How to use Notebooks in Thinkr

A Notebook is a source-grounded research surface. You drop in your raw material — interview notes, support tickets, competitor pages, a PDF, a web search — and Thinkr turns it into answers that cite back to the snippet they came from, an opportunity-solution tree you can shape, and Studio artifacts you can hand to stakeholders. When an idea is ready, you promote it into a PRD without retyping the context.

Before you start

Notebooks live in folders — one per team or initiative — so your research stays organized. Think about which initiative this work belongs to before you create anything.

Open Notebook from the sidebar to start.

Step 1 — Create a folder, then a notebook

On the Notebooks page click + New folder. The form asks "What are you working on?" (the folder name) and "What are you trying to achieve?" (a short description — outcomes, hypotheses, audience). Click Create folder.

Open the folder and click + New notebook. Give it a Title (e.g. Parent engagement discovery), leave Type as Discovery, and set a Desired outcome — "What outcome are you investigating?". That outcome seeds the opportunity tree later. Click Create notebook.

Step 2 — Add your sources

A notebook has three panes: Sources (left), Chat / Opportunity Tree (center), and Studio (right). Everything downstream is grounded in the sources, so start there.

Click Add sources. You can:

• Upload files — PDFs, text, Markdown, CSV, audio recordings, even images.
• Websites — paste a public URL.
• Copied text — drop in a transcript, ticket, or notes.
• Search the web — run a grounded web search and import the results as sources.

Sources take a moment to embed. Once they're in, tick the ones you want active — selected sources are what each chat reply and Studio artifact draws from.

Step 3 — Chat with your sources

Open the Chat tab. This isn't a generic assistant — it answers only from your selected sources, and every reply carries inline citations like [1] [2] that you can click to see the exact quote. Start from a suggestion chip (Frame a discovery hypothesis, Map opportunities and risks, Summarize what users said) or just ask your own question. The input shows how many sources it's drawing on — "Asking 8 selected sources…".

If an answer feels thin, check your source selection. The chat is deliberately grounded — give it more of the right sources rather than expecting it to fill gaps from thin air.

Step 4 — Build the opportunity tree

For Discovery notebooks, open the Opportunity Tree tab. Click Mine opportunities and Thinkr reads your sources to propose a tree under your desired outcome. Nodes come in four kinds — Outcome, Opportunity, Solution, and Assumption. Select any node to open the inspector, where you can edit it, + Add child nodes, or delete it. This is where messy research becomes a structured map of what's worth solving.

Step 5 — Generate Studio artifacts

The Studio pane (right) turns your sources into things you can share. Pick a tile:

• Hypothesis Card — belief + signal + evidence + top risk.
• Risk Map — Cagan's four risks, per opportunity.
• Customer Quote Wall — the strongest quotes for stakeholder buy-in.

Each tile lets you focus the output (or leave it blank to let Thinkr pick the strongest angle), then click Generate.

Step 6 — Promote to a PRD

When a Solution node in your tree is worth building, select it and click Create PRD — Thinkr opens a new PRD seeded with that solution and its grounding, so you start the Create PRD flow with real context instead of a blank page.

You can also click Send to Brain (top-right of the notebook) to snapshot the notebook's sources into your Brain knowledge — "Snapshot" — so other PRDs across your workspace can reuse the same research.

That's the loop

Add sources, chat them into focus, build the opportunity tree, generate the artifacts your stakeholders need, then promote the winner into a PRD. The research you do once becomes reusable context for everything after it.

Ready to try it? Open Thinkr and click Notebook.