I Built an AI Project Lifecycle Manager with Notion MCP: PRD Review to Tickets in One Flow

#notionchallenge #ai #nextjs #devchallenge

Notion MCP Challenge Submission 🧠

Notion Assist

AI-powered project lifecycle manager: from PRD review to TRD to tickets, all inside Notion. (Bye Bye PMs)

What It Does

Notion Assist takes your PRD, reviews it against your existing workspace context (business logic, RCAs, issues, engineering DB). Writes a Technical Requirements Document and creates a full tickets dashboard in one flow, all living in Notion.

Share a PRD link. One button later, you have three production-ready artifacts:

PRD Review — structured analysis with gaps, strengths, and completeness score
TRD — full technical doc with architecture, APIs, data models, edge cases
Tickets Dashboard — Notion database pre-populated with all tasks (type, priority, description)

The Problem

Every product team does this manually:

Write PRD → share with team for review
Engineers write TRD from PRD
Someone breaks TRD into tickets

That's 3 context switches, 3 docs to write, and the information rarely stays connected. By the time tickets are created, half the PRD context is lost.

The Flow

You: "Review my PRD for the billing upgrade flow."
         ↓
Claude searches the Notion workspace (via MCP)
Claude reads PRD + related docs + known issues
Claude outputs: Summary → Gaps → Strengths → Score
         ↓
  [ → Build TRD + Tickets in Notion ]   ← one button
         ↓
TRD page created in Notion
         ↓
Tickets database created in Notion (pre-populated)

The sidebar tracks live progress and shows ↗ view links to each artifact as they're created.

How It Works — Notion MCP

This branch uses the Anthropic Messages API mcp-client-2025-04-04 beta. One API call gives Claude native access to your entire Notion workspace — no tool definitions, no proxy for chat, no MCP client code.

fetch("https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages", {
  headers: {
    "x-api-key": ANTHROPIC_API_KEY,
    "anthropic-version": "2023-06-01",
    "anthropic-beta": "mcp-client-2025-04-04",
    "anthropic-dangerous-direct-browser-access": "true",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    model: "claude-sonnet-4-20250514",
    max_tokens: 8096,
    system: SYSTEM_PROMPT,
    messages: [...],
    mcp_servers: [{
      type: "url",
      url: "https://mcp.notion.com/sse",
      headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${NOTION_TOKEN}` },
      name: "notion",
    }],
  }),
});

Claude gets access to notion-search, notion-fetch, notion-create-pages, notion-create-database, and more — automatically. It decides which tools to call, reads multiple pages, cross-references issues, and creates artifacts. Zero routing logic on our end.

Session storage

Project state (name, stage, timestamps) is stored in a Notion database that the app creates automatically on first run (notion-assist-sessions-v1). This uses the Notion REST API via a Next.js server-side proxy to avoid CORS.

Browser → Anthropic API + mcp_servers  (chat, CORS allowed via beta header)
Browser → /api/notion (Next.js proxy)  (session storage only)
              ↕
         Notion Workspace

Tech Stack

Next.js 16 (App Router) — frontend + /api/notion proxy for session storage
Tailwind CSS v4 — dark terminal-style UI
Anthropic API — Claude Sonnet with Notion MCP (mcp-client-2025-04-04)
Notion MCP — mcp.notion.com/sse — full workspace read/write via Claude
react-markdown — AI response rendering

No backend. No database. Everything lives in Notion.

Architecture

Browser
  ├── Anthropic API (Claude + Notion MCP)   ← chat, PRD review, TRD, tickets
  │       Claude ↔ mcp.notion.com ↔ Notion workspace
  │
  └── /api/notion (Next.js proxy)           ← session/project tracking only
              ↕
         notion-assist-sessions-v1/
                 └── Projects DB

Getting Started

1. Get an Anthropic API key
Sign up at console.anthropic.com. Key starts with sk-ant-.

2. Create a Notion integration
Go to notion.so/my-integrations, create an integration, copy the token (ntn_...). Share your workspace pages with it.

3. Run

npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000, enter your keys, and paste a PRD link to start.

What's Next

Retrospective stage — AI reads closed tickets and writes a retro doc
Slack integration — post PRD review summary to a channel
Real streaming — SSE streaming once MCP beta supports it
Multi-user — shared project state via the Notion DB (already there)

Branches

Branch	LLM	Notion access
`anthropic-api` (this)	Claude via Anthropic API	Notion MCP — native, zero tool code
`main`	Gemini/Claude via OpenRouter (free)	Direct Notion REST API + custom tools