Notion Employee Shares 4 Secrets For Successful Notion Workspaces
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I wanted us to be the best team in Notion EMEA at using Notion. This is Kieran Doyle, the head of solutions engineering at Notion EMEA, and he's about to share some insider secrets on how to use Notion. The only way that you can get improvement is by change. You cannot improve by doing the same thing the same way. Kieran helped some of Europe's largest companies and enterprises adopt Notion at scale. A beautiful...

Notion page that doesn't help is useless. And I would much rather something simple that is impactful, which makes him the perfect person to talk about how to adopt Notion, where to put your priorities, and most importantly, what traps you should avoid. So in this episode, you learn the problem most companies struggle with when they try to adopt Notion. And all of a sudden,

the structure starts to fall apart. The one thing every company should implement in Notion is the most transformative thing that you can do in Notion for a company. An often overlooked but super important step when you try to roll out Notion in your organization. That step is often really quick.

in implementations, but it shouldn't be. And a simple yet effective trick that you should use before doing anything in Notion. Regardless of if it's you wanting to change how you use Notion personally or the largest enterprises in the world, it's the best place to start. So what would you say is your two-minute elevator life pitch?

Yeah, sure thing. So I have the business and the personal side of that life pitch. So from the personal side, living in Dublin with my wife, our dog and our five month old baby. So that takes up pretty much all of my spare time. That's not notion at the moment, just keeping a little one alive. In terms of professional, I...

Similar to yourself, I had like an unusual route into technology, not the most kind of straightforward path. I'm actually qualified as an environmental scientist. I had grand ambitions of making the world a better place and came out of university at the very beginning of the financial crash in the mid 2000s.

And it didn't turn out there weren't a lot of companies willing to pay for people who wanted to help save the world. Unfortunately, it's not the way it was back then. I think it's gotten a lot better now. But to invite part of my degree, I learned to program in a language called OR, which is a statistical package. And I was at the time living in London.

And there was a niche in consultancy for that particular skill. So I ended up working in the IBM ecosystem, doing implementation for four years in London. It was an amazing time to be in London. It was around the time of the 2012 Olympics. It was very great atmosphere around the place. And it was a really interesting time to be working with IBM products because it was really at that point where enterprises were transitioning to

from on-prem to cloud. And really starting to take it seriously. Like cloud had been around for quite a long time, like Salesforce and NetSuite, but really like the large enterprise was starting to take it very seriously. So that was really interesting to me.

And then I had the opportunity to join Oracle a couple of years later. And they were really going all in on cloud at the time. Larry Ellison, the founder and now CTO of Oracle, was really pushing cloud. And based on what I was seeing, that was just really, really exciting.

And I had like, that was where I was introduced to solution engineering, which I'll get onto in a minute. And that was just like the most wonderful place to work and learn. I was surrounded by incredible solution engineers, incredible people. I spent almost four years there and the opportunity came up to be the first solution engineer in Dublin at Slack.

And Slack just felt like one of those technologies where the groundswell was behind it. And I was proven quite luckily right. It was one of those transformative technologies. I had the most incredible time there. Got to build a team. I got to work with so many amazing customers. Really, really fortunate customers.

And then I had the opportunity just over a year ago, I celebrated my year anniversary at Notion at the beginning of June to come to this. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. So it's absolutely flown. But I had the opportunity to come here and I'm sure I'll get on to Hawaii, Notion in a while. But it was just, yeah, it had that same feeling. It was that balance between the head and the heart.

that I had at Slack. Notion had that same feeling. So I know I've gone over a little bit over two minutes there, but hopefully that's a view on the person, on the professional. Yeah, that's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. And yeah, I would love us to talk a bit more about Slack today. I think we're mostly focused on Notion, but maybe one other day I'll get some insights for you on how to set up Slack the perfect way. But yeah. I'm a little bit rusty now, but I'm sure there's one or two things that we can share.

Yeah, probably a lot more than I know about it. But yeah, you mentioned solutions engineering. And before I actually looked like when I first met you and you mentioned your solutions engineer, afterwards, I looked up what it actually means because I had no idea what a solution engineer does. So maybe you could just quickly, quickly explain, you know, what is that job profile? What does it mean? Yes. A solution engineer, I like to say, is the best job that no one's ever heard of. So I get the really like it's an incredible job. You get to work

Essentially, you sit in between three kind of pillars. You sit between the product team, the sales team, and the customer. So if you imagine a triangle, we're right in the middle. And we get to essentially work with all of those groups of people to best utilize the product that we work with. And that involves lots of things. So it will be big, deep customer workshops where we're figuring out use cases and, you know,

going old school, getting post-its on a whiteboard and journey mapping together and then building that out in Notion or any product really. It's demonstrations, it's presenting at events, it's also less glamorous stuff like, you know, going and working with our product team on, you know, the nuance of an integration. So, you know,

Notion, we have tons of integrations with lots of different platforms. How our customers want to use them can be slightly different. We're very fortunate in that we're talking to those customers all the time. So we might want to go and make some enhancements on particular things. And we would work with our product team there. And we also work with our sales team because we are working with customers all the time. So I always like to think of a customer buying Notion has to make

four decisions uh so they have to make a commercial decision the thing that they're they have the money are they willing to pay for the product that it is there has to be a value decision in that obviously it needs to you know do something that they really really need or it's not doing right now or they can't do right now they have to make a legal decision in that they have to sign a contract and they have to make a security decision they want the data to flow in a certain way

The solution engineer really helps with everything except for the legal. We help with the value. If we do a good job with the value, that helps with the commercial. We help with the security. We tend to be subject matter experts in how...

I would say what I would call customer trust. So we tend to touch a lot of different parts of sales processes, existing customers, product enhancements, and I said events. So that's why I say it's the best job that nobody's ever heard of because you get to do so much. You get to use different parts of your brain. You get to be creative. Yeah, it's a very exciting field within software to work. I know.

It sounds like a super cool mix of A, skills, and B, activities, right? Like this combination role. So I'm glad a lot about solutions engineering. I'll definitely keep an eye on these roles. And yeah, but that all relies, right? That was like the general way of what you do. And now you do that specifically for Notion. And just the same way some people have never heard of solutions engineering, a lot of people also haven't heard of Notion, right? So if you're, you know,

come home to a family dinner, like a bigger gathering and someone asks you, no, what do you do? And you say like, well, okay, I'm a solutions engineer at Notion. They're like, well, Notion? What is that? How would you usually try to explain what Notion is all about?

Yeah, that conversation happens so frequently. So I feel like if I'm at a family do and I'm talking to like my younger cousins in their 20s and teens, they all know Notion and they all think like, oh, it's so cool. You work there. And I talk to like any auntie or uncle and they they like.

why don't you work with IBM anymore? Yeah, I know that company. Yeah, it's really interesting and really funny. What I tend to do is, if I'm explaining it to somebody who doesn't know Notion, who is in some way IT literate, what I'll do is I'll get them to take out their phone

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, Notion actually takes all of those things and connects them to one place. So not only do you not have to think where something is, but you also get the advantage of they're all connected. So, you know, the going shopping item on your to-do list or in your calendar is directly connected to that meal plan that you have. So all the ingredients are there. That kind of connectivity just works.

reduces stress in life and that's a good thing and if you can imagine that in your personal life it's the exact same for your work life you probably have five or six applications that you use regularly to store knowledge or to utilize knowledge or to interact between knowledge and time

And Notion is the kind of place where all of that should sit. And it just makes your life far less stressful. So, yeah, that's tends to be my like method for for explaining what Notion is to to family members or people you might meet in a bar or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious. How do you do it?

It's a good question. I'm struggling with it, right? That's why I like ask everyone like, what is your secret? I also I tend to go with the, you know, when it's like for more from a business perspective that it's yeah, it's like it's sort of just like all in the central hub for your activities, right? Notion doesn't necessarily have to do everything.

that you need to do on a daily basis, but it can be that starting point for all activities. So it sort of becomes this command center is a loaded word, but it's the central point. So whenever you start anything, you start from here. So no matter whether you're looking for a document, whether you're trying to do some work, whether you're looking up something, you have one single starting point and that removes so many decisions.

It's a tool that helps remove other decisions because you don't need to think about it. It could be there. It could be here. It reduces this multitasking in your digital work life. That's currently what I try to do. I feel like it's still not quite there. I like the value proposition that you have in yours. With the stress, I feel like that is very, very tangible. Yeah.

I think mine is different from yours in that I'm maybe focused on a user rather than a business. Certainly when I'm talking to businesses, I take a very similar tack to you. So I would think about a business, no matter what the entity is in a business, and you may remember this from when we met in Berlin, talking about the different spheres of influence within a business, the individual, the team, or even the department or business-wide. Those entities all have

different types of knowledge that they store. And that can take the form of very structured knowledge like project management, tasks, OKRs,

Even your own personal calendar, that is structured knowledge. But then there's also unstructured knowledge, meeting notes, brainstorming sessions, all these kind of things. Notion is a great place for both of those to interact and for the unstructured to become structured or for the structured to benefit from the unstructured. I feel like when you, it's such a tactile product, pitching it as hard, showing people and getting them in it

They see it so clearly then. I remember the first time seeing relational databases work.

And, you know, that just sounds intimidating, doesn't it? Relational databases. It's like, oh, I don't like somebody's thinking like databases. That's Oracle stuff like that's scary. I don't want to go near that. But like relational databases will transform any business if you put them in there. Every team would improve by having a company wide relationship.

central database and then being able to create relations for their own personal teams. Like so powerful. So when I saw that, when I tried to explain that, it's really difficult when I show it, people look. Yeah. Yeah.

I agree. And I think actually that's like Notion's biggest contribution to the whole productivity or, you know, a workplace suite, both on the personal use cases and for the business use cases is like this democratization of database, right? Like making databases accessible to non-engineers before,

Before I did a few small web development calls, I had no idea what SQL is, these sort of things. But if you play around with the Notion database long enough, you start to develop an intuitive understanding. It makes it sometimes a bit harder because as a non-technical user, you look at it and it looks like a spreadsheet. It does some weird things that are

figuring out what the difference between spreadsheet databases can be a bit tough. But again, you learn by trying and using it. And then later when you learn the fundamentals of what actually is behind it, and you're like, ah, this makes a lot of sense. And it's like so accessible and so approachable through this interface. So I think that's actually like the, yeah, probably the biggest contribution that Notion has had or the biggest impact on the whole space.

Yeah, I actually, before we move on, I owe you a big thank you because there's something that you said, I think it was in Berlin when we were presenting at the same event where you were discussing the difference between databases and spreadsheets. And you just conceptually, you were just added database up on the screen behind you and you said the difference is spreadsheets work across and down, databases work across.

And it's just such an easy phrase for people to actually go, okay, so now I'm actually thinking about something that's actually 3D. It's in depth here rather than a flat spreadsheet. And that just really helped me when I'm articulating the customer statistics, get them to take that first step. So I owe you a big thank you for that.

I'm glad to hear that. I remember that there was, I think, a post-lunch session where I talked for 30 minutes on formulas. So my apologies to everyone in the room there. We had to sit through that right after a good lunch. But it was a really fun event.

I love that. I love formulas. So I love that. Yeah, me too. Me too. But speaking of formulas, actually, formulas and databases is, I think, a perfect segue to the next question because it's about what do you see people most commonly struggle with when it comes to those? Databases and formulas are certainly two maybe easy feature things, but maybe you have more of a meta answer to that in the sense of what do you see in

Yeah, so there are definitely some technical things that I see people struggle with. Let me give you two answers. So one is maybe a little bit meta and the other is what tends to happen with a company starting out with Stocean is that

one person uses Notion in their personal life and they're using a tool that's not quite good enough, or maybe they're using three tools when they could be using one. And that person says, I use this thing in my personal life. I think it will be perfect here. Can we try it as a team? And that team start using it. And they probably have really good structure because that person who brought it in owns it, is passionate about it, wants to make it successful.

And then the project that team is working on grows and another team come in and another team come in. And all of a sudden the structure starts to fall apart because nobody is responsible for it. And that I would say is the number one thing that I see people struggle with is the, you know, their notion workspace does not have a plan. They don't have team space structures. They don't have that centralized database and the relations built out that I was talking about.

And that leads to the benefit of Notion actually getting eroded a little bit. So that's where my team and some of the other teams here in the Dublin office and globally come in where we try and build those structures, build those best practices from day one, build amazing team space hierarchies and workspace designs. Because if you do that...

just the value you get. It doesn't just go up a little. It shoots up. The other one that's maybe a little bit more meta is change. And when you go...

So when I came here first, Slack had been bought by Salesforce maybe 18 months. No, we'd been bought maybe two and a half years, but had been a Salesforce company for about 18 months. And Salesforce is a huge company, 80,000 people, all very, very good at what they do. But it's also quite a competitive place. And the idea that you would...

put your meeting notes in a public space for all to see. In these big companies, it's quite a change. A lot of us have worked in those big companies. So we get that. We have that kind of way of thinking built into us. This is for me. This is for my team.

And all of a sudden, moving to Notion, where apart from maybe a one-to-one with your manager about your career or maybe some HR conversations, everything's open. That is a huge...

mental shift to make. But the value that it unlocks is huge because I can use Notion Q&A to ask a question and I'm not just searching my notes, I'm searching everyone's notes. So I am so much better at work because of that. That sounds obvious, but...

Getting people to go I am shifting from private first to public first with my note-taking with my team's notes with our team meetings with Our tasks our projects that requires a big shift that is change management that's the kind of stuff that traditionally like McKinsey or BCG get paid millions and millions for and You know, we're trying to do that with notion and bring that that change and

That's the kind of thing that I think a lot of people struggle with is when you all of a sudden have to really, truly benefit from this product to its full potential, require that shift in work and the way you think about privacy at work. Yeah, that's really interesting, having those conversations. And I look after all of Europe.

And it's really interesting to see regional dynamics at play as well. So like in the Nordics, for example, that's a very normal thing. And they're very comfortable with that. Whereas maybe in Southern Europe, that's less of a cultural norm and it requires a little bit more coaching and stuff. So it's really interesting actually just to even see within our European region, the different kind of cultural dynamics at play. Yeah. Yeah.

Somebody good points there. I see a lot of the same patterns, both the growth perspective. I think it's one of notion strength that it spreads very organically in companies. But you really notice the saying, what brought you here won't get you there with these things. What brought

things that work well for an individual because you can just cover the cracks and you're still one human on the other end who knows a lot of things. The system is fairly forgiving. And also if you have a small team of two, three people that work with the product and everyone can just maybe in the same room or talks to each other on a regular basis,

still fine. But a second ride, you crank things up and you add like 515 or 50 people into the mix. They're very, very different challenges. And the you notice that only when it then you know, becomes a bit more chaotic and things start getting lost again. And all of a sudden, you feel again, like, okay, this is now in a similar position as

as i was you know like one year ago when i had like a combination of g drive google docs like you know i have documents everywhere i don't really know where to find it and it's yeah because you you don't don't have the foundation in place right to help you later down the line but i'd like to uh also like maybe go a bit further into the change management perspective because i think that's such an underrated discussion about notion in particular like notion and b2b like i

my job title says like, don't you got started, blah, blah, blah. Actually, like, I think like at least 50% of the job is helping teams change and adapt to that new tool. So I would be really, really curious to hear if you say, you know, like it's a big part of the conversations you have, like what are your, you know,

some angles or like some, you know, ways that you've seen work well with teams to help them adopt A, to more transparency and then B, also in general, right? Like when it comes to adopting a new tool with a somewhat steep learning curve in particular in the beginning. Yeah. So to answer part A, I think that there are

I don't think carrot and stick works in this situation. I think it has to be all carrot. People need to see what's in this. If you're asking somebody to change the way they work, they need to see benefit in it. Otherwise, they will revert back to their previous way of working. So what we tend to do is try and find two or three things

like solid use cases that a customer has. All we'll do is we'll go over to their office or we'll jump on a virtual meeting room for, for a couple of hours. We'll speak to tons of people, ask them what they do every day. It's when we're having these conversations, we do not mention notion. Uh, it actually helps more if they don't know anything about notion and they talk us through what they do every day. Um, what are the bottlenecks? What works well? Um,

Who are their direct reports? Who are their stakeholders? What are their timelines like, etc.? And by being able to piece that together, we can almost, you know, if you do that with 10 people, you can build a pretty good knowledge map of a company. Then it's our job to go away, build that out in Notion, present it back to the customer. And all of a sudden, that enterprise is now seeing

Yeah. You know, a transformation in how they work and a tangible benefit because the bottlenecks that they spoke about or the deadlines that they were missing, they're no longer at risk of being missed or the bottlenecks have been smoothed out. I find this approach works really well because it's listening to the customer. It's trusting that they know their business better than anybody else. And it's trying to help.

What I find doesn't work is trying to come in with a very strict, this is Notion, this is how you're going to use it, off you go. Because...

You're showing no trust. You're showing no empathy. You're saying that you know their business better than they do. And all of a sudden, they're going to try it for a week and then it's going to fall away and it's going to become shelfware. And that doesn't work for us. We sell on a license per year model. We want to make sure the most important thing for us is that people find huge value from it and they want to bring more people in. That's how we continue to grow. So yeah, that would be the...

the answer for like the part A of the question. I'm sorry, I've forgotten what part B was. Yeah, no, part B, good question. Let's revert back to sort of like, yeah, part A was that part with the, yeah, the implementation. I think part B was about the, like the steep learning curve, right? Like notion as from more the technical side.

whether you have any, you know, maybe from some success stories with other companies or like things that you've seen work well in order to board on the group that is not the Notion champion, right? That is not the person who in their free time builds like, you know, for hours in the system and knows everything in and out. Completely. So I had a very interesting experience in this when I first started at Notion. We were working with a large European TV company.

And we went on site to do a workshop. I was brand new in the job, trying to flex a little bit, trying to show my value. And I was sitting beside somebody who had been in this company for 30 years. And I was just kind of showing them one or two things on Notion. And I just kind of started a new line and indented with the tab key. And they said, oh, stop.

Show me that again. How did you do that? And I was like, oh, it's just a tab. And they're like, that's like 10 spaces in one. And I was like, yeah, yeah. And it just dawned on me that for some people that we're working with, the journey isn't just Notion. It's, you know, in general, this new language that, you know, everybody younger than them in the company speaks. And that was really important for me just to understand, right,

there are layers to this and this is not just bringing one person on board this is yeah our one type of persona on board so what we would tend to try and do is build a hierarchy of users um so at the top you want the sponsor the person who's brought this in who is responsible for this and has tied it to something strategic for for an organization

Below that, we want a kind of smaller group that we would call our admins. These are the people responsible for administering Notion, whether that's connecting it into things like a single sign-on provider or making sure that we have really strong rules around guests or good team space management, etc.

And they're kind of like the people who will be getting a lot of face time with the Notion team. And then next we have the most critical layer. And that is the champion network. And they are like, they're the trainers who are going to train everybody else. So they are the, let's say we had a 400 person Notion implementation. They're the 20 to 30 people that we are going to incentivize and reward and

with lots of like notion training, notion enablement, really going in deep on their use cases with the idea that these will be really influential people and they'll bring them back to the business and they will train the trainer. They will be, um, they'll be the ones who will actually show everybody in the company, uh, how to get, how to get notion. So that step is often really quick, uh,

in implementations, but it shouldn't be. That needs to be something that we take time on, that we pick the right people. If you get the person in your team who's got a

build beautiful databases and I don't say that as a joke I really mean build beautiful databases and take care about like how our team spaces look and understand formulas and buttons and all these types of things if you get those right type of people and you motivate them correctly your implementation is going to be incredibly successful if you just pick 30 people off a list yeah

it's not going to work as well for you. You might get lucky, but most of the time it won't work. And then after that, you have your main users. And there should be a methodology for those main users to be able to like,

become champions, but also for them to be able to provide feedback in a really clear way. And there should be opportunities for like one to many type enablements and things like that. But yeah, I think that when you get that hierarchy working well and you have regular meeting cadences with that hierarchy, your opportunity for a really successful notion implementation that helps the customer that achieves the strategic goal of that sponsor at the top is going to be so much higher.

Yeah, I agree. And it's like it touches on another part that I think like people sometimes tend to forget when they get very excited in the beginning about Notion and just want to roll it out quickly to the company is that it's not like a set it and forget it thing, right? Like no tool is like, yeah, neither tools nor methodology. So you can't just like, you know,

throw them into the company and then expect them to like sort of self-organize. There's a reason why companies have IT teams, right? That whole responsibility is to just keep like the back end running and

Notion needs to be treated in the same way with maybe the special part that is much closer to operations than a lot of the other IT solutions. So it's like usually you have this hybrid role of a person who needs to, on the one hand, do the technical stuff and administer and set up things, but also needs to know exactly how the operations work and then

that in particular in bigger companies, someone will have to have that as a role assigned to them. Maybe not full-time, depends on the size of the company, right? If you're a smaller team, you can get away with someone doing a part-time, but if it's like 400 people, you need one or maybe like two people, right?

whose sole job is to just administer that, while you'll have this one-time boon and then over time, all systems move towards chaos and you need to constantly try to fight back there. So I think that's a very important point for everyone when they're planning their adoption, thinking about, okay, do I do that? Not just with Notion, but with pretty much any tool out there.

Yeah, completely. I remember when in my very, in that role I was talking about earlier when I was working in the IBM ecosystem, the owner of the company that I was working for in one of my first interactions with him, he said something that I have sworn by ever since. And I think it's completely true. He said, software is easy and people are hard. Software does what you tell it to do. People don't. And that's where I think like,

I see it happening. That is a well-known, well-established truth. Yet I see so many implementations where all the time is spent on the software and we rush the people part. The people part is so important. Human beings are beautiful, complicated, nuanced things and people do not like change. And we need to make sure that change is easy for them and there's benefit to it. And

And that's where it works, where it works well. So, yeah, I completely think you and I are very aligned. And you probably are living that same experience as a consultant all the time. Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The change management is the hard part. There are so many people who can just build notion. It's a technical skill, but it's not that hard to learn. The big challenge is taking those technical skills, understanding what the other person needs,

building that and then helping them adopt that. And also if they don't want to adopt that, I like being able to change the plan and the system so that it works for the person. Because if you build a system and the person doesn't use it, it's probably not the person's fault, not necessarily, right? It's probably your fault with either the system or the implementation along the way.

away completely speaking of like all these people using using notions do you you know when you encounter so many different types of people using notion and bring notion into the companies I'm just curious are there any like you know like archetypes or like typical people that you encounter along the way where like

And I'm asking also from this perspective, what you just mentioned, right? So if someone wants to roll out Notion to their company, it's like, hey, but how do I find these champions? Are there any tips and tricks to discover them? Like they share some common themes? The tips and tricks to discover them, if you can figure that out, please let me know. But definitely some common themes, right? Yeah. They are...

people who are curious and that is regardless of level. I'm currently working with people who are in entry-level analyst roles, write up CTOs of some of Europe's biggest companies. And the commonality across all of them is that they are curious. When I started at Notion,

I did. Project management was a new world to me. So I did a course in project management to learn. And in the very first class, the lecturer kind of put up this challenging slide where he said that you cannot improve something without changing it.

And I find that the people who gravitate to Notion, who want to bring in Notion, are people who live with that kind of philosophy. That they see the only way to get better is by being curious, by changing, by experimentation. They're the ones who bring in Notion. Trying to find them is the hard part. But what we tend to see is those people will bring it in and they're usually builders, right?

And in the successful implementations, they're also influential. And I don't mean influential being that they have a very lofty title. It could be that they're just really good at their job. And we've all been surrounded by somebody who's really good at their job. And you're like,

Like, how do you do it? Can I buy you a coffee and figure out what it is that makes you... And that's influence, right? Or it's the high performer. It's the person who's maybe been there for a while and kind of has a bit of nous and all that kind of stuff. So influence is kind of packaged up in different ways. But if you can kind of capture somebody who is...

curious is a builder and is influential that's Goldilocks that's absolutely perfect and then we can work with them to try and have them realize that goal improvement improvement and that comes about through change so yeah a bit of a long winded answer but yeah and

Yeah, I wish there was like a LinkedIn filter for that. So you just find that individual. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist. And then obviously, like, there are certain types of roles that tend to gravitate towards Notion. You mentioned that it can be... I find Notion is funny because it can be as technical as you want it to be. And quite technical people tend to gravitate towards Notion. So we see a lot of people like, for instance, developers. Yeah.

using Notion, either individually or as teams. But also I think roles that tend to work

with a lot of documentation and roles that tend to work very cross-functionally, find Notion. So I find marketing teams, so people who work in marketing agencies, where they might be working with, it's so easy to share documentation in Notion across the walls of your company. And that's something that's super powerful for a marketing agency. They work incredibly cross-functionally. They have strict deadlines. They have tons and tons of documentation, lots of different approval workflows,

And it's almost different for every client. Notion was like, it's as if Notion was designed for them. So yeah, we tend to find that it's, you know, often technical roles, but not restricted to technical roles. Yeah. It's almost people who have, the people that software has forgotten and need to build their own tool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And the kind of people that like, you know, like that get annoyed by things if they don't work smoothly. That's like the, that's at least like also like how I got into it. It's just like, I'm very impatient person. And if I have to do like 10 clicks where I think, you know, like one click should be enough. It's like, you know, come on, like,

I opened up a tool and it looks like a Windows 98 interface, which is very common in my background of legal software. It's like, can't work with that, sorry. Need something that does a better job and is much smoother. That and the combination of the Venn diagram that you shared, that's probably where you find most of...

yeah absolutely yeah yeah speaking of like the the marketing ones and like these different use cases um what would you say like in in your day-to-day life right when you go to customers and you build solutions for them what are kind of the most typical workflows am i that you uh develop for customers and where you would also say okay like these are like very easy wins if you as a company want to go and adopt notion yeah it goes back to what i was saying in the beginning around

your structured data and your unstructured data. And if you think of a lot of companies right now, they'll probably have a legacy tool that they use for something. They mightn't have a legacy tool. It might be Excel, but they probably have something that they use for project management. And those projects hopefully are tied to company goals.

And then they have their day-to-day work. So, you know, you have all the meetings that you have every day that are either individual with the team and you have these blocks of work where you've carved out time to get things done. And that's all over the place. So as an employee, I often don't feel connection to our company goals, even though the thing that I'm working on is related to a task that's related to a project that's related to an objective of our company.

I often don't see my work valued in any way. Putting in a system in Notion, and it's really easy to do. It can be overcomplicated, but really the 60, 70% lift at the beginning to just do this step of having an individual's work connected to team tasks, connected to department projects, connected to company objectives is the most transformative thing that you can do in Notion.

for a company. After that, there's all the amazing things that you can do to improve your individual productivity and your team's productivity and your company's productivity. But if you build that foundation right, and that's where I spend so much time because so many companies do not have that structure in place. That will be the thing that I would say like,

There are obviously cool specific use cases that we do. We're working at the moment with a music label and building out how they're interacting between the artists, album releases and concerts and the people who work for the music label. That's really cool. It's really fun. And you get to test Notion in different ways.

But I suppose the unglamorous side of it is like a lot of it is companies that aren't structured. I don't have an optimum structure. I'm putting that optimum structure in place because I can tell you as an individual, the feeling if you feel like you are part of something and you're impacting your company in a huge way, what you're working on.

directly impacts the objective of your company, you're going to work a lot harder. You're going to take a lot more pride in your work. It's truly transformative for you as an individual. And Notion offers that in a way that I don't know any other software

can or does that's true like it it can create a lot of visibility and meaning and uh it it's a very simple change right like all these these elements exist already in the company probably hopefully uh if not then that's the first uh part to start but a lot of times i'd like you you have uh this like you have this planning element in your company and you have this execution layer and they they just don't talk to each other right like they they happen separately it's different people who do a and who

to be and then like both people talk to each other like you know like why did you do this plan why did you not do this task and everyone's like well i didn't know what i didn't see and it's like

little tweaks, you get so much more traction on all the things and you make sure that all this collective energy, you have good people in your company. So the goal of Notion and any of this system is just get out of the way and make sure that every person can do the work that they actually should do every day and not have to be bogged down with ad

admin tasks, like copy paste, like my favorite new saying is like, life's too short to copy paste, right? No one should have to copy paste information from one thing to another or like update things in three places because the tools don't talk to each other. And yeah, just having this like smooth line from like the top to the bottom, it's like, it's so easy, but like it's, no, it's simple. It's not easy. Yeah.

Yes, exactly. It's simple. It's not easy. I love that. Yeah. Francesca in my team, who I think you've met before as well, she talks all the time that everybody is a project manager and that makes your life filled with admin, your working life. Notion makes that easier. It allows you to actually just focus on being productive and not focus on, like you say, copy paste. So, yeah, I love how you phrased that.

Well, there's a lot of fun things that you can do with Notion to make your life easier there, for sure. But let's also maybe go back to one thing that we talked about in the beginning, and that is like this typical scenario, right? Where people, they start with something in Notion, and it feels good in the moment. And then later down the line, like a few months later, with like a few more teams in the loop, they realize,

oh shoot, this isn't serving us anymore. What would you say to people who might be afraid of starting Notion now? Maybe a smaller company that is not an enterprise client or that doesn't have a huge budget for an implementation and is worried that if they get it wrong now, it might hurt them later on in the mind. Do you have anything there where you would say,

Yeah, firstly, that's like a very normal and very real concern to have. And I'd almost be more, I would be surprised if customers didn't have that concern. Because if they did, I would almost say they're being naive. Because you're bringing something in to change the way you do things. And there is, the reason you would do it is very obvious. There is huge benefit.

But there is also the risk that this doesn't work, that the person who brought it in looks a bit silly and that you spent all this money. And that is whether you're buying Notion or you're buying Salesforce or you're buying a new facility or moving to a new office. All of these things are the same for a company. Right. And I think the most important thing that you can do in that situation is due diligence. Right. So speak to us.

Understand what that process looks like. Understand the professionals that we have in our team that make that job really easy for you. Speak to our other customers. Speak to the amazing Notion community, consultants like yourself, people who are spending every single day de-risking this process for companies. I go back to what I said a little bit earlier around

The only way that you can get improvement is by change. You cannot improve by doing the same thing the same way. You maybe can drive efficiency, but you're not going to improve anything. So if a company fundamentally needs to change...

then yes like you have to do it what i would say is it is very good that you are thinking about the risks and we want to work with you to be risk averse and we want to do it in the safest way possible that works for your business and that can go from the macro rollout right down to the minutiae of like when are we going to do imports uh when are we going to do enablements uh how many parts

departments are we going to roll out first like obviously we would love for you to roll out wall to wall but we know that doesn't make sense sometimes so we'll start with these departments because they're working on this project and we want to make sure that's super successful so yeah we have tons of different ways of making sure that that process is done correctly but i would never be concerned if a company is showing concern i think that's a really healthy thing um and you know

I'm sure you see it all the time. I don't know if your role or my role exists if companies don't have concern because they'll just do it themselves and they get it wrong or they don't. But hey, it's companies that take things seriously that mean that our ecosystem exists and that we get to work together and work with them. Yeah, that's true. And it always depends a bit on the individual situation. In some companies, you have a lot more leeway to experiment and to think

get things wrong and to try over again, right? And it's like, you can tinker yourself, right? Like you keep things in hours, particularly if you're like, you know, like an early stage startup or so you probably don't have like the resource, but you have also like the freedom, right? To get things wrong, like adapt quickly. And then other situations, right? Like might be better to react, get outside help by like just shorten the adoption curve and the time it takes you to figure these things out because other people have made a lot of mistakes for you. So you can learn from that, but get it right a bit quicker. And then the other thing,

is always right like the um uh like what i also sometimes uh try to to to illustrate is um if you're at this point right where you're looking for a solution um then clearly not everything is running perfect in your company right if you're super happy with how your processes are and like everyone is just like coming to work like oh this is a dream uh chances are you're not looking to you know change things up much so like

not doing something, not trying to fix it. It's the devil you know, but there is just accumulating costs. The chaos in your system, it just gets larger. The amount of documents that you lose and legacy tools will just keep growing. So yeah, it's always a balance of the unknown risks and the risks that you learn to live with every day. Yeah, completely agree.

Speaking of some things that don't run so smoothly, I would love to know, like Notion internally using Notion, are there any workflows or any challenges that you already experienced in your time at Notion where a workflow wasn't optimal and then you used Notion to solve something like that? Is there maybe a story that you can share there with us? Yeah, it's a really good question. So...

Not to give away too many internal secrets, but maybe to kind of tell a little story. So when I...

I started, I was the first solution engineer in Dublin. We already had Marshall and Massey who were working in New York and Tokyo respectively. And I built out a team. So I've got an amazing team here now, Brendol and Francesca, and we're expanding that team at the moment. And I set us a little goal a couple of months ago. So I wanted us to be the best team in Notion and Mia using Notion.

Seems like a pretty normal thing for a team in our position to want. But what we decided to do was look at our processes and how we worked as the three of us, how we worked with our cross-functional stakeholders and kind of...

How do we optimize everything that we're doing in Notion? Like we're doing a lot right now in Slack. We're doing a lot right now in Google Drive. And that is because of our biases from where we've worked before. And we have this amazing tool and we're not challenging ourselves to use it for everything. So that was probably that was like a little kind of light bulb moment for us as a team. And we decided to just kind of go and completely rip up our team space.

and rebuild it and start using our own, in some cases, champagne and in some cases, dog food. When it's trying to find it, because we need to stand over this to our customers and we need to be able to advocate for these things. And I find if you have a personal use case

that you're passionate about, you are so much more convincing because you actually truly believe it and you truly care. So we looked at, right, well, we work, as I say, with salespeople all the time. How do salespeople request us?

what are the bottlenecks that we have when salespeople request us so we previously had slack channels and they would post about the customer or prospect that they wanted us to work with and it would usually involve us going back and asking like five or six questions and uh we use a crm in here so we would probably check salesforce as well and it was kind of clunky uh in that

They had a request and by the time we accepted or declined the request, it might be two days of back and forth. So I said, all right, let's design a workflow in Notion. So we are capturing all the information that we need to capture and

We're doing it in a really programmatic way. And then we're building an automation in that database so that it's going to notify us in Slack. We can have an internal private conversation, just the three of us, about how we want to work with that. And then get back to accepting it with another button inside the database that sends a message back to the sales rep. What we've done is we've been able to take something that was a pain

take something that was sitting in multiple products, put it in a single place. - Yeah. - Mean that we can have a private conversation as a team, make the best decision for the customer and for the salesperson, and get back to them as quickly as possible. So we're able to get back to people quicker, there's less stress, there's less products,

Less mistakes. When you introduce more products, you introduce more complexity, you introduce mistakes. Less mistakes. And we don't want to make mistakes for our customers. So that just little thing that we do now has just smoothed everything out for us. And we do that with lots of things. And that was a big step for us. It was just even philosophically thinking,

we're going to be the best at using notion in our company and challenging ourselves to use it in a really interesting and fun and useful way. So, yeah, I won't speak for any other teams that might be doing things better or worse than us. I will shout out in particular, though, Anya, who's our head of international marketing. Her team used notion in a really, really cool way. And we're,

I don't know if we're neck and neck yet, but they were the ones that when we started this project, we were trying to catch up with. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Audia is amazing. I need to talk to her and ask her what are her secrets of setting up that phone. Yeah, she would be an incredible guest.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll add it to the list. I already asked her once whether she would be interested. So hopefully. But yeah, I think what I really loved about your story right now is that I think it illustrates a very, very underrated point with notion adoption. And that's to know your process part. And it's something very simple. But if you ask someone, how do you actually work? How does your work look like? Or like,

if you're fast nothing like well do you know how your work looks like that well everyone would ask yes of course i do it every single day but if you don't challenge yourself to think to like okay what is actually every single step that has to happen for me to you know deliver my product to to my customer and like it doesn't matter like where you work in a company right you will always have an at least an internal customer an internal product that you're responsible for and that you have to deliver if you really think about like all the single steps all the single decisions that have to happen and

take the time to write them out and realize, oh, here's a bottleneck that is unnecessary. And this is actually the one key step that is the most relevant. So maybe when I build out my Notion system, this is what I might want to focus on first, rather than setting all the icons and colors, which is very fun and rewarding. But if it's the 80-20 of this impacts your work every single day versus this is a nice draft, then maybe

maybe it is a good part. And like, just knowing again, right? Like what your process is, is like huge unlock, which will make everything in your work and in particular when building Notion so much easier. Yeah. Um, I completely, I couldn't agree more. Um, a beautiful, um,

notion page that doesn't help is useless. And I would much rather something simple that is impactful. I have them right here on my desk, like sticky notes. I'm a huge fan of the humble sticky note. I think this is something the project managers are very good at, that I'm a skill that I'm learning. Only the yellow ones. But what I'll always do, if I have something, if I have a goal,

Just get a sharpie or a pen and a sticky note and just start putting how do I get here? What are all the steps that I need to do? Yeah, I think of them as steps not tools too often like I was saying in the beginning people will think of Okay, so I need to do this in Jira and I need to do this in github and I need to do this in in slack and this in email and You're actually not thinking about the steps. Now. You're thinking about tools and

Think about the steps. I need to create a project. I need to have a kickoff meeting. I need to do X, Y, and Z. And all of a sudden now, I have a complete map of...

what I need to do, who are my stakeholders, when do I need to involve them, I have a really clear flow chart and the humble sticky note can kind of unlock that for you. And that's only then can you start building. So yeah, that for me is just such a crucial thing. And regardless of if it's you wanting to change how you use Notion personally or the largest enterprises in the world changing how they want to use Notion or any tool for that matter, it's

it's the best place to start. Oh, yes, I agree. Like it's a small habit change or like it looks like only a small part, but if you rush that and then skip over it, you'll regret it later down the line. Completely.

Yeah, so your team wanted to be the best at using Notion internally. I'd be curious, what does Notion do to help train their new joiners on how to use Notion? Is there a program in place? Is it like you need to pass a certain exam before you get hired? How does that work? Yeah, so for my team in particular, the bar is high because your job is to talk to customers, to talk to our product team about Notion.

So we hold a really high bar, both pre to hiring someone. Like we expect you to be able to showcase some cool stuff in Notion to us in the interview process. But then also we will take you by the hand once you start and enable you. One of the first things I think, and like we were saying earlier, Notion is so tactile. I don't think that you can truly learn. Some people can. I learn differently. I'm

I'm a very tactile learner. I think the best way to learn Notion is building and getting in. So what we do is we set tasks for people. And the first thing that you do when you get here is you build. And this kind of stems from before. It feels like forever ago before we had home in Notion. And you had to build your own personal OS.

to kind of navigate like all your tasks, all the pages that you use, all your notes, all that kind of stuff. And people can get really creative and complex. The worst thing that you can do is just download a template for that because you skip the learning and you skip figuring out how things work. So that is the most important step is in the first week, build.

Because if you don't build, if you just borrow, you'll never understand the thing. The thing that I always tell every new hire is that you only ever get one chance to be new. I would much rather somebody take six weeks to ramp up

well, then four weeks to ramp up poorly because they're going to be here for a long time. They're going to be talking to lots and lots of people and they need to know what they're talking about. So yes, we do like lots of like kind of smaller enablements and different things. And we have like one-on-ones and all that kind of stuff. But the most important stage is building it, building early. You should never be afraid. I think actually that's probably the thing that I would love to is like,

In everyone's first week, they're going to do something on a very public page that they probably shouldn't do. They'll add a block in or they'll change a property or something like that. And the important thing to know as well is that we always say, you're new, that's okay.

We can restore a page to a certain point. We can delete it. Nothing is permanent in Notion. And I think that that's just getting that out of the way. The last thing you want is people to be fearful of a tool or using a tool in a certain way. Yes, there are rules. There are things that we should all do in here. But...

you should feel the psychological safety to use this tool to its maximum. And I think that that's almost like a rite of passage. You have to mess up something. You have to add something to the global projects database or something like that that isn't meant to be there.

that's totally fine um somebody's going to go in and they're going to fix it and they're going to let you know that it's totally okay and here's what you should do next time and that's i think the collective responsibility in onboarding is so important and just to let everybody know like you know this is what you did it's probably not the right thing to do that's totally okay here's what you should do next time and having a positive attitude about that yeah

Oh, yeah, I love that. I love the build not borrow part in particular. I think that is so important. I have a hate love relationships with the Nautian templates. I think they are a super good thing to have, but I think most people just use them wrong. You need to use them as inspiration. You need to use them to liquidate, see like, okay, this is what other people do. And then you can go in and try to decipher, okay, and this is how it works. And then you can do it yourself.

But expecting, you know, like with this box of Lego that if someone else builds you like this Lego piece, and particularly if it's a complex Lego piece that somehow randomly fits how you want to work, rather unlikely. And you lose so much opportunity on figuring something out. I think if you ask yourself, what is the goal of you learning Notion? You want to understand the dynamics of how things work. If you're just like, hey, I need to think for a meal plan.

I don't need to know how it works. Our community have built amazing templates for exactly that. If you're like, I want to be able to talk to people about this thing, then you need to get to the level that our amazing community are building templates. You need to understand how that stuff works. And I think that that's probably the difference in you have the people who want to use this and the people who want to understand it. And if you come into Notion to work, you want to understand it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, we're coming up to the hour. So maybe to be respectful of your time, right, and to wrap things up, even though I could keep going for another two, three hours to just talk about this. Maybe just one last question. And that would be sort of, you know, like, if you could, you know, ask everyone or encourage everyone that uses Notion to follow one specific best practice or, you know, do one specific thing,

what would that one be? There's lots that I would love to say here, but if I could just encourage every team to do one thing is at the top of your, so regardless of what your team does, at the top of your team, team space, build some buttons.

And those buttons should be your most used things. So if you want to create a new project or create new meeting notes or add a task to a project or whatever it is, build buttons that are connected into your databases down below.

Because what that will do is it's going to create the right behaviors and the right paths for people. So instead of somebody just creating a new page when they want to start a new project or creating a page in private when they want to have some meeting notes or some minutes for a team, what you're actually doing is creating them, hopefully with a really clean template. That means that you're working at the same methodology for your entire business and capturing things in the right way.

But now they're also all being stored in the right place. And that is going to, in a way that you can't imagine yet, supercharge your team. That is my one piece of advice is buttons are the most powerful and underused. I know you might argue formulas, but I'm going to make the argument for buttons. Buttons are the most underused and most powerful thing in Notion. Pick your team databases for notes, for projects, for tasks, etc.

create three buttons for them at the top of your team page quick links and it will make everyone in your team's life easier and you're all going to get to benefit from the collective brain of that team so if you could do that today you'll have a more powerful team tomorrow yeah I mean

amazing uh i i agree and i would also say like it's it's i would use buttons before formulas i think they are the bigger like the formula formulas are really nice they are really fun they can do some really really cool stuff but that's like the in the 80 20 that's the 20 right like that that will get your notion workspace to to the next level to like that that end zone but there are so many quick wins and low-hanging fruits uh on the on the way there and yeah particular when it comes to

Designing UI that encourages smart choices and the right user behavior without reducing clicks. Big fan of that. Not having to look at a lot of different places. Amazing.

Perfect. Thank you so much for this. This was an absolutely amazing conversation. I learned so much. It was super, super cool to get some insights into what a solution engineer does at Notion and how Notion thinks about solving these problems for customers. So, yeah, thank you so much for coming on today. My pleasure, Matthias. It's so fortunate that we get to work with people like you at Notion. And I'm very grateful to get to spend an hour in your company today.

Yeah, well, hopefully soon again. And until then, have a good time. Thank you. So much for my interview with Kiran. If this got you interested in using Notion for your business, but you don't quite know where to start, don't worry. Here is a complete Notion for Business setup guide. Everything you need to know to go from a blank page to a fully operating system. Just click here and I will see you in a second.