Question
Project documentation I write, design decisions, team reflections, hard-earned learnings, tends to sit underused in Markdown files, .txt logs, or Confluence pages. Stakeholders fall out of sync, context gets lost over time, and decks or status docs don't land well in async or hybrid environments where attention is already split. I wanted to know: what if that documentation could talk back, instead of sitting there waiting to be read?
Experiment
I use NotebookLM to convert my existing notes, whether a Markdown file, a .txt log, or a Confluence export, into short-form AI-generated podcasts. I don't script or edit anything manually: I upload the raw material, add a focused prompt like "summarize the key insights from this design sprint" or "recap all blockers and decisions made this week," and NotebookLM returns a spoken audio file ready to play. 1Decision 01Turning notes into a shareable update usually meant writing a summary by hand, on top of the notes I'd already written. Chose: I feed raw documentation directly into NotebookLM with a single steering prompt, and it generates the spoken summary end to end, no scripting or editing pass on my side. Traded: I give up control over exact phrasing and pacing in the output, but it removes the manual summarization step entirely.
I've used this for three kinds of updates so far: weekly team recaps instead of meeting notes or Slack threads, stakeholder briefings that turn raw documentation into something listenable async, and personal reflection logs I can revisit or share with mentors.
Two episodes below show the actual output:
Episode 1
A podcast segment discussing design challenges and insights from the financial planning project.
Episode 1.5
A follow-up episode with additional thoughts on design communication and podcasting as a medium.
Learning
Generating a podcast from raw notes with a single prompt works today, and it's replaced the write-up step I used to do by hand for weekly recaps and stakeholder updates. The audio format also reaches people a status doc doesn't: it's something a teammate can listen to on a walk instead of reading top to bottom.
What's next: prompt templates tuned to different audiences (PMs, ICs, design leads), a recurring podcast feed generated from ongoing documentation, and audio-first retrospectives. I'd also like to test multi-source input, feeding several documents into one generated episode, for batch summaries across a longer project.