Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky turns ideas into action with Notion
Scott Belsky built his career on creativity. Known for founding design portfolio platform Behance, he now leads Adobe's Creative Cloud, serves as a product advisor and angel to many of today's top startups, and teaches the business of creativity as a speaker and writer. For Scott, everything begins with an idea — and organizing all his thoughts in Notion helps him connect the dots and drive innovation.
Insights from
Scott Belsky
CPO of Adobe
1
Connecting people, products and ideas to make executive decisions
Setting product strategy for such an iconic company in the creative software space is, understandably, a big job. To maintain a clear vision, Scott tracks yearly product themes for Adobe's entire Creative Cloud platform in Notion. In one board, he can view these concepts by year, product, or the people responsible for each one, with notes bundled in each card.
Seeing all the data together from this vantage point allows Scott to focus on what's most impactful and balance the needs of company stakeholders as he jumps from meeting to meeting. He can look at this board anytime to see the Creative Cloud product roadmap for the next two years and make sure the organization is pointed in the right direction.
Scott can save different views of the same board so he can quickly switch between them. The contents shown are fictionalized for privacy.
Creativity is about seeing the same things in different ways. With Notion, I can slice the same data several ways and extract insights I would have otherwise missed.
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Building a long-term memory for his projects as an investor, speaker, and writer
When creativity is such a core part of your job, you need a place to write everything down. Who knows when an idea will spur an epiphany? So Scott collects and organizes all his ideas — for Adobe and his personal initiatives — in Notion. Sometimes his venture investments influence his book idea, and his latest presentation sparks a non-profit idea. For Scott, work and life are very blended, so having everything in one tool helps cut back on organizational overhead.
All his notes are stored in a database, easily searchable, and in one place. Ideas are two-dimensional when they only live on the page, but Scott is able to bring them to life by tagging, prioritizing, adding deadlines, and embedding any sketches, visuals, and inspiration along the way. Using Notion, he can capture quick thoughts and organize them so he can surface and act upon them when the time's right.
You can organize the sidebar however you want with drag and drop and move pages inside of each other. The contents shown are fictionalized for privacy.
I'm 50% better at connecting the dots with Notion. It's about realizing that the idea I had six months ago is actually related to this other idea.
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From scratchpad to final draft
As a prolific writer who’s already written two books, Scott nurtures several article ideas at a time. But a new article always starts out as seemingly random bits and pieces. To connect these bits, he uses Notion like a visual playground — flexible enough to jot down unformed thoughts but structured enough for brainstorming.
He can drag and drop bullet points, images, and even link to a related document, allowing him to play with these ideas and eventually identify common themes. Notion's real-time editing experience is optimized for organizing his thoughts into cohesive arguments and action plans.
There are hundreds of media types you can embed in the page to create visual documents.
Notion lets me move around at the speed of thought, as opposed to having to rewrite everything.
