Thread by @Conaw

Had an amazing call with the CEO of a Series B stage tech company yesterday - a recent and passionate convert to the #roamcult - who gave probably the clearest articulation of the problems that @RoamResearch solves for executives and team leaders I've heard.

Quick thread

1) Before Roam, he'd tried literally every other tool for managing his knowledge about what was going on at his company - Notion, Evernote, OneNote, Pen and Paper, emails to himself -- the thing he hated - in his words

"I hate feeling stupid, they all made me feel stupid"

2) The problem was - even when he took notes - those notes were never available in a context that was actionable.

He'd have a 1:1 with his head of Product - they had some issue with Head of Sales or Engineering

Note is only actionable later when he has 1:1 with the other party

3) He'd have a meeting with a customer, and in the course of his discussion he'd have information that needed to get to the Account Manager for that client

Some notes from meeting needed to get to Product

Some needed to go to Marketing

Some he'd want for next Roadmap meeting

4) If he had time between meetings - he COULD have copied and pasted the different sections into other notes - so they'd be available - but the problem is he never had time!

With back2back meetings - no time to move notes into 10 different contexts where they might be actionable

5) The problem for 1:1s only got more complicated when he'd have a meeting with 4 people on the team, or looking at an issue that affected 3 departments -- what file or folder do you place those notes?

6) He found @RoamResearch through twitter - and he knew it was worth checking out because he'd had this problem for years...

But it still took him a few weeks of playing with the product before he figured out a strategy that REALLY solved this problem for him

Consistent linking

7) This is somewhere I think we could be doing a LOT more in terms of guides and templates. Will be making it a priority in the coming months

Executives have to manage information flow, break up silos in their organization.

They're interdisciplinary researchers - know it or not

8) The alternative to having a good personal knowledge management system is perfect memory.

Holding all of the context and next action items in your head.

When 8 people report to you, or have demands from 20 customers whose needs you have to balance...

Gets unsustainable fast

9) Note - not suggesting companies switch off of Notion to Roam wholesale. Today they solve different problems.

Notion is great single source of truth for teams, polished docs

Roam is for messy scraps of thought that you need in multiple contexts

PKM

https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1244085559754018816?s=19

10) Decided to make a sample database for Axe Capital - from the show Billions

Here's an example of doing a 360 review process in Roam

And using {{attr-table}} to visualize the aggregate of the reviews

Database is publicly readable - play around

roamresearch.com/#/app/axecapit…

11) Here's a gif of a sample workflow of using Roam for 1:1s

Using the Query component so you can really quickly see if there are any action items you have related to the person you are meeting with

Full video:


Sample workspace:
roamresearch.com/#/app/axecapit…

Far better demo - this time with sound

Also shows how you can use datepicker to schedule things for future attention - and idea of using a tag like #amazon so when you get a book recommendation in a meeting, the rec appears when you're in context to buy