What to expect, what they’re really testing, and what a strong answer looks like — scored.
Knowledge management, personal and team productivity, and the tension between flexibility and structure. Notion PMs must understand that Notion's strength (infinite flexibility) is also its weakness (high setup friction), and balance power users with casual users who need more guidance.
The question below was asked by Notion interviewers. The answer is graded on the five dimensions real PM interviewers use: structure, specificity, reasoning, decision quality, and delivery.
“Notion's templates gallery has low adoption. How do you improve it?”
Low template adoption could mean templates are hard to find, templates don't match users' needs, or users don't understand the value until it's too late. I'd investigate which of these is the primary driver before proposing a fix.
My hypothesis: the discovery problem is the biggest barrier. Users who need a CRM template for their sales team are unlikely to browse a gallery with 1,000 templates and find the right one. The templates gallery functions like a library catalog — comprehensive but overwhelming.
I'd look at two signals: template search query data (what terms are users typing into the gallery search, and what are the zero-result queries?) and template abandonment rate (how many users open a template preview page but don't duplicate it to their workspace?). High abandonment suggests the preview doesn't convey enough value; high zero-result queries suggest the gallery doesn't have the right content.
Proposed improvement: contextual template suggestions. When a user creates a new page in Notion, surface 3 template suggestions based on: the page title they typed, the workspace context (are other pages in this section finance-related? Team-related?), and the user's role if known. 'You're creating a new page called Q2 Budget — here are three budget templates used by teams like yours.'
This is different from a search-based gallery because it meets users where they are rather than asking them to come to the gallery.
Success metric: template adoption rate — percentage of new pages created using a template (primary). Currently tracking at a baseline that I'd aim to improve by 20% in the target segment (new page creators). Guardrail: don't increase time-to-first-edit — the suggestions should be dismissable in one click.
Investigates before proposing, identifies signals to analyze, then targets the root cause with a specific solution.
Names specific signals (zero-result queries, abandonment rate), a concrete feature trigger (page title), and a 20% improvement target.
The 'library catalog vs. contextual suggestion' reframe is correct and well-argued.
Commits to contextual suggestions over gallery improvements with a clear rationale; guardrail is well-chosen.
Good length; the Q2 Budget example is instantly relatable.
The contextual suggestion idea is the right intervention because it solves the discovery problem at the point of need rather than asking users to come to the gallery. The page-title trigger is smart and low-friction. The weakness is that the answer doesn't address the content quality problem — even with better discovery, a bad template won't get adopted, and the answer doesn't propose any quality curation mechanism.
Add one sentence on how you'd ensure template quality at scale — for example, surfacing community-rated templates first and hiding low-rated ones from contextual suggestions.
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