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Contacts PRD

Problem Area

Context

For professionals and individuals alike, managing personal and professional relationships is vital. Whether remembering birthdays, following up on a sales lead, or just keeping in touch with old friends, a reliable and context-aware system is paramount. Current CRM tools and other contact management systems often suffer from being overly complex, non-contextual, and challenging to integrate with other workflow tools.
Contextual Understanding: For every interaction or contact, there is a context that defines its significance. Be it a one-time transaction on Craigslist, or a recurring meeting with a client. Current tools often fail to capture this.
Action-Oriented: Based on the context, there might be an associated action. Perhaps, you met someone at a networking event and promised to send them a research paper. That promise should be tagged, remembered, and actionable.
This requirement for context and action often takes the form of a combination of contacts, notes, calendar entries, and tasks. For the purpose of this PRD, we'll term this combination a "Contact Bundle".
Contact Bundles often revolve around similar contexts or engagements.
Contact Bundles might involve similar groups or categories of people.
However, creating, managing, and optimizing these bundles is where many tools falter.

Difficulty in Capturing Entire Relationship Context

When you add a new contact, current systems don't provide an easy way to capture the entire context. The best we can do is attach a brief note or categorize the contact. But what about that upcoming meeting you scheduled? Or the task you promised to accomplish for them? There's no seamless way to connect all of these elements.
Example:
Adding a new client contact after a sales meeting.
Why was capturing the context difficult?
There's no direct connection between your notes, calendar, and tasks.
Why is there no connection?
Most tools exist in silos, not designed for integrated workflows.
Current Workaround
Manually add tasks based on calendar entries and use third-party integrations to try and tie everything together.

Integrating with Current Workflow Tools is Cumbersome

If you're using a task management system, a separate calendar tool, and maybe another tool for notes, integrating all of these with your contact management system is at best clunky, and at worst, impossible.
There's a heavy reliance on third-party integrations or manual data entry.
Important context can be lost in translation between tools, leading to missed opportunities or broken promises.
Example:
Setting a reminder to send a report to a colleague in 3 days.
The reminder exists in your task tool, but there's no direct link to the colleague's contact or the original meeting note.
Switching between three tools to get the full picture disrupts the flow and increases the chances of missing something.

Critical pieces of information can get overlooked during these transitions.Lack of Genuine Value & Noise

Current CRMs and contact tools often don’t prioritize or provide genuinely useful suggestions. Instead, they might bombard the user with reminders or notifications without considering the relevance or actual importance.
Non-contextual reminders: "Wish happy birthday to
coldoutreach@webuydomains.com
⁠
!"
Irrelevant suggestions: "Reconnect with Joe from a 2009 Craigslist transaction."
This not only leads to cognitive noise but reduces trust in the tool's suggestions and reminders.

Inability to Connect Interactions Over Time

Over the span of months or years, you might interact with a contact in various capacities. The ability to look back and see the evolution of your relationship, contextually combined with notes, tasks, and meetings, is currently missing.
Contacts aren't just static entries but dynamic representations of relationships.

Seamless Transition Between Tasks, Calendar, and Notes is Missing

Being able to transition from a task, to checking when you're meeting a contact next, to looking up past notes should be seamless. However, this is often not the case.
Jumping between tools breaks focus and efficiency.

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