Picture a product manager opening her laptop after lunch. She has 94 new emails. Her shoulders slump. "I'll never get through these," she says.
This happens to every product person. Your inbox fills up while you're in meetings. Customer feedback gets mixed with JIRA tickets. Important questions from your CEO hide behind vendor spam. You know something critical is in there. You just can't find it.
The weird thing? Everyone just accepts this. People assume email has to be painful. But what if it didn't? What if you could open your inbox and immediately see what matters?
That's what Split Inbox and Auto Labels do in Superhuman. They organize your email automatically. No more hunting. No more missing important stuff. Just clear sections showing exactly what needs your attention. Takes about five minutes to set up.
Why product email is so painful
Product managers get a special kind of email hell. Here's what it looks like.
Everyone needs something from you. Engineering wants you to clarify requirements. Design needs feedback on mockups. Sales keeps promising features you haven't built. Marketing needs positioning help. Support forwards angry customer emails. Legal wants to review everything.
Your brain keeps switching contexts. One email is about database architecture. The next is about pricing. Then someone's asking about the holiday party. Each topic needs you to think differently. By afternoon, you're exhausted.
The worst part? Important insights are scattered everywhere. A customer complains in a support ticket. Another mentions the same issue in a sales call. A third writes directly to you. The pattern is obvious if you could see all three together. But they're buried in different places.
Meanwhile, people wait for your decisions. Three engineers can't start work until you approve the API design. Marketing can't launch until you finalize messaging. Every hour you spend in email delays actual product work.
How Split Inbox fixes this
Split Inbox is simple. Instead of one giant inbox, you get multiple sections. Each section shows a specific type of email. Like having separate mailboxes for bills, personal letters, and junk mail.
Superhuman's Split Inbox Library has dozens of pre-made sections for product teams. Pick the ones you need. Or create your own. Either way, your email becomes organized instantly.
Setting it up takes two minutes
Here's how to get started:
Step 1: Open the settings
- Desktop: Click the gear icon ⚙️, then Split Inbox Library
- Mobile: Pull down and search Split Inbox Settings
Step 2: Pick your splits
These work great for product teams:
Figma: Collects all your design feedback in one place. Review mockups when you're thinking visually, not between spreadsheet work.
Jira: Groups your tickets and engineering updates. Check development progress without wading through every tiny change.
Notion: Gathers your PRDs and documentation updates. Keep your specs organized and findable.
Linear or Asana: Brings together your project tasks and timelines. See what's happening across teams.
You might also want:
- Loom for video messages
- DocuSign for contracts
- Zoom for user interview recordings
- HubSpot for customer data
Or create custom splits. Maybe you want all customer feedback together. Or every email from executives in one place. Whatever helps you work.
Step 3: Put them in order
Drag the splits to match your workflow. Most product managers do something like:
- Starred (stuff you marked as critical)
- Customer feedback (if you made a custom split)
- Figma (design reviews)
- Jira (engineering updates)
- Everything else
What this looks like in real life
Take a product manager at a B2B startup. Before Split Inbox, she spent an hour every morning just sorting email. Half the time she'd miss something important and hear about it later.
Now her mornings look like this:
- 4 starred emails that actually need her right now
- 7 design updates she'll review when she's ready
- 18 JIRA notifications she'll check after standup
- 32 other emails, mostly automated junk
She handles the urgent stuff in 15 minutes. The rest waits in its proper place. No more anxiety about missing things.
Auto Labels make important emails obvious
Split Inbox organizes your email into sections. Auto Labels do something else. They add colorful tags to individual emails. You instantly see which ones need action.
The Auto Label Library has pre-made labels for product work. Turn them on with one click. Or create custom labels that understand your specific needs.
Turn on labels in seconds
Quick setup:
Step 1: Find the label settings
- Desktop: Settings ⚙️, then Auto Label Library
- Mobile: Search for Auto Label Settings (iOS only right now)
Step 2: Pick helpful labels
Good ones for product teams:
respond: Shows which emails actually need your reply. No more guessing.
meeting: Flags all that scheduling back and forth. Deal with it all at once.
signature: Highlights documents waiting for your approval. Never be the bottleneck.
mention: Shows where someone specifically needs you. Cut through the noise.
invoice: Tracks money stuff. Keep tabs on your budget.
Create smart labels for your needs
If you have Superhuman Business or Enterprise, you can make labels that understand context.
Say you want to catch angry customers before they churn:
- Go to Settings ⚙️ → Auto Labels → Create New
- Write what to look for: "Frustrated customers, cancellation threats, or feature complaints"
- Add specific rules: From contains "@support" OR subject contains "urgent"
- Save it
Now every upset customer email gets flagged automatically. You spot problems before they explode.
How this saved a product launch
A senior PM at an education company was launching a new platform. Hundreds of emails poured in. Teachers had questions. Parents complained. Bugs appeared. Executives wanted updates.
Without Auto Labels, she would have drowned. Instead:
- respond labels showed what needed immediate answers
- mention tags revealed where teams were stuck
- Her custom Teacher Feedback label caught usability problems
- meeting labels got ignored until after launch
She shipped on time because the right information was always visible. The noise stayed in the background where it belonged.
Making this work for you
Start small. Pick 3 splits and 4 labels. Use them for a week. Add more as you learn what helps.
Match your day. Put design reviews first if you do them in the morning. Move customer feedback up if you handle that after lunch.
Share with your team. Use Snippets to share your setup. When everyone organizes email the same way, handoffs get smoother.
Learn the shortcuts. Tab jumps between splits. Shift+Tab goes backward. Small tricks save real time.
Keep adjusting. Your work changes. New tools appear. Update your email setup when your job evolves.
What actually changes
Product managers using these features report big improvements:
- Email takes way less time
- Important customer feedback never gets lost
- Teams move faster because you respond quicker
- You have energy left for actual product work
Thousands of teams using Superhuman see these results. People save 4 hours every week. They handle twice as many emails. But the real win? They catch the insights that make their products better.
Try it right now
Takes five minutes to set up:
- Open Superhuman Settings
- Pick some splits: Figma, Jira, and Starred are good starters
- Add a few labels: respond, meeting, and mention work well
- Arrange them however you like
- Watch your email transform
Product management is hard. You juggle user needs, business goals, and technical reality. You translate between teams. You make tough calls with incomplete information.
Email shouldn't make it harder. With Split Inbox and Auto Labels, it actually helps instead. These features work for all Superhuman customers right now. Set them up and join thousands of product teams who save 4 hours every single week with the most productive email app ever made.
