Tana Outliner

Head of Design → VP Product
2021 – 2025

Tana Outliner is Tana's first product. It works like a regular outliner, where you type bullets and indent them, but every bullet is a node in a graph. The same node can appear in many places at once, and stays in sync everywhere.

Supertags are the main idea. When you tag a bullet as a task or a meeting, it picks up fields, and it becomes findable across the whole workspace. There is no schema to design up front. You write, and the structure accumulates as you go.

The same nodes can be viewed as a table, a calendar or a set of cards. We later brought AI into the outline, so you can chat with your notes, and turn voice memos and meetings into structured nodes.

I worked on Tana Outliner from 2021 to mid 2025, on all aspects of the app: conceptual design, product and interaction design, and front end engineering. From mid 2025, I shifted my focus to the new Tana product.

Product of the Month on Product Hunt
The very first time we shared a preview of Tana Outliner, in September 2022.
A lightweight supertag in use. Feedback tagged inside a customer interview turns up wherever feedback is collected.
A team workspace, with the roadmap, wiki, project calendar and sprint board all living in the same graph.
A personal research project as a table, with AI filling in the fields it can work out on its own.
The outline editor. You start writing right away, and the structure emerges as you go.
Supertags work like types. Tagging a node as a meeting, a contact or a task tells the system what it is.
Views. The same nodes shown as a table, a calendar or a set of cards, switched whenever you like.
Tana AI. Meeting follow-ups, voice memos, and new information connected to the rest of the graph automatically.

What people say

“Tana Outliner is to the knowledge graph, what Netscape was to the Internet.”
Torbjorn NerbovikTech lead at Tikkio
“Tana Outliner operates in the sweet spot of outliners and databases, creating a new kind of flexibility that sometimes resembles magic.”
Alexander RinkComputer scientist
“This is proposing a new fundamental model for computing, a new mental model.”
Alexander ObenauerExplorer of the future of personal computing
“Tana Outliner is one of the few knowledge management tools that moves beyond mimicking static text on paper. It takes the computational medium seriously. It gives regular folks access to a set of powerful primitives that previously only developers could touch.”
Maggie AppletonProduct designer
“The way Tana Outliner seamlessly blends in AI utility is mind blowing.”
Peter LouwProject manager and engineer
“Tana Outliner + AI is like having a well-organized library with a fully capable librarian. Can't live without it.”
Tom BieleckiCEO, PrintToPeer
“Tana Outliner is insane — it generates incredible insights and content ideas from my calls and meetings without me having to do a thing.”
Ali AbdaalBest-selling author of Feel-Good Productivity
“As a busy creator and marketer, Tana Outliner has supercharged every one of my processes. I quite simply could not do what I do without it.”
Ev ChapmanCreator
“Tana Outliner's design reflects deep knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of existing connected outliner tools.”
Maggie DelanoAssistant Professor of Engineering
“I 100% attribute being accepted to law school to Tana Outliner. For three years, I have relied on it to organize my work and life. Its unique connected-nodes structure does exactly that, making it easier than ever to stay on top of everything.”
Dr. Monica D.T. RysavyFounder of Systematic You
“As a small agency, Tana Outliner has quickly become our one-stop shop for running a business.”
Marius SundeFounder, Opening Hours
“I stuck with Tana Outliner because the way its flexibility allowed me to adjust to brand new job opportunities with wildly different expectations. Something that would have been structurally cataclysmic in other interfaces became something I could easily update on the fly, day by day.”
Bri BallardProject manager