A product team: from eight interviews to a spec that remembers why
Five people, one feature, three weeks. The customer quotes, the sketches and the final decision stay in one notebook the whole team can read.
Lena runs product for a team of five. The problem is clear enough: new users sign up and then do not know where to start. She has eight customer interviews, a support ticket export with 140 rows, screenshots of the current first screen and three weeks before the engineers need a spec. Everyone has an opinion. Two of the opinions were already settled in a call last month, but the call was not written down, so they are back.
In week three a new developer, Max, joins the team. He will be the one building this. He will ask why.
The interviews stop being a slide
Lena has summarised interviews before: five bullet points, one slide, everyone nods. This time the eight interviews go into the notebook as eight notes, with the three sentences each person actually said in quote blocks and her own reading underneath, visibly separate. The 140 tickets go in as a table. The screenshots get comments on the exact pixel the designer means.
When the engineer who doubts the whole project asks “did anyone really say that”, the answer is a link to the quote, and he reads it himself. He is still doubtful, but about the right thing now.
Three options, one scorecard, no call
The guided tour, the sample notebook and the better email each get a branch. The designer works in one, Lena in another, and the team agrees on the scoring questions before anyone argues: days of effort, which interview problems it solves, what it costs support. The comparison comes back with a link under every cell.
The answer is a mix, which it usually is. The sample notebook from branch B and the email copy from branch C go into the spec. The guided tour does not, and the reason is written down, so when someone proposes it again in autumn the team can read why not before re-arguing it.
Max reads for an hour and asks one question
Max joins on a Monday. He gets the notebook link and reads the pinned Start here note, the Friday decision notes and the spec. It takes him an hour. His one question is a good one, about an interview nobody had weighed enough, and it goes into the notebook as a comment on that interview.
The spec is exported to Markdown and lives in the repository with a link back. In October, when a different developer opens the file and wonders why there is a sample notebook on the first screen, the eight interviews are one click away.
A product decision starts in a customer interview and ends weeks later in a technical discussion. In between it passes through a chat, a slide, a call and someone’s memory. Below is how a small product team keeps that path in one notebook in Kartoteq, so the developer who joins in week three can read why, not just what.
How the notebook is laid out
One notebook per feature, with a door
Create a notebook for the feature, not for the quarter. Invite the whole team with the edit role; a stakeholder from sales gets view. Write the goal as the problem, not the solution: “New users do not find where to start after sign-up.”
The interview asks who the users are, what evidence you already have, what is out of scope and when the decision is due. Approve the sections: problem and evidence, options, spec, decisions. Then write the Start here note by hand: three paragraphs on what this is, who owns it and what is being decided this week. Pin it.
New people read that note first. It is the door into the notebook, and it should be rewritten every time the question changes.
Put the interviews in as quotes, not as conclusions
Each of the eight interviews is one note in Problem and evidence. The recording’s transcript or your notes go in as an attachment; the three sentences the person actually said go in as a quote block; what you concluded goes below, clearly yours. Tag the note with the user segment.
Screenshots of the current onboarding, the support ticket export and the analytics table live next to the interviews. One line under each: what it shows. The researcher adds, the designer comments on the specific screenshot, and the thread stays attached to it.
Ask AI across the section: which problems came up in more than three interviews, which came up once, which interviews disagree with the analytics. The answer links to the quotes, so a sceptical engineer can check the source in a minute.
Give each option its own branch and the same scorecard
In Options open a branch per approach. Branch A: a guided tour on first login. Branch B: an empty state with one sample notebook. Branch C: nothing new, just a better sign-up email. Each branch keeps its own sketches, its own discussion and its own draft result.
Agree on the criteria before arguing: effort in days, which interview problems it solves, what it costs support. Write them once in the section note, and AI compares all branches by that list, pointing at the evidence for each cell.
Mark with “Keep” what should survive: the sample notebook from B, the email copy from C. The consolidated spec shows which branch each requirement came from, and the losing branches stay readable for the next time the question comes up.
Close the week with a decision note
Every Friday, add one note to Decisions: what was settled this week, what was dropped, what moved to next week. Link each line to the branch or the comment where it was argued. It takes fifteen minutes and replaces the Monday “wait, what did we decide” call.
When a decision is reversed later, add a new note that says so and links to the old one. Nobody edits history. Version history of the spec keeps the rest.
Tasks live in your task tracker; the notebook keeps the reasons. The spec, exported to Markdown, goes to the repository with a link back to the notebook, so the developer who opens the file in October finds the eight interviews behind it.
What is left when the project ends
A notebook you can open a year later and still understand: the sources, the discussions and the result, with the reason next to every decision. If the next project is similar, you start from here instead of from an empty page.
Where to go next
Work on one notebook togetherStart with one notebook.
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