How Docsum drives clarity and ships fast with Create

How Docsum drives clarity and ships fast with Create

At a recent team offsite in Mexico City, Shaunak Turaga and his team of 3 were jamming on how to nail a critical product experience.

Shaunak is the founder and CEO of Docsum, a new AI contract review and negotiation platform that graduated Y Combinator's S23 batch. Docsum helps legal, procurement, and sales teams negotiate and manage contracts 3x faster, reducing time to close.

At Docsum's core are configurable playbooks owned by a company's legal team. The playbooks govern all the rules that the AI system uses to parse contracts, highlight issues, and redline terms using precedent language. Since playbook set up is critical to the user experience, Shaunak and the Docsum team were brainstorming how users should create new document types and manage their legal playbooks ongoing.

"It was one of those things where we were looking at the API spec, and then everybody had ideas of what the UI should look like.

And I knew exactly what we needed to build.

So I just described it in Create and shared it with the team"
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Shaunak and the team instantly saw how powerful it is to turn your ideas into an interactive prototype with just a brief description of what you're imagining. It made it come to life, increased team collaboration, and saved a ton of time later.

"Even just showing this was super nice because we actually used this prototype, and then we had a white-boarding session with the team, and we scoped out the API endpoints that we needed. Like, 'okay, we need the ability to create a document, we need to be able to edit a document' So all the routes actually originated from this experience. And then we all kind of rallied behind it, and it's still in progress.

Having this as a basis point for having meaningful conversation was huge.

It avoided having to go into Miro or going to Whimsical and create a lot of user flows and really just simply describe what the end user experience was. And that was the biggest value for me in that session"

Shaunak and his team use Create to save valuable time getting to consensus. Instead of having a debate, they just build their ideas in minutes and decide on the best approach.

"To me, it's always around consensus and clarity. So if I know that there's a specific user problem, I come into Create and iterate on those different ideas"

Sometimes, even a simple prototype can save valuable product cycles downstream.

Shaunak's playbook configuration prototype
White Background Layout - built with Create
Make your own in 2 minutes

A classic conundrum: explore or exploit? Now, you can do both.

Before starting Docsum, Shaunak was a product manager for fast growing startups like Pacaso, OpenTrack and Good Money, as well as a developer in larger orgs like Capital One. He recognized how much this decision at Docsum mirrored similar conversations on what to prioritize at previous stops:

"I used to be a product manager. Sometimes product, design, engineering, and the business can be really contentious in what you prioritize.

And so even the decision to explore an idea has to be prioritized.

And that can be a really tough environment where you want to be creative, you want to test things out, but how can you do that in an environment where those things take time and there's all these competing priorities?

Having a tool like Create lets anybody explore an idea and talk about an idea in near medium fidelity of what that is without having to over invest in a Figma design. That, to me, seems like the biggest win."

Now, Shaunak reguarly opens Create to explore new ideas and share with his team before they build. For example, before his team built the next version task management in Docsum, Shaunak quickly made a prototype for it in Create so they could play with how it felt.

Shaunak's tasks prototype in Create, complete with Trello like interactions.
Trello Card Mover - built with Create
Make your own in 2 minutes

Turning everyone on the team into a builder

Shaunak sees a more profound shift after using Create to spin up a prototype: it allows teams to explore. As more people use Create and other generative AI tools to bring their ideas to life, Shaunak sees less heard ideas coming to the forefront.

"I used to work with a lot of designers who had a lot of great ideas, but they would always be shut down because there was, like, product priority or engineering priority that took precedent over them testing ideas out.

And so you're enabling someone to be like, 'Hey, look what I built. Can we talk about this?' You can't deny or decline that conversation or the intent to explore if it's already been done."

As a startup CEO on the lookout for top talent, Shaunak has learned that the most valuable employees in an organization are the ones who can wear multiple hats:

"I think the new phase of how work is getting done, especially with generative apps, is that we assume if you're an engineer, you should also be a proficient enough designer and a product manager. If you're a designer, you should be proficient enough to no code or low code.

The best folks have to wear more than one hat. So the transition between these different product roles has to be smooth.

There's all these different dynamics that I'm seeing play out, and that's actually my expectation for anybody that I hire. I don't want to hire just an engineer. I want to hire someone that can also talk to users or write up a product requirement doc.

And so to me, it feels like Create is an extension of your ability to be a multidisciplinarian."

Now, with Create, everyone can add one more hat to their head: builder.

It's better as a team

After the launch of real time collaboration, Shaunak invited his whole team to Create so they could jam together. It's resulted in faster decisions, more democratic decisions, more alignment, and less product cycles.

Plus, as Shaunak points out, it's just fun.

"I really love the UI. I really love the speed."

Check out Docsum if you're a general counsel, biz dev leader, sales leader, or founder who wants to unlock speedy and compliant contract review.

And if you're a product manager, designer, developer, or founder, invite your teammates to Create so everyone can build and jam on your next great idea together.