Steal the AI workflow behind 43 new product ideas

I’m on the balcony of our Sunshine Coast Airbnb, ocean glimpses out front, husband beside me (and also above, in the picture). We start going deep on a conversation about work.

“Let’s Granola this,” I say.

What???

No I don’t mean get out the cereal.

For anyone who hasn’t met it, Granola is an AI notetaker. It listens, transcribes and summarises. And I just suggested to my husband that we use it on our holiday.

If you’ve followed my work for a while, this will not shock you.

Some context: My husband and I work together, which means we talk about work (willingly and enthusiastically) a lot. And this trip was sans-daughter and semi-work-retreat.

By the end of five days we had 12 recorded conversations.

Now, the problem with a good conversation is that it evaporates. Psychologists have been measuring this since the 1880s, when Hermann Ebbinghaus sat down and worked out how fast we lose new information.

Answer: fast.

Five days of loose, wandering, occasionally excellent conversation is far too much to hold in your head, and far too tedious to write down while you’re halfway along the Noosa Coastal walk.

So here’s what we did instead.

The method

1. Record the conversations you were going to have anyway. No agenda, no facilitator, no whiteboard. We use Granola, but any AI recording tool will do. The Voice Memo app on your phone is fine.

2. Have a topic if you feel like it. Don’t if you don’t. You can go where the energy is, wander off, and come back.

3. Upload the lot into Google Notebook (previously NotebookLM), with each conversation as its own source. I copied and pasted the transcript from each Granola chat.

4. Prompt across the whole set. A few of mine:

5. Make a list of all the Inventium strategy decisions we made or flagged.

6. Make a list of all the product ideas and decisions we discussed for experimentation.

7. Tell me all the changes to how we work that we discussed, and the highest priority ones for our weekly and quarterly rhythms.

8. Give me a summary of the balanced scorecard* for our relationship and family that we discussed.

(*Yes. We built a balanced scorecard for our marriage on a beach holiday. You were warned.)

When I fed the whole set into Google Notebook and asked what we’d actually decided, here’s what came back:

At no point did it feel like we were doing any of that. It felt like two people talking on a beach/balcony/walk, occasionally getting distracted by the smell of fish and chips.

And without this workflow, most of this thinking would have vanished on the flight home.

What you can do

Now I am aware that the primary reader of this Substack is not running a business with their spouse. Which is where I’d encourage you to steal this workflow for, well, work.

If you’ve got a work retreat or a strategy day coming up, resist the urge to plan every minute of it. Instead, get out of the conference room, go for a wander with an AI recorder running, and let people talk. Then feed the whole lot into Google Notebook and ask it what you discussed and decided.

The conversations are the easy part. Keeping them, unpacking them, and then actioning them is where most teams fail.