Product Scrapbooking
Continuously file every real-world clue about every opportunity so it's ready when the roadmap arrives.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Roadmaps look linear but customer insight arrives non-linearly and out of order. Product scrapbooking is the habit of maintaining one large database where you file every piece of evidence — support tickets, sales-call recordings, great Slack threads, data points — clustered by opportunity, so that when a topic finally hits the roadmap you already have a pile of in-the-weeds real-world clues to start from.
Origin
Tal Raviv's self-described 'weird habit,' built in a large Notion database over his PM career.
Core principles
- 01Insights about a future opportunity arrive long before you're ready to work on it — capture them when they appear, not when you need them.
- 02Clustering messy evidence over time beats trying to reconstruct context later.
- 03Having receipts ('this client and that client also mentioned that') builds credibility and makes stakeholders feel heard.
How to run it
- 1
Create one opportunity database
Set up a single store (Raviv uses Notion) holding every opportunity, big or small, that's ever come up.
- 2
File evidence the moment it appears
When a support ticket, a Gong call from a CSM, a strong brainstorm thread, or a data point surfaces, actively screenshot/save it and drop it into the relevant opportunity.
Pro tip Do it in the moment — the friction of 'I'll log it later' is what kills the habit.
- 3
Cluster loosely, don't over-organize
Let related evidence group into messy clusters per opportunity. It doesn't need to be tidy; it needs to be findable.
- 4
Pull the scrapbook when the topic goes live
When the opportunity hits the roadmap, open its cluster and start from accumulated real-world clues — and use it live in sales/CSM conversations to show you've been listening.
Pro tip Surfacing 'this and this client also said that' visibly makes the other person feel heard.
In the wild
When a salesperson or CSM mentions a customer request, Raviv opens his scrapbook and shows that the same request came from several other named clients. You can see in their face that they feel heard and that he's been quietly writing it down all along.
→ Stronger cross-functional trust and faster, evidence-backed prioritization when the opportunity matures.
Common mistakes
Relying on memory or the roadmap doc
Treating the roadmap as if insight arrives linearly means you lose all the scattered early clues and have to rebuild context from scratch when the work finally starts.
Is it for you?
Best for
A PM juggling many long-horizon opportunities who wants accumulated customer evidence ready the moment prioritization comes around.
Not ideal for
Very early-stage or single-focus teams with one obvious priority and little incoming signal to file.
From the transcript
“I call it product scrapbooking um where I have this like massive notion database of every opportunity big or small that's ever come up”
“I'll file it like I actively take a screenshot or whatever it is I file it and I start to like cluster these in this…”
“this is actually this client and that client and that client also mentioned that and uh you know you see like in their face that…”
From the episode
Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor
Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside)