Product Road Maps - How Do They Work?

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i think, as i've come to notion, the one thing that has been very clear since i joined and in the interview process, was notion is going to be an enterprise company. E want to build for larger companies. And so there's a balance of building features that our users need and rely on all the way to where we want to be. So keeping that real time feedback loop there is important. And then the vision of where you want to go, making sure that you're dedicated to something. You can't resolve that in six months to a year. You have to stay and believe that you're in it for the longer term.

Today’s episode is with Kate Taylor, who recently joined Notion as their Head of Customer Experience. Previously, Kate spent 8 years at Dropbox, leading their SMB revenue and scaled sales operation before leaving in 2020. Prior to that, she started her career as a sales rep at Salesforce.

In today’s conversation, Kate shares a wealth of advice for building out product-led growth and self-serve motions. She shares tons of nuances around going up market, competing with sales and product planning, offering up tactical advice that any founder, product or go-to-market leader can learn from.

Kate also gives us a detailed look at how they approach product prioritization at Notion, including their system of 700 tags and examples of tradeoffs they’ve had to navigate. We also get into pricing and packaging, from specific experiments at Dropbox to why interestingly Notion’s trial isn’t time based.

We also chat about how to handle a wide range of use cases, as well as the “front door” customer experience her team is trying to build. From why customer service shouldn’t be focused on getting customers off the phone faster, to the questions she asks to find more signal in their product feedback, Kate shares some counterintuitive thoughts here.

Finally, we wrap up by talking about her approach to leading teams, including why she hires for curiosity, how she tries to teach her team to ride the ups and downs of startup life, and how working for three very different CEOs — Marc Benioff, Drew Houston and Ivan Zhao — has impacted her own leadership style.

Kate isn’t on Twitter, but you can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson