syntactic sugar
transient thoughts

I’ve been loving quarantine because I feel like I can finally learn new skills and work on projects that I’ve been neglecting. I haven’t coded in quite some time, and wanted to challenge myself to do something fun and get back into it. With my new job, I’ll be moving away from a strict product management role, so I also wanted to refresh my PM skills by writing up a PRD for this project.

I believe in designing apps to solve problems you face in your personal lives, so as a foodie and avid Notion user, I created a tool that automatically maps rows in your Notion database. Here’s an excerpt from my PRD that explains the project:

Context

People on the internet are constantly inundated with information from different sources. Our lives are increasingly cross-platform — an instagram account here, a reddit account there, and everything in between. With a large spread of sources, it’s hard to consolidate and unify information in one place, which is a pain point that is relevant for all internet citizens. Like many others, I have turned to Notion as a reliable way to document and collect information across all these platforms. As a die-hard foodie, I’ve been using the Notion web clipper to note down restaurants I want to try, but it’s hard for me to visualize the location of restaurants through a table or list. Although I could manually add restaurants to a Google Maps collection and view it that way, it takes way too many clicks to do that. Consistency is achieved through simplicity. To solve this, I created this application that allows users to clip restaurants through Notion and have it automatically be plotted on a Google Map for simple data collection, access, and visualization.

Goal

The goal of the app is to automate and simplify an otherwise complicated user flow. It bridges the gap between applications such as data sources (Instagram, Reddit, blogs, etc), data collection tools (Notion database), and data visualization tools (Google Maps). It allows users to see their data from different sources in one unified layout.

I currently use this tool for mapping my favourite restaurants, but will definitely use this in planning future vacations and trips. I can then embed the map back into Notion, which lets me interact with the map and the database simultaneously.

You can check out the app at food.mchen.co. My full PRD below explains the app, the design, and tech stack. Code is on my github.