For product managers: you cannot facilitate and take notes at the same time
A PM’s hardest meetings are the ones where they are also the facilitator — discovery workshops, prioritisation sessions, kickoff arguments. Facilitating well means being in the room, and being in the room means the record is whatever anyone remembers afterwards. Donna keeps the record so the PM can keep the room, and is specifically instructed to tell the difference between agreement and exhaustion.
What this job loses without a real record
- Half the ideas from the workshop die of neglect within a week, including the good one raised at minute fifty.
- “Let’s park that” is where a roadmap item goes to be forgotten.
- Stakeholders agreed in the room and disagreed in writing two days later.
The sections that earn their keep here
Every idea captured and grouped by theme with who raised it and the reaction it got — the section that is genuinely re-readable three weeks later, when you are writing the spec.
Real convergence versus what got nodded at to end the meeting. The gap between those two is where most roadmap disputes are born.
Everything deferred, listed with who deferred it — so the parking lot becomes a backlog input instead of a whiteboard photo.
The lens that fits
The Facilitator — Every idea captured, energy mapped, nothing left in the parking lot. Brainstorms, ideation sessions, planning offsites and working sessions where the point was to generate and shape ideas together. Donna selects it from the meeting itself, so nobody has to remember to switch modes.
The meetings behind it
Questions, answered straight
Can I use this for user interviews as well as internal workshops?
Yes, and they benefit differently: interviews get the verbatim quotes and the questions that were dodged, while workshops get idea capture and the alignment read. There is a dedicated use-case page for research interviews.
Do stakeholders need accounts to read the output?
No. Any ready read can be shared as a revocable link that needs no sign-in and always serves the latest version of that lens, or exported as PDF or Markdown.
Can I re-read a workshop as a decision meeting?
Yes — re-analysis runs a different lens over the stored transcript on demand, so a session that generated ideas can also be read for what actually got decided.
Put Donna in your next meeting
Access is open — sign in with your Google account and she’s in your dashboard in minutes. Rolling out to a whole team, or want a hand with the server setup? We’re glad to help.