The best product insights don't happen when you're sitting down to do discovery. They happen mid-conversation with a customer, during a team standup, or while reviewing a support ticket before bed.
The problem: by the time you open your PM tool to log the insight, the moment has passed. You're in a different context. The nuance you wanted to capture is gone. So most PMs don't capture those moments at all — they rely on memory, which is lossy by definition.
The Kansov Scratchpad is our answer to this problem. It's a daily writing space — similar in concept to Roam Research's daily notes — built directly into your PM workspace. You write freely, and when something deserves to become an Insight, you type a # followed by a short label. That's it. A real Insight record is created immediately, linked to the Scratchpad entry, and available in your full Insights pipeline.
How it works
The Scratchpad opens to today's date. You can navigate backward and forward through days using the arrow buttons, but the default is always today.
You write in plain text. No formatting required, no fields to fill in. Just write the way you'd write in a notebook. If you're in a customer call and someone mentions that their team struggles with reporting, you write: "Sarah from Acme said their team hates the report export UX — too slow for large datasets. #slow-export"
The moment you hit enter, an Insight called "slow-export" is created in your workspace with the surrounding text as context, the current date, and a link back to this Scratchpad entry. Later, you can enrich it — add the customer link, set the priority, add more detail — but the signal is captured immediately, without breaking the flow of the conversation.
Why this matters for PM workflows
The standard PM advice is "always be capturing." The reality is that most PM tools make capturing too slow. You have to navigate to the right module, find the right form, fill in required fields, and then come back to your conversation. By the time that's done, you've lost the thread.
The Scratchpad removes that friction entirely. It's designed for capture first, enrichment second. The #tag syntax is intentionally lightweight — it works even if you're capturing with one hand while the other is gesturing in a video call.
Date navigation and search
Every Scratchpad entry is tied to a date. Navigate backward to review what you captured last Tuesday, or search across all entries to find something you wrote last month. The search uses keyword matching across all your dated entries.
The pop-out window
One of the most useful features: the Scratchpad can be opened in a separate browser window. This means you can have Kansov's Scratchpad open on one screen while you have a customer call, Jira, or another tool open on the other. Captures happen in the background without interfering with your primary work.
Why we built it into the PM tool
Most PMs who use daily notes use a separate tool — Roam, Obsidian, Notion daily notes, Bear. These are great general-purpose tools. But because they're separate from the PM system, the insights you capture there stay there. They don't flow into your insight pipeline. They don't get linked to customers. They don't inform your roadmap.
The Scratchpad is different because it's native to Kansov. A #tagged thought doesn't just create a note — it creates a first-class Insight in the same system where you discover patterns, make decisions, and build your roadmap. The daily capture becomes part of the pipeline.
Start capturing insights the way good thinking actually happens
The Scratchpad is part of every Kansov workspace. Try it with a 30-day free trial.
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