Topicflow: Meetings

The Project: Effective and Context-Rich Meetings

Performance reviews were Topicflow’s core product, but reviews only happen a few times a year. Meetings — especially 1:1s — happen every week, and they’re where the most important feedback, coaching, and discussions actually take place. We saw an opportunity to capture that context continuously and feed it back into the review process, giving managers a clearer picture of their team over time rather than just at review season.

My Role

My role was the same as on the Reviews project — sole product designer, product manager, and customer success. For meetings specifically, I owned the design end-to-end and coordinated with 4 engineers to build and ship these features.

The Problem: Managers Are Busy

Most managers we spoke with kept meeting notes in tools like Notion, OneNote, or Google Docs — if they kept notes at all. The problem wasn’t the note-taking itself. It was that those notes existed in isolation. Nothing connected a conversation from last Tuesday to the review a manager would write six months later. Context was generated weekly but lost almost immediately.

What Managers Actually Needed

Through interviews with managers, prospective customers, and existing customers, we identified what managers actually needed from a meetings tool on a day-to-day basis.

The Opportunity: Meeting Managers at Each Stage

Context is hard to keep track of. We wanted to support managers at each stage of their meeting workflow — before, during, and after. Our main focus was on 1:1 meetings, since those are where the most important feedback and coaching happens.

Finding the Right Level of Structure

Early on, I explored different levels of structure for the meeting experience. One direction was highly structured — predefined agenda templates, required fields, and automatic categorization. Another was completely freeform, closer to a shared document. Through testing with managers, we found that too much structure felt like busywork and too little meant the data wasn’t useful later. The sweet spot was a lightweight topic-based format that gave managers just enough structure to capture meaningful signals without adding friction to their workflow.

Starting from a blank slate needed to be easy. Managers needed to quickly jump between today’s meeting, the last one, and the next upcoming one — adding topics for next week or referencing what was discussed previously without friction. We also designed for topic tracking, so managers could see which discussions had been resolved and which were still open.

Using AI to Help Make Sense

Remembering the specifics of a previous meeting can be difficult. When a manager navigates back to a past meeting, the first thing they see is an AI-generated summary — key takeaways, action items, and a recap of what was covered. The full notes are still available below, but the summary gives an immediate refresher.

We carried that context forward into upcoming meetings as well. Any unresolved topics from the last meeting were surfaced automatically, and managers could add them to the next agenda, mark them as resolved, or dismiss the summary entirely.

Balancing Automation and Control

One of the key tensions in designing the AI features was how much to automate. Early versions generated summaries and action items automatically after every meeting, but managers told us they didn’t always trust AI-generated content appearing alongside their own notes. We pulled back and made the AI summary a clearly separated section — visible but not mixed into the notes themselves — and gave managers explicit control over which unresolved topics carried forward. The principle was that AI should surface information, not make decisions on a manager’s behalf.

Effective Navigation

I designed the navigation so managers could quickly move between their most common touchpoints. The sidebar surfaced each direct report, and clicking one brought the manager straight into the 1:1 space — where they could add notes to the next meeting, review previous meetings, catch up on activities, and surface insights they might have missed.

The same experience extended to team meetings. A dedicated meetings page let managers view all recurring 1:1s, team meetings, or their work calendar. These layers of focus made it easy to jump between different meetings to add notes or review past discussions.

Designing the Connection to Reviews

Meetings aren’t the core product — performance reviews are. So the meetings feature had to do more than be a good note-taking tool. It had to capture signals that would become useful months later when managers sat down to write reviews.

I designed the meeting experience so that topics, action items, and key takeaways were stored in a way that the review system could surface later. When a manager opened the context panel during a review (shown on the Reviews page), their meeting notes and AI-generated summaries appeared alongside the relevant review question — connecting weekly conversations to periodic evaluations without any extra work from the manager.

Earning a Place in Existing Workflows

The harder design challenge was convincing managers to use Topicflow for meetings at all. Most already had a system that worked well enough. The experience needed to be simple enough to replace tools like Notion or OneNote, while providing value those tools couldn’t — the connection to reviews. I focused on making the first interaction frictionless: one click from the sidebar to start adding topics, no setup required, and immediate value from AI summaries on past meetings.

Outcome: 30% Adoption Among Existing Customers

Most of our customers initially bought Topicflow for performance reviews. We successfully marketed the meetings features to these existing customers, and within a few months, 30% of managers were actively using them for 1:1s and team meetings. That regular usage fed the system with context that made their next review cycle faster and more informed — validating the core bet that meetings and reviews should be connected.

What I Learned

This project taught me that the hardest design challenge isn’t building the right feature — it’s earning a place in someone’s existing workflow. Managers already had tools for meeting notes. They didn’t need another one. What they needed was for their weekly conversations to actually matter when review season came around, without adding any extra work to their day.

Designing for that required restraint. Every feature had to justify its existence not by what it could do, but by whether a busy manager would actually use it. That constraint shaped every decision, from the lightweight topic format to the separated AI summaries, and it’s a principle I carry into every project now.