InMinutes

InMinutes was a digital workspace concept created at Goodpatch Tokyo between 2015 and 2017, designed for project managers and product design teams.

The idea came from a simple observation: meetings produced decisions, tasks, reminders, and follow ups, yet most notes remained trapped inside static documents.

Through interviews with more than 20 design teams in Tokyo's startup ecosystem, we found that project managers were spending considerable time reorganizing meeting notes after every discussion.

Information was fragmented across Google Docs, Trello, Asana, Wunderlist, calendars, Dropbox, and Drive. A meeting might finish in 30 minutes, while converting the conversation into an actionable project plan could take much longer.

The opportunity was to connect note taking and project execution within a single workflow.

As Senior Product Designer, I worked across the complete product definition and design process.

InMinutes combined a focused writing environment with lightweight project management.

While writing meeting notes, users could convert individual lines into tasks, assign owners, add deadlines, create reminders, and organize follow ups, without rebuilding the same information in another tool.

The interface was intentionally quiet and document focused, using a restrained grey visual system to keep attention on the meeting content.

The central interaction challenge was balancing reading and editing.

Early prototypes used separate document, sidebar, and editing states. Testing revealed that users were sometimes uncertain whether a document was editable, and navigation controls also competed with document actions.

We simplified the model, clarified the transition between viewing and editing, and made document actions more visible and predictable.

InMinutes remained an experimental product concept and did not reach meaningful scale.

The project was developed before integrated workspaces became mainstream, when collaboration workflows were still distributed across several specialised tools. The concept addressed a genuine user problem, but good product design alone was not enough to establish a sustainable product.

It became an important lesson in the relationship between product quality, market timing, distribution, technical investment, and business commitment.