Architecting [Notion] Workspaces

Recently we launched all-new sub-course inside Notion Mastery teaching people how to build and roll out fault-tolerant Notion workspaces: Architecting Workspaces.

As the closed beta becomes public, I wanted to share this aspect of the work that Notion pioneer Marie Poulin has been helping me with, on the complexity of onboarding a whole organization to Notion—the kinds of things we’ve noticed after training over thousands of individuals and hundreds of companies on how to leverage Notion effectively.

Notion adoption is hard!

Notion’s core challenge is that not only does the audience vary, but the software itself presents itself differently to each user, depending on how you build.

Every person within an organization brings different skills, personalities, preferences, and feelings about adopting new technology. When you roll out a tool like Notion, you’re going to see a wide variety of responses from people, and some of their reactions might even surprise you.

• Your early adopters will dive in immediately, hungrily devour the systems you’ve built, and maybe even delight you by building alongside you or inspiring new approaches.
• The pragmatists will wait to see if it’s worth their time, but they’ll give Notion a shot. They may need a bit of convincing, but they’re open to learning.
• The skeptics need structure and proof before they’ll invest. They’ll ask a lot of questions and might be a little spicy with feedback. They likely have existing tools they’re holding on to dearly.
• The haters. Can’t forget them! You’ll probably feel compelled to ignore them, but they can offer valuable insight into areas where Notion falls short. That insight can sharpen your problem solving and, in some cases, help you identify workflows where Notion isn’t actually the right choice.

One funny thing you’ll notice is that these categories don’t map cleanly onto individual people. Someone might be an early adopter who loves Notion’s flexibility and optionality, a skeptic about AI use, and a full-on hater when it comes to one specific feature or a way you’ve designed something that touches their workflow (I know this guy, because he is me).

A favorite interview question we employ in our work is “Who is going to resist this change?” It’s a great tool for identifying friction. Most of the time you don’t even have to ask it directly (sup, haters). Figuring out which category your collaborators fall into is a helpful shortcut.

Where do you fall? Are you aware?

Onboarding and training approaches

You learn to meet folks where they are and decide whether a structure-based or experience-based approach is more relevant for them.

This variation in the adoption curve is entirely normal with any new tool, especially an all-in-one like Notion. You won’t win everyone, but the goal is to progressively win most folks over to the idea of using Notion as their central team hub.

Each of these groups may require a different approach to develop buy-in. Most of your effort as an architect will go toward meeting people where they are on that curve, not necessarily building more systems—in fact, very rarely is managing more workflows the answer to organizational dysfunction.

The Course

The core of this course is broken down into three phases:

1. In Phase 1: Build Your Architect Systems, you’ll learn how to configure workspaces and configure permissions and groups to support building scalable Notion systems. You’ll also build a complete set of meta-systems that help you manage your workspaces, what we call your Architect HQ.
2. In Phase 2: Develop Your Company Core, you’ll discover the best practices for deploying “locked down” databases and dashboards across your organization—practices that will prevent your less savvy users and teams from breaking things.
3. And, finally, in Phase 3: Beyond the Build, you’ll learn all about going further than the technical side of Notion: how do you onboard and train your collaborators? How should you think about change management from a Notion perspective? How do you extend and maintain what you’ve built? How can you protect your organization from the costs and impacts of unrestricted AI adoption?

This core ”Adventure” is combined with side-quests, guides, and challenging “dungeons” that help you explore more advanced topics like permissions and formulas.

You can view more about everything included, along with our curriculum map, here.

Is Architecting Workspaces for me?

Architecting Workspaces is for you if you’ve done a fair amount of exploring in Notion on your own, and are looking to make the move from solo Notion to multi-player Notion. Perhaps you’ve been tapped at work to build out a new Notion workspace or to improve a Notion rollout to a larger team. And perhaps you don’t know as much about good workspace design, permissions, and other business and enterprise Notion topics—designing for large teams.

You can join Notion Mastery today to get access to the new course, our live events covering every new Notion feature, and our office hours sessions where you can get unstuck with support from the world’s most knowledgeable Notion power users. Plus you get access to a community of like-minded learners who are on their own journeys through this complicated ecosystem.