Notion is a wonderful application for personal knowledge management, but—let’s be honest—it doesn’t shine when it comes to collaborating with larger teams.
The sweet spot often feels like around 10 people, and even then, there necessarily must be an expectation of high levels of expertise of, not only *Notion, but the systems themselves.
At my previous role as a Software Lead at Precision Nutrition (“PN”), I also held a “Documentarian” role, meaning I was accountable for building and maintaining Notion systems and standards. Now I and all of my teammates hold a similar role at Oki Doki, where we run and maintain the Notion Mastery program in Notion.
Here are a few key tips I’ve learned working with a large(r) team (around 100 employees):
🖥 Treat Notion like a Digital Product
Building an effective *Notion workspace is not at all unlike building a website. In fact, it has a lot of the same principles and requires similar skillsets:
- Information architetcure
- Workflow and form design
- Automation and interaction with existing systems
- UI design
- Customer interviews (your customers being your co-workers in most cases)
We teach our students and clients how to create small-batch projects in Notion and release them in much the same way that you’d release a software project:
- Test new features with a small group
- Collect feedback
- Interview stakeholders
- Iterate and improve
- Documentation
- Release cycles (including release notes)
It’s a lot of work, and—similar to a software product—your systems and workflows will need ongoing maintenance. Things won’t work or won’t be clear. Who do your co-workers go to for help?
These are all important things to think about as you build out your workspace, and this may mean dedicating a cross-discipline team of folks to work on small products within your Notion space, and not just dumping “All the things” Notion on your VA or technical team members.
🔛 On-board one team at a time
We started by on-boarding engineering. We discovered what worked for the team and then slowly started bringing in other stakeholders.
I had a process for meeting with team leads, interviewing to discover what they wanted to accomplish and whether that was suited for Notion or another tool.
Starting at small scale allows you to fail quickly and iterate. Don’t go hog-wild with 100 team members out the gate. This is a recipe for sadness.
🧱 Focus on simple primitives
Discover what types of object all of your teams work with. “Projects” are a great example. But—and this is critical—keep your primitives decidedly simple.
Our Projects database at PN only had a handful of fields. Teams often created their own databases and use a Relation to “attach” it to the “Projects” database.
Example:
- Projects
- Shaping (Product Strategy)
- Feature Comms (Marketing Strategy)
- Feature Releases (Announcements)
- Documentation
This keeps primitives simple and allows teams to define their own processes while agreeing upon common process.
Imagine having ALL the Relations above in the same database. 😅
Now, you can go incredibly complex in Notion—that’s totally okay—but, I recommend you do this in personal dashboards rather than shared primitives.
🍱 Team Dashboards
At PN we had a global shared Documentation database. We created dashboards for each team and created linked versions of the Documentation database on each team’s dashboard.
Global search is still rather slow, so utilizing the search function in databases is a nice optimization.
At Oki Doki, we have a bunch of shared databases like Tasks, Projects, and Tensions (which are like “Issues” and “Suggested Opportunities”). However, our individual dashboards are completely custom.
In both cases we provide Dashboard templates so new team members can get up to speed quickly with shared systems…
🍤 Dashboard Templates
Complexity is best left to personal dashboards. One thing I like to do is create Dashboard Templates and store them inside a Template Button. This allows employees to quickly create their own dashboards.
For example, PN’s Curriculum team has a “Content Reviews” database. There’s also a button to create a “My Reviews” dashboard which shows all the reviews assigned to the current user and provides other helpful resources for doing the reviews.
👯♂️ Leverage Groups
Under Settings & Members you’ll find Groups. At PN, we created groups for each team, squad, and even for feature tests (for example, when we’re beta testing a new form or dashboard).
Granting access by group is much more efficient than manually sharing pages per user.
When we create team dashboards, we typically start by granting “Can comment” access to everyone and “Can edit” access to the team. Starting with minimal access and expanding to more access seems to be easier to maintain than giving the entire workspace “Full Access”.
TL;DR: set up Groups early and often and leverage ephemeral groups for experiments/trials.
🕵️♀️ Regular Reviews
Because Notion has limited access controls, if you want to allow someone to manage content in database, you have to give them “Can edit” access. This can be a nightmare because they can also accidentally add or delete database properties.
I recommend you set a weekly or monthly time to review top-level databases, make sure pages haven’t been delete, and ensure changes haven’t “broken” anything.
🧘 Zen and the Art of Notion Maintenance
Having many collaborators in Notion is itself a lesson in mindful practice. At absolute bear minimum, you need at least one Notion master on the team. At PN, we had 3 folks with the aptly-titled Documentarian role. At Oki Doki, no one on the team isn’t a Notion expert.
Some of the accountabilities include:
- Organizing, prioritizing, standardizing, and formatting documentation.
- Being a point person for questions and inquiries related to documentation.
- Helping others write documentation and suggesting topics for roles which hold key operational knowledge.
These accountabilities were based on the work initial Notion users were doing to support the larger team. As you can see, the scope of work is non-trivial.
Some companies are now hiring to manage Notion ops specifically! Mayhap your team needs one of these.
☎️ Office Hours
Inherit a role like the above and get ready for the “I have a quick Notion question…” messages to roll in.
Via our public calendars I’d get meeting requests for Notion help, often involving repeating similar trainings. These days I make a point of only offering live support in office hours or pre-recorded sessions.
Establish clear boundaries if you inherit a Documentarian-style role. Notion’s experience can be entirely different for each user—its blessing and curse—so the challenges are legion. Don’t solve for one person.
📹 Looms over Litany
Use a screen-recording software like Loom.com instead of writing in-Notion docs. It’s 100x faster to visually show how things work in Notion than to describe in writing, and videos tend to make the docs stickier for your learners.
Clearshot is also fantastic for creating quick videos with your headshot
[*For full disclosure, I’m a Notion Partner, so when you sign up with my link, you also help support me and my content!]
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