, we've refined our product feature development process into a guide we call 

This guide is essentially a cheat sheet that we turn to every time we kick-off a new project. It keeps us laser-focus on the two things we believe matter the most, without losing sight amidst the noise: delivering value to our customers and driving value for our business.

 is an acronym that represents each stage of our process: 

Feature discovery + Evaluation, Validation, Execution, and Rollout

As we worked on Notionlytics, we figured out that we need to be super precise about which features we build and why. We always had lots of ideas about what to build, but often we didn't have clear reasons for choosing one thing over another. 

We tried different approaches: we looked at the business impact and effort, then prioritized based on that, we talked to customers to understand what's important to them, etc, etc. But over time, we realized that even though we were doing a pretty good job of prioritizing, we didn't have a single checklist or framework with all the important questions we needed to answer during brainstorming and prioritization. 

So, this checklist combines everything we felt is super important that used to be scattered all over the place, and it emerged from all those pieces we had in our Notion here and there.

We hold a weekly session during which we take the most promising ideas, the ones we’re about to build, and we take them through every single question in this list. 

Folks who own the feature are involved, in our case it’s the co-founders.

We jump to the following question only if the previous questions are answered. 

For us, we felt, that’s very important, as it ensures we aren’t missing anything, and we keep asking ourselves questions that are oftentimes uncomfortable.

We’ve been using this checklist since January 2023. We had a process before, that essentially was about the same thing, but it’d been a little bit of a mess, so we came up with something that’s much more structured, taking some mechanisms we already had as the base. While we don’t change the template, sometimes if questions aren’t applicable - we skip them. E.g. not so long ago we shipped an onboarding-related feature that had a huge impact on activation, but due to its nature questions like “what are are our co-marketing opportunities here” simply didn’t make sense. Nevertheless, for the sake of simplicity, we decided to keep using just one checklist and skip questions when they’re irrelevant, as opposed to having several questionnaires for different cases: we’d need to maintain them, and being super focused is critical for us at this stage.

The checklist does evolve with time, but the fundamentals remain the same. I believe we make some tiny improvements every other week. We may rephrase the way something is asked, or make some questions more aligned with e.g. customer value. 

As we kept building Notionlytics, we had to “unlearn” things that we learned working at big companies. But we also acknowledged that building startups requires structure too. 

So, while we do make changes to our checklist from time to time, we’re still trying to keep it agnostic of the product specifics, so we can reuse it, keep it simple, and stick to it, to reduce the cognitive load and remain focused.

Max Prilutskiy

This serves as our go-to guide every time we initiate a new project. It helps us focus on the two most important aspects we believe in, without getting distracted: delivering value to our customers and enhancing the value of our business.

, to allow our users to understand not only pageviews of their Notion documents, but also how helpful the readers find those materials. We’ll do that by adding a “Reaction” widget, that the readers would be able to click and signal to the author of the content that they like what they see.

Product Feature Development Framework (FEVER) at Notionlytics

FEVER - Reaction widget

Idea

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