yammer, Jive, Salesforce Chatter, Facebook @ Work

Krypton (Shishir Mehrotra), Bold, (Gentry Underwood and Scott Cannan)

Facebook grew sharing by making it frictionless and providing instant gratification

Facebook has been able to drive significantly more people than ever before to share the stories of their lives with their friends on Facebook. While it wasn’t the first to enable sharing, it was the first to popularize it at scale and to get a far greater percentage and absolute number of users to share with their friends. So how were they able to achieve this? Facebook made sharing frictionless and provided instant gratification. It made it easy by enabling the sharing of photos right from your phone. The simultaneous growth of smartphones cameras and apps made it easy to snap and share on Facebook. More importantly, after sharing, they provided instant gratification in the form of feedback to the sharer. Your friends would quickly view, like, comment, and re-share your content. Getting immediate push notifications from your friends that they’ve liked your content is incredibly gratifying and created the tightest engagement loop the Internet had ever seen on shared content. This basic mechanic is now popular on all social sites. Yet when you think about it, such a mechanic doesn’t exist within our office productivity solutions. There’s no easy way for you to share content with your co-workers and receive instant gratification and feedback on it. If we were able to re-create these mechanics in the office (frictionless sharing & instant gratification), we could similarly increase the amount of corporate knowledge shared within the enterprise just as Facebook has increased the world’s social sharers.

Who’s Viewed Your Profile is LinkedIn’s most emotionally delightful feature

While LinkedIn serves an incredible number of value propositions to our members, there are only a few that have been able to truly elicit an emotional response from our members, with the greatest being who’s viewed your profile. We’ve found that this feature has the highest retention of all of LinkedIn’s experiences. Members are incredibly curious about who is checking them out and will always click through to see and learn more about those individuals. They check out their titles, company, common connections, and more, to try to deduce why they might be looking at them. Just how this mechanic is popular on dating sites as the lightest-weight expression of interest, it drives the same emotional response on LinkedIn in the professional setting. Imagine the same mechanic being applied to your work products. What if you could know when a co-worker had viewed your document? Or your manager? Or the CEO of your company? It will undoubtedly create a similar emotionally delightful response and keep users coming back to see who else has checked out their work product.

YouTube’s mechanics for great content discovery are broadly applicable

I’m an avid YouTube user for finding new music that I’ll love. YouTube has done an absolutely incredible job of enabling content discovery to make it effortless for me to find great content. They employ a variety of mechanisms to enable this discovery. Every video has recommended videos based on others who’ve enjoyed this video. They allow you to easily go to the channel of the publisher of the video to find more great content from them. They enable users to be curators of content so you can subscribe to great curators. It even starts automatically recommending content on your homepage based on your watch history. YouTube knows my tastes even better than I do at this point. It’d be magical to have these same discovery capabilities built into our office tools. It’d be great if when viewing a document I could see other documents from the same author, or other documents that people who viewed this one had also viewed. It’d be great if I could even subscribe to authors or channels to be kept up-to-date on the topics I care about. Or to have curators curate relevant docs without being the original author. Yet no office solution has executed well in bringing YouTube and consumer Internet discovery capabilities to organizations.

The enterprise equally suffers from a signal-to-noise challenge with YouTube and other media sites address. Just think about your inbox. Or nowadays even Slack is getting far noisier and difficult to find the signal. Have you tried finding relevant content in your Wiki or Google Docs lately? It’s still incredibly challenging. The enterprise could benefit just as much from improved discovery as modern consumer media sites.

Enterprise social networks are the wrong approach to bringing social to the office

Yammer and other enterprise social networks thought the best way to bring all of the great advancements in consumer social technology to the office was simply by re-creating them with a private space within the organization. Yammer replicated much of the core functionality of Facebook and created a private enterprise space. As did CubeTree, BranchOut, Salesforce Chatter, and more. Yet they have mostly failed to bring consumer social networking benefits to the enterprise. The challenge is employees don’t want yet another tool they have to remember to use in their day-to-day work life. They also find the social networking paradigm difficult to accept in the office since it is far too reminiscent of how they conduct their personal social networking. A better approach is to infuse tastefully crafted social mechanics directly into the productivity solutions employees use to get their work done everyday, including the tools they use to create and share documents and other work products. This would integrate far better with their existing workflow yet brings all of the social advances to the enterprise.

Email is not dead: it’s a key enabler for bottoms-up enterprise adoption

The industry has been anticipating the death of email for years and tons of startups are pursuing solutions that attempt to replace email as the predominant communication mechanism within organizations. Yet email is far from dead, especially in the enterprise. So it’s important to embrace email as a critical part of an employee’s workflow. And it becomes an important channel for enabling bottoms-up viral adoption of a new document collaboration solution by being a common denominator all employees have, enabling non-users to still participate. Most solutions aren’t taking advantage of this as carefully as they could to drive adoption within the organization.

Asana has the right idea with supporting both personal & team tasks

One of the core pillars of Asana was to solve the issue that the tools individuals used to store their personal work tasks was separate from the tools the team used to manage theirs. This created a double accounting system that often resulted in far less utilization of such tools on both the personal and team side. So with Asana, the team set out to create a single solution that was lightweight enough to use for your personal tasks but powerful enough to use for team tasks, enabling a single system to drive far more capture of all tasks. The same idea would apply well to document collaboration, where too often personal notes are captured in notebooks, sticky notes, Evernote, emails, etc while team documents are shared via Google Docs, Wikis, Dropbox, Box.net. If these are unified, you’d similarly enable far more capture of knowledge into a single system and simultaneously drive up team sharing.

Modern consumer search advances have far outstripped enterprise search capabilities

The capabilities of consumer search have significantly outstripped that of enterprise search solutions. Type-ahead allows you to quickly jump to commonly accessed results without having to hit the search results page. Instant answers give you the specific answer you are looking for on the search results page without having to go out to any document. Faceted and guided search experiences help you quickly filter down search results to the most relevant ones. Social annotations on results give you cues to what are the most desirable results. All of these have broad application to enterprise search and could significantly improve the experience of existing collaboration solutions where today it feels almost impossible to find relevant content.

PMF Narrative at Notejoy

The Notejoy Opportunity

A Modern Organization’s Communication & Collaboration Challenges

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