Meeting & Decision Notes — Notebook Overview

The notebook spans three sessions held across one week in early July, each with a distinct focus that built on the last.

The first session, Roadmap Planning (Jul 3, 2025), was the foundational kickoff. The full team — a product manager (Mina), an engineer (Jun), a designer (Jisoo), and the note-taker — gathered to lock the Q3 roadmap and assign ownership. The outcome was a tight, deliberately constrained MVP scope: payments, landing page, and onboarding. Everything else, most notably image generation, was explicitly ruled out as scope creep and deferred to v2. The beta launch date of July 31 was confirmed as a hard deadline. Payment processing strategy was also settled here: the team chose Stripe for direct integration over any third-party provider, citing better cost structure and greater control over the payment experience. Each major workstream was assigned an owner — Jun on payments, Jisoo on the landing redesign, Mina on building the beta user list. [Meeting notes.md]

Four days later, Product Weekly Sync (Jul 7, 2025) served as an early health check. With Jisoo absent, Mina, Jun, and the note-taker reviewed progress against the roadmap. Payment integration immediately surfaced as the highest-risk item blocking the July 31 date, and the team realigned to make it the week's singular top priority. A bug in the email verification signup flow prompted a brief debate about whether to drop verification altogether to reduce friction — but the team decided to keep it required, concluding that the protection against spam outweighed any onboarding cost. The session also flagged the landing hero copy as too weak, and Jisoo and Mina were jointly assigned to rewrite it before the next session. [Meeting notes.md]

The third session, Design Review (Jul 9, 2025), was the smallest — just Jisoo and the note-taker — but produced two of the most consequential product direction decisions in the notebook. Three landing hero mockup options were reviewed side by side; Option B, built around a problem-first framing with the anchor line *"scattered knowledge, in one place,"* was selected as the strongest. Separately, the team reconsidered the default onboarding experience: rather than dropping new users into an empty wiki, the first screen would instead show an example mockup alongside an "add sources" nudge, meaningfully lowering the blank-state barrier to first action. [Meeting notes.md]

Across the three sessions, the team made eight concrete decisions. These are all catalogued in the Decisions log, which records each choice alongside its rationale, date, owner, and the meeting where it was made. Here is the substance of each decision and how they relate to one another.

The backbone of everything is the beta date of July 31 and the locked MVP scope. Choosing a fixed date first forced the scope conversation: image generation was a genuine candidate, but keeping it in the build would have jeopardized the deadline. Deferring it to v2 was a deliberate trade-off — ship something lean and learn, rather than risk slipping on a feature that isn't core to the initial value proposition. [Meeting notes.md]

The Stripe direct integration decision (from Roadmap Planning) set the technical direction for Jun's work through the end of the month. By July 7, at the Product Weekly Sync, this work had already become the team's most visible risk — not because of the technology choice itself, but because payment integration is inherently complex and any delay in testing would cascade directly into the beta date. The team's response was to make it an explicit weekly priority rather than let it drift. [Meeting notes.md]

The email verification decision is notable because it was nearly reversed. Removing it was a live option on the table during the Product Weekly Sync; the team considered the signup friction it introduces. The final call — keep it required — reflects a deliberate prioritization of product integrity (spam prevention) over conversion optimization at this pre-beta stage. [Meeting notes.md]

The two design decisions from Design Review — landing hero Option B and the onboarding first screen — are where the product's voice and first-run experience were settled. Option B's problem-first framing is a strategic bet that leading with a user pain point ("scattered knowledge") converts better than leading with a feature or a brand statement. The onboarding change is a UX principle decision: the empty state is a known friction point for tools that require user-generated content to show value, so showing an example removes that barrier before it becomes a reason to churn. [Meeting notes.md]

*Decisions made per meeting, per Decisions log.*

Every decision produced follow-up work, and all open tasks are tracked on Action Items, grouped by owner. The distribution of work reflects each person's role clearly.

Jun (Engineering) owns the highest-stakes workstream: starting and completing a meaningful milestone in the Stripe payment integration. The two tasks — begin integration (from Roadmap Planning) and complete at least one end-to-end payment test (from Product Weekly Sync) — are sequential and together represent the team's biggest delivery risk against the July 31 date. [Meeting notes.md]

Jisoo (Design) holds the most tasks of any owner: the original landing redesign assignment from Roadmap Planning, the landing hero copy rewrite (jointly with Mina, from Product Weekly Sync), and the finalization of landing hero Option B from Design Review. These tasks are related and converging — the Option B finalization is effectively the culmination of the earlier two assignments. [Meeting notes.md]

Mina (PM) is responsible for the beta user pipeline: building the initial user list (from Roadmap Planning) and confirming a specific target of 10 beta users (from Product Weekly Sync). She also shares the landing copy rewrite task with Jisoo. Her work is the demand side of the beta launch equation — without a confirmed user list, the July 31 date is a launch with no audience. [Meeting notes.md]

The note-taker (Me) has one open item from Design Review: writing the onboarding copy for the new first-screen experience — the words that will accompany the example mockup and "add sources" nudge. [Meeting notes.md]

The notebook is structured so that information flows naturally from the general to the specific. Meeting notes.md is the source of record for all raw notes. Each meeting has its own dedicated page — Roadmap Planning (Jul 3, 2025), Product Weekly Sync (Jul 7, 2025), and Design Review (Jul 9, 2025) — where the full agenda, discussion, decisions, and action items for that session are documented individually.

The two cross-cutting pages synthesize across all three sessions. Decisions is a running table where every concrete choice the team made can be found in one place, with rationale and meeting links — useful for onboarding someone who missed the early sessions, or for checking why a particular direction was chosen. Action Items does the same for outstanding work: rather than hunting through individual meeting pages to find what still needs doing, every open task is surfaced in one place, grouped by owner.

This structure means the notebook serves two kinds of readers: someone who wants to understand the arc of the team's thinking over the three weeks can read the meeting pages in order; someone who just wants to know what was decided or what still needs doing can go directly to Decisions or Action Items without reading any meeting notes at all.