No, I am your (Bot)Father; a Product Manager who wants a ping

No, I am your (Bot)Father. I don’t need a galaxy of dashboards, conversion funnels, or heat maps. All I want is a simple ping when something important happens. Sometimes, as Product Managers, we tend to overcomplicate things; whether we want to or not. Yet the simplest solution is often the one that makes the most sense.

# Clarity over complexity

When I was building Koffiework, a coffee shop discovery platform, I noticed how easy it is to gravitate toward feature-rich analytics tools. They promise depth, control, and insights. But before signing up for anything, I asked myself a very basic question: what do I actually need?

The answer was incredibly simple. I just wanted to know when:

  • someone added a new café
  • a user left a review
  • someone suggested a new roaster
  • someone signed up for the newsletter

That’s it. I don’t need heat maps, dashboards, or multi-layered reports. I just needed a tap on the shoulder when something meaningful happened.

# Sometimes clarity and ease are the UX you need

As Product Managers, we think constantly about UX — reducing friction, simplifying decisions, shortening paths. But we don’t always apply that same thinking to our own workflows.

The UX of my own life pointed to one thing: notifications should arrive where my attention already is. An app I open every day. A place where signals don’t get buried.

The more complicated the tool, the more likely I’d ignore it. And ignoring it defeats the whole purpose.

The takeaway is simple: the best solution isn’t the most powerful — it’s the one that removes friction. Clarity and ease often outperform complexity.

# The solution: BotFather

Telegram has a bot called BotFather (yes, really), and it lets you create your own notification bot in just a few minutes. Here’s the entire setup:

  1. Add BotFather in Telegram
  2. Type /newbot and follow the prompts
  3. Copy the bot token it gives you
  4. Use @getidsbot to get your chat ID
  5. Add both values to your environment variables

Now, whenever someone does something meaningful on Koffiework, I get a message in Telegram. No dashboards. No logging into another platform. Just a ping in an app I already use.

A close-up horizontal image of a Darth Vader-like character holding a mobile phone in a futuristic setting. A large notification overlay sits in the top left, displaying a message about a "New café added!" named "Wakuli specialty coffee bar (Piet Heinstraat)" in "Den Haag." A blue "Ping!" notification bubble appears above the mobile phone.

# UX lessons from your own workflow

The same principles we use to design products apply to our personal tools:

  • What is the actual need?
  • What’s the simplest way to satisfy it?
  • What friction can you remove?

Sometimes the answer isn’t a complex analytics suite. Sometimes it’s a small bot that simply says: hey, something happened.

And honestly? That’s all I needed.