Hey everyone, I work on an extremely complex and fast-moving product. There are tons of projects that are currently being worked on, each piece has its own set of constraints and requirements. Some of these are minor features and aren’t documented, and are mostly in the heads of a lot of people.
There are also facts, data, and others that I need to remember on a day-to-day basis to make decisions on a day-to-day basis.
This information is also not going to be static and changes rapidly. How do you guys store all of this information and visualize this for your own personal use? How do you remember all of this information?
Would love to hear about any visualization, note-taking, or any other strategies you have.
When starting out the knowledge curve is extremely steep at every organization. The first 3-4 months you are mostly just absorbing as much as possible and writing down many brief documents to capture ideas and note down things you learned. It is a firehose and you need to learn to take in what’s most relevant to what you own and not every minutia you come across.
Start with a mindmap and draw the product world and everything that is relevant to you. Your brain will start remembering things as you go along.
I can relate to this. Honestly, I felt like it was impossible to keep up, so I did what was in my control: take notes. I took so many notes that I used up half a notebook in a month or so. Then I switched to Evernote once they introduced task tracking. Step one, at least for me, was to reduce that overwhelmed feeling so I could start making practical changes, and that’s what the notes did for me.
Then when I get free time I try to summarize each project in a doc, just for myself. Better not to publish it, which can be tempting. When you have to talk about a project, make yourself make a slide deck, even if no one asked for it. Practicing that will force you to consider what’s important with each project.