How Match Group's decision-making framework yields delightful products

+1 Labs, the innovation lab at Match Group (Tinder, Hinge, Match, OkCupid), is dedicated to creating meaningful connections around the world. The team uses Notion to stay focused on the right ideas, the right feedback, and the right goals, all in one place.

Insights from

Rahim Makani

Director of Product

Use cases

Project Management, Notes

A rubric for prioritizing ideas

There’s no shortage of good ideas at +1 Labs, which makes it difficult to decide where to invest and which new products to build. With Notion, the team quickly built a roadmap of their big bets for the year. On top of being able to easily document and track these bets, they used Notion’s formula feature to automatically filter each idea through a RICE scoring system. This system drives clarity around what the team wants to run after and when, which helps maintain vision and focus.

Notion’s formula feature helps +1 Labs prioritize what needs to be worked on and when.

Notion has been the most powerful and impactful way to streamline our workflow.

Rahim Makani — Notion has been the most powerful and impactful way to streamline our workflow.

Gather project information in one place

Once an idea is prioritized, all the teams involved in development — product, design, engineering — need to stay in lock step. It was hard to do so when information lived across Jira, Confluence, Scrumwise, Asana, and Google Docs. If someone wanted to check in on a project, it wasn’t clear where to look.

“Centralizing the entire team’s workflow and processes in Notion has been pivotal for increasing transparency and making sure we’re all aligned,” says Rahim.

Using Notion, the team created spec templates that serve as anchor points for all projects. Each spec captures product requirements, technical schema, and mockups, effectively mapping the project end-to-end. Keeping all relevant project information within a single spec helped the team reduce cognitive load and maintain contextual clarity while moving quickly from one decision to the next.

Match 2 — Creating a template for specs in Notion allows for easy documentation and collaboration.

Sprint planning made simple

With specs as a homebase for product development, it’s a lot easier for everyone at +1 Labs to move into execution mode. Once there’s a spec, the project moves to the main development board, where engineers can add tasks that outline exactly what needs to be done to bring a new feature to life. The backlog is kept in the same board too, making weekly sprint planning a breeze. Having every stage of the building process connected in one tool cuts out unnecessary steps and speeds up development.

Match 3 — Organize engineering stories in an easy-to-use Kanban board.

What’s powerful about Notion is that it helps us move quickly, from product ideation to kicking off work with the engineering team.

Stay in sync with users

Internal collaboration allows +1 Labs to maintain an aggressive shipping cadence, but having a pulse on user feedback is what makes their products great. Before, the team had a hard time keeping track of if and when customer issues were addressed.

"We move so fast that it's hard to track which bugs are fixed and which are a priority. Notion has become our automatic issues tracking system, giving our team more visibility and our users more faith in us."

Now that the team documents all incidents in Notion, they can quickly prioritize the most popular and impactful requests. With every issue linked to the development board, it’s much easier to follow up with users, close the feedback loop, and build the best user experience possible.