Pitch Notion's CEO Three Improvement Ideas as a Newly Hired PM in 2021
Company: Notion
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
It is August 2021, and you have just joined Notion as a product manager. The CEO asks you to bring three ideas that would make Notion better and leaves the scope open: the ideas can strengthen the business, improve things for customers, or both. Present your three ideas, explain why you chose them over other options, and say how you would tell whether each one worked.
```hint Tie each idea to a lever
Three unrelated feature wishes make a weak answer. Decide which stage of Notion's path from a single enthusiastic user to a paying team you most want to move, and make each idea earn its place against that goal.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Which goal matters most to the CEO this year: more paying teams, better retention, or higher revenue per customer?
- Should the ideas be bets for the next quarter, or larger moves over the next one to two years?
- Is there a priority customer group, such as individuals on the free plan, small teams, or departments inside large companies?
- Are there limits on what I can propose, such as engineering capacity or a preference for improving existing features over launching new products?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal tied to how Notion grew and earned revenue in 2021, such as bottom-up adoption that turns individual users into paying teams.
- A segmentation of Notion's users and a reasoned focus for the ideas.
- Three distinct ideas, each traced to a real pain point and to a business or customer outcome, with at least one aimed at the business side.
- A prioritization of the three by impact, effort and confidence, with a view on what to do first.
- Success metrics with guardrails for each idea, and the main risks, such as added complexity in a product loved for its flexibility.
### Follow-up Questions
- The CEO says you can fund only one of the three next quarter. Which do you pick, and what do you give up?
- How would you test your riskiest idea cheaply before committing engineers to it?
- One of your ideas makes Notion more powerful but also more complicated for new users. How do you protect the simplicity that drew people in?
Overview: A product sense question set in August 2021, in which a newly hired Notion product manager must give the CEO three ideas to improve the product or the business. It tests goal setting, user segmentation, grounding ideas in real pain points, prioritization, and choosing success metrics for each proposal.