Any product managers here? How do you leverage Obsidian?

I’m a software product manager who is currently onboarding with a new company. Starting to use Obsidian (been using it for a week) and seems promising so far.

I wanted to ask other product managers: What use cases or workflows do you have that seem the most valuable to you?

Backlinks have been extremely valuable for me. It feels like I’m learning much quicker/efficiently than if I didn’t have Obsidian. A lot of my learning has been tribal knowledge from meeting other folks in the company (e.g. developers, designers, sales, customer success, etc.).

For example, I’m learning about Product A. Developer talked about Product A in this meeting, Sales talked about Product A in another meeting, Customer Success talked about Product A in another meeting. I create a note called “Product A” that links to all of those three meetings. This is valuable for me to be able to “connect the dots” and remember what was talked about in these meetings.

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Hi there. I’m also a product manager and I’ve working on my Obsidian for the last few months.

My most important use of Obsidian is to have a note for every new feature idea. Some of my workflow/setup:

  • a folder for each product;
  • a kambam MOC note with the status of every feature such as “Future”, “Developing”, “Testing” and “Discarded”. Here I put all new feature ideas that come up during meetings so I can create the proper notes and analyse them later on;
  • a template for for each new feature note, so I don’t forget anything, like estimated effort, start and end date, tags for the main areas involved, the module in which the feature be made (all these in the frontmatter, so they show up on my Kambam and I can use for Dataview summaries);
  • A field on my features template for interference or blocks among different features, so I can put the links to have a quick navigation between my notes

Hi there, I’m a product manager and I’ve been using Obsidian for more than a year.

Probably one of most use useful workflows for me is using Obsidian as an Integrated Qualitative Analysis Environment (props to @ryanjamurphy) for user research. I’ve been using Grounded Theory to extract from conversations with users their pain points, common themes and things like that. These inputs are used to empower product decision on what to do next, inform marketing angles, validate existing assumptions, etc.

Another thing that has been valuable to me is To-do plugin which I modified (having some programming experience) to allow me to implement GTD. As a PM I think about different things throughout the day and having a system to help me empty ideas that spontaneously come into mind and ensure I’ll revisit them later is very important.

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I’m a Product Owner / Product Manager. Using obsidian for nearly a year now. I love it. Before I’ve used Evernote for 5y, plain txt files for a while and Workflowy for 3y, but I love obsidian.

My work consists of shaping the long term vision, roadmap, maintaining the backlog and interact with my stakeholders.
Next to that I have quite some ad hoc questions and tasks for the current Sprint. Switching context frustrates the vibe.

I’m always looking to optimize my workflow and changed note taking a lot.

Please have a look at this topic as well:

Edit: link updated^

Why create a separate note for each meeting? In the past I did that as well, but I realized the meeting itself means nothing. It is all about the content. For each topic I have a note and I try to keep related stuff in there, with date stamps, which create unlinked backlinks to my daily notes.

I make use of templates quite often, to add structure and quality to my notes and thinking process, but to be honest I should make use of templates more often.

Currently I place all my to do items in a separate note called GTD, which has the headings Now, Next, Soon, Someday. Each to do has a link to the note of the topic.
I use keyboard shortcuts to move items up and down the list.

Bit of a love/hate relationship with these to do items. I feel they belong in the note of the actual topic, so that I would have the overview complete, but then it is harder to prioritize my GTD list.

Next to this I have a log file in which I add items that I want to remember which are not necessarily related to a topic note, like a Product outage, or some other interesting event.
I’ve a saved workspace with 4 panes:

  1. GTD
  2. Note for topic
  3. Log file
  4. Local graph

Whenever I need to prepare a meeting or presentation, I can browse these panels and have everything available.

This setup is quite OK for me. It is heavily customized to fit my need. I love obsidian for supporting this.
But as said, I’m always interested to further optimize my setup :slight_smile: so I’m interested in suggestions of others.
Hopefully this may be of inspiration to you…

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