Death by a Thousand Databases

Notion makes it so easy to create your own system when we need people to be folding into the system that works for everyone.

All right, we're on air. Welcome to the Notion State of Mind podcast. Uh, I'm Josh Redd, joined by my co-host, co-founder Bryan Takayama. And we run Notion State, the world's, if I, if I may dare say, the world's best Notion agency. Um, can I dare, Bryan?

I don't see why not. I like to think of it as a consultancy, not an agency, but either way works.

Ah, all right. Tell me, uh, let's just kick off right there. Uh, what do you mean? What's, what's the difference for, for the uninitiated?

Honestly, I'm still kind of figuring out the terms because agencies were a new zone for me and I came from a traditional consulting background. I worked at Deloitte for 10 years. But the idea of a consultant in my mind is not somebody that is, uh, just cycled into an opportunity, but it's somebody that has a rich background of understanding and dissecting client issues and mixing it with the, uh, expertise of choice, which is Notion for us, to help, uh, relate that to, um, what the client solution needs to be. Where I, I don't know why, it's just when I think of an agency, it's like stranger to the organization and a stranger to the, uh, the, the client that they kind of just get filed in.

But our team is a team that works together across the world to run these cool solutions. And they have a rich expertise in not just the solution, but also the, the client aspect around it. So that's just why I like to think about that.

Yeah. What's your reaction to that? Or any, any, like any disagreement? Cause I know agency comes out a lot for you.

Yeah, probably just by default and honing in our language is I think important and all that. But I wonder if it's due to, we kind of talk about ourselves as more than just Notion implementers, but, and maybe that is like the agency model is just being like an implementer or like very project-based, whereas what we really do and what we get into with our clients is being more of a, what we would call an embedded operational partner. Do you see that as maybe like the delineation between maybe what Notion State is versus, uh, you know, uh, some other agency or person out there, you know, also doing quote unquote Notion consulting?

I think yes and, um, I think that that's a, that distinction is probably one of our most significant differentiators in the market is we're not here just to do like Notion stuff. We're here to understand your business, the ins and outs of it, oftentimes better than the entire business does because we span parts of the organization.

But honestly, I think the, the main thing that I think of different here is our consultants are part of a team that brings one another up, as opposed to like, when I think of a design agency, like we get a new client, I find a new designer, uh, that's out in the, the, the ether in the marketplace, and I pull them into that immediately. And ours are like a, a, we have a cohort of people that learn and build and grow together.

So you see it, an agency more as maybe, uh, sometimes, and I intentionally say that we're not this, we're not a broker for deals for our consultants. We're not trying to just sell and then offload and then, you know, be the middleman and take some, take some cut off the top there. But we're really trying to not, not just build ourselves up, but build up our consultants while, while, you know, building up our clients. You know, that's the end goal.

Exactly. I love like the, that, that framing as well. Like we're not a broker of talent. We don't put one of our consultants onto a client. That doesn't have considerable amount of experience before or paired with someone that has that sort of experience.

Where I would see an agency, it's like they find talent to meet the demand for the organization.

Yeah. Something I, I, uh, I can't remember if I said this in the, in the pre— in a previous episode, uh, kind of often quip that people go to Notion to solve a, a business problem and then they come to us to solve their Notion problem. And so they come to us to solve Notion problems. We, we are Notion consultants, but tying it into what we are is like embedded operational partners. Nobody buys an embedded operational partner. Nobody, nobody contracts an embedded operational partner, but they, they look for a Notion consultant cuz that's the, the current pain point. Right. Um, so that's, you know, to, I guess to show our cards a little bit, that's kind of the strategy is like, yeah, uh, we can definitely help you with, with the Notion piece, but under the surface what you're actually trying to do is make your business better. To work better, to solve business problems. That's what you came to Notion for. So let's actually get to know those really well. Like you said, we often get to know the business better than a lot of people that we're talking to know the business. Can you maybe just highlight that just a little bit? Like, what does that mean that we actually know their business better than they do sometimes?

Yeah, I think it's a, it's a really fun part of the project, uh, is, is being able to have conversations across the businesses. And then when we're having a conversation and someone introduces a pain point, we can either connect that pain point to somebody else's, or we can actually invalidate it because of our understanding of the business. Uh, so like something that's really core to our work is people come to us with their Notion problem. Our job is not to solve what they think is that initial solution.

It's to really explore across the organization to figure out what are the root causes and the root pain points that are causing them to come to Notion State. And one of the really cool artifacts that comes out of a project with Notion State or a relationship with Notion State is we should have a diagram of how data flows across their entire organization.

And what I mean by that is we should be able to clearly state how research flows into product, how product designs the tech spec and the feature brief, and how that flows into engineering, how the output of engineering flows into product marketing via product ops, and how go-to-marketing then flows into what reaches the market, and ultimately what CX and AEs and SDRs and their teams are ultimately selling.

And when we're able to diagram that out, one, we're able to say like, this is how your Notion now needs to function and build, but we can also start to tie our understanding of like, what is the business into a diagram that they've never even seen before or even had the wherewithal to kind of pull together. And I think that that's what I mean when I say we're embedded operational partners that know their business just as well, if not better than anyone in the organization.

Yeah, you anchored it off of, um, their workflows, understanding their actual work streams, like how does value get created in their business and, um, building a tool to suit that. Where do you think that people get it wrong when they're building out their Notion instance or whatever? Like what, what are they doing that's not that, that ultimately leads to, you know, failure to launch or just more confusion or you know, the, the Notion problem that, you know, eventually, you know, sometimes they come and talk to us so that we can kind of get it back on track.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's really natural what happens. Um, and what the issue is, is Notion's so flexible for the individual to build for themselves that each, each individual or each team builds their own system.

Um, and what, let's just take a go-to-market organization for example here, uh, where you have a revenue team, you have a marketing team, you have a creative ops team, um, and then you have like your, your downstream, like client-facing sales reps. And then in marketing, we have a social team and a performance team and a lifecycle marketing team and a growth team.

And each one of them has their own projects and each one of them has their own funnel for people to request things from them. Um, and each one of them ultimately needs to report out to somebody else. But what happens at all of these organizations when they first get into Notion is they download a template or they have somebody that's a power user on their team and they each build their own system. So you have a ticketing system to request a creative request. You have a ticketing system to request a social, uh, post. You have a ticketing system to request a customer story. And you have all these disparate ticketing systems where the actual execution spans everyone, but the individual tracking of it is on the individual level. So we might have 5 task databases for 5 teams where the same task is represented in each of them. So I'm getting a little granular here, but I guess the issue that happens is Notion gives people the flexibility to build their own systems when organizations that are using Notion need one system that everyone's working in.

and that's a lot of the time the solution that we're aiming to fix.

Something we often, I think, hear from people, especially when they're, or when they're wanting a little bit of, of help with their Notion is like they want autonomy, right? They want to like enable autonomy and they have a unique business. Everyone, everyone has a unique business. And we could maybe say that when we start building out information architecture, a lot of it actually is a lot more similar than maybe they realize. How do you balance autonomy with what's best for the organization?

Honestly, this is the, the balance that we play as Notion consultants and embedded operational partners is, is making sure people feel like they have autonomy and ownership and, and, and design, uh, decisions in the system while keeping the interest of the broader organization in, in mind. A lot of the time when people say my process is special, or like, I need my own system because I'm unique. It's, I have a specific tag that I need, or I measure dates a little bit differently, or I need this additional status. It's not, I need a net new database. So what our job is to do is to figure out how we can meet their general must-have requirements within a system that everyone else can use. And a lot of time this just takes multiple conversations and, uh, some some, some workshops and maybe even some accommodations at different times to kind of bring them along the journey.

It's a little bit more of a finesse part of the relationship than it is like a— there's actually a tactical framework that you apply.

I think everybody talks about collaboration like they— like, like we all do it really well. And there's probably something to tease out here, but like collaboration is more than just like sharing a Google Doc, you know, like I guess that is collaborating, right? But there's, there's levels to the game here where it's like that works on a one-to-one level, but your ability to have the network effect, I guess, uh, to, to pull out some philosophy here, uh, is you're hamstringing that, right? So what I mean by the network effect is that the more, oh, there's, there's a name for this too, and I forget what it is. Uh, but you can imagine like telephones, right? You, you have telephones. And they connect to one another. So if you have 2 telephones, you have 1 connection between those 2. If you have 3 telephones, you have 3 connections. So you've gone from 1 to 3 connections by just adding 1 more telephone. You had, you had a 4th telephone. I can't do math very good, uh, but you'd have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, I don't know, 6 or 7. The point is it exponentially raises, right? Uh, and what we want out of collaboration is for 100 people to each have a very clear signal connection between anybody else in the organization. That's the ideal of true collaboration. But realistically, you can't manage 500 connections. You don't, you don't connect with people one-on-one, right? And when you're starting to talk about the same data, talk about duplicating and sending it over and sharing and permissions and all that, obviously we're just getting into ridiculous territory, right? So tools like Notion come into play where you have this central brain. Right? Everybody talks about it as like a central brain and it really is for true collaboration. We're all looking at the same thing. We're talking about the same thing, but we're not, we're not having to interface all the time one-on-one with, with 50 different people, but we interface with the knowledge. So the knowledge becomes, you know, this piece of work that we're all working on, so to speak.

Absolutely. It's all around a specific like type of object or collection or like few types of objects. And when I mean object, I mean database type.

like a meeting or a doc or a project.

And generally speaking, what happens in organizations and where this network effect gets like heavily reduced in its value is when that object is represented multiple times in isolated fashions across the organization. This is what happens when you have project roadmaps by Excel spreadsheets. And one of the biggest jobs for us as, as Notion consultants and operational partners is what is the core object that your organization orients around and let's figure out how we can get everyone to like build and exist within that.

Um, so some organizations are extremely doc heavy. Uh, so it's figuring out how do we create a content management system with docs that the entire organization can use or work into that way people don't feel the need to create a doc on their sidebar or create their own NetNewDocs database.

And I think this is honestly one of the harder parts of the job, but once you get this right, you win over an entire organization into Notion.

I think people understand that Notion can and should and will be the solution, especially to this problem of everything's everywhere and everything's disconnected and we don't have the central brain, the central source of truth. And Notion is, is that solution. Problem is you can recreate the same problems in Notion that you had in other software, right? Because Notion is a tool for making tools. You can recreate the bad tool that you were still using, right? So that's, I think that's where a lot of people actually get hung up. Is that notion is this new— it's a different approach. It's a new approach and it requires not just thinking about yourself, not just about your team, but it does require a wholesale mindset towards your company that if you're going to truly collaborate, you have to think about everybody. So if you want insight and visibility into projects across teams, and if you want to report that up to leadership, it has to be in one spot. And that's hard for people to get right. So it's like the autonomy piece. We will, we will empower you to have autonomy to work the way you want, but it has to be within the framework that also helps everybody else work the way they want. So like what's best for you to work really well is that you have insight and access to everything else going on. And this is, I think this is like actually, uh, isn't this Kant's philosophy? The categorical imperative. And, and, uh, and I think this is the right, this is the right philosophy. How would you feel if everybody else How would the world function if everybody else acted in the same exact way? So if everybody acted in a way that was best for them, it actually becomes best for nobody and it becomes not good for you because you're all, you're all in the same ecosystem. So if you act in your own best interest, it will eventually fall back on you and, and not be successful. It has to be, it has to be for the good of, you know, for the good of the company. Didn't expect me to, didn't expect to go to philosophy there.

What I love about that, uh, that philosophy though, the categorical imperative, is that what you called it? I don't know if that's the actual title for it, but maybe that is a title, whether or not it's that one.

Uh, we should probably have our, our producer, uh, double check.

There's something that's like, so, uh, like really important about this concept that you're, you're touching on here, especially organizations. That are using Notion to manage the organization is Notion itself makes this super hard for businesses because every time you log into Notion, you're gifted your own projects and tasks database, or you click on this very fixed feature here. That's your template, or that's the marketplace where you can download any of 100,000 templates to create your own personal system. Or when you're talking to Nosy, the little Notion AI chat on the bottom right. And say like, I need a project syntax database, it'll just bust out a new one. Uh, like one of, one of the, the, the scariest metrics I ever saw at one of our bigger clients was they, they were giving us by AI action statistics and we were just seeing databases fly up this chart when they, when people create them. I'm like, no, like this is not what we want. Um, that's, that's something as a Notion consultant that we're constantly battling. Notion makes it so easy to create your own system. When we need people to be folding into the system that works for everyone. Um, and it's, yeah, so, so relevant and such a, such a hard piece of it.

Yeah. Well, and I think, um, the more we, the more we did this, I think as we graduated from thinking about, you know, the person to the team and then to enterprise, it was like, yeah, we need to, we need to have really good team hubs. We need to have a really good structure. We need to have the, the company home and an intranet. Things like that. What we actually can do is come full circle, uh, back to the individual and we can give them their own space. Like we can actually give them their own, their own place. They can, they can customize it. The, the trick is that they need to pull from the right data sources, right? And they need to have guardrails on what they can like create or not create. And, and, uh, unless we expect them all to become Notion experts to understand how these things break or don't break. We need to, we need to provide those guardrails, right? So we do have those guardrails and at the same time we do provide autonomy where it's like in the personal hub, um, you know, somebody can spend 90 to 95% of their time in that hub and have everything that they need. And that's, that's actually, I think that is the epitome of how good Notion is when you do it right, because when you are pulling from central data, there are a million, actually infinite permutations of how you can view that data. So it's all about contextualizing data in the right place at the right time for the right person. Like that's probably what you would call information, right? Something useful. And that's all about how do we pull from a thousand projects, you know, whether they're 5 years old or recent and tasks and docs and all that. Well, We, we curate how data is tagged and described and things like that so that we pull it up to the right people when they want to see it, how they want to see it. They can customize their own views. They don't have to worry about messing up the team hub or anything like that. They truly can have their own view. We just got to get to that point where it has to start from this centralized framework and architecture first, and then we can start giving everybody their own little studio.

And it's, it's so important to get this right in an organization because I, I, I think something that, um, we suffered from in our first couple of years and probably many Notion consultants also suffer from in their, like, the success of their deployments is, um, when you're deploying it, you're deploying it for the people that are already in the organization.

Um, but a lot of our clients are gonna double the number of users in the next year or triple.

And if you don't have this system, when you deploy for the people that are currently there, that are starting to use it, that extra 200 people that are joining next year, they don't have an easy on-ramp on into the system.

So they start to create their own by creating that me hub.

That's their first introduction into how Notion works for this company and it curates their experience. So like they fold directly into it as opposed to having to learn it.

And that's just such a critical component.

And we're going to give one more example of where this is really, really powerful is it's not just the me hub. because the me hub is relatively generic and it's good, but it's relatively generic. What you can do once you start to build these systems is you can create persona-based hubs. Uh, an example, going back to go-to-market organization, could be the my AE hub. So my account executive hub or the my SDR business or like sales development, uh, uh, representative hub or my CSM hub where you're building hubs for functions where that function ultimately owns this, but it's everyone that is being brought onto their team, can be brought onto their team's methods and methodologies within the confines of the system. And that's where we start to see scaled adoption with distributed ownership.

And it starts to have a really positive cyclical effect on the organization.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Highlighting the fact that again, there's a million permutations of how you can visualize your data and contextualize it. When I think about this concept, I think about almost like this, Gemstone that just has a million facets on it and like the beauty's inside it and you turn it a 10th of a degree and you, you do see something different, right? But you're seeing the same thing. And, and that's kind of how I see it. If we do it right, we're, we're giving everybody their own little, you know, unique view, but they're, they're still looking at the right thing and the same thing.

That's a new Josh-ism. I haven't heard you say that one before, but I like it.

Really? I have to work on it. Doesn't it? The analogy falls apart, I think, pretty quickly. So with all that said, how do we actually, we've highlighted a lot of problems and challenges. Like, how do we actually start? How do we do it right? How do we help companies not face these pitfalls? Or if they have, how do we recover? Like, how do we start this process for our clients or our customers?

In our 75 clients of experience now and like 150 different projects that we've deployed, I think we've developed a little bit of an understanding of some of the The challenges that the typical organization faces when they need to do this at scale. And a lot of this we learned through trial and error and through feeling the pains ourselves. And it's because there's so much surface area on Notion to cover when you first get into the product, but also for each user, they can create their own variant of that. Um, a lot of what we've been talking about today honestly applies to that, but once we're, we're having the conversation with the client, we start to break the discussion up into different categories and it's how are your workspace permission or your workspace settings configured. And that might sound mundane, but that component there will determine whether or not you can have team spaces proliferated by any individual in your organization or how your connections are set up to understand like if anybody can set up a connection and start to use external tooling to create your own software. So it's like really having an intentional conversation about those. To ensure that we're putting in the guardrails to prevent unintentional proliferation of your information. That's one surface area. Then you have your sidebar and this is your team spaces that are on there and it's within those team spaces. Can anyone in that team space add a new page? If so, you're, you likely have team spaces that have 30 pages in your sidebar and then your entire sidebar scroll is one team space and you might have 50 other team spaces in the organization. So it's having a conversation to understand like, what is your actual operating model? And what I mean by that is what are your core pillars of your organization or your core departments or the core teams that need their own segmentation of information and making that represented on your sidebar. For a product organization, this is like EPD, go-to-market, and foundation. 4 team spaces is all you need, those 3 plus company intranet. And it's like, how do we have that conversation to make sure that we can create a good user experience on the sidebar because people inevitably are going to navigate through that no matter how many times we tell them to close it. And then the next one is how are you structuring the core pages that are linked everywhere in your workspace? And a lot of the times when we think of it, this one, it's like, what is your company home? Or where is your company operating system? Or where is the, the, the people handbook in your workspace? And how is that represented? And it's making sure that we can start to create a workstream that's centered around like creating really strong representations of that information. Um, so there's, there's many more facets to it that we actually touch on in this, but what I'm, what I'm trying to get to in this long tirade of, of, of information here is when an organization typically gets into Notion, the first thing they start to do is build databases or build pages and then build pages within pages. And what we do is we start to bring everyone out of that mindset and start thinking of this more structurally and intentionally.

This is how we build a system for an organization to to adopt this and make it work for them over time.

So rather than letting people bowl in a bowling alley from 100 feet away, what we're saying is like, no, here's the alley. We'll set up the bumper guards so you don't, you don't gutter. You're going for the right one. And we'll even give you like the little, the little ramp down, let you drop your ball in and like strike. If you, if you do this. I mean, Strike is coming. That's terrible.

I'm going to give you like a yes and no to that one. Cause like, yes, like we want to put in the right structure to ensure everyone can get a strike every time that they're bowling.

But there's more freedom and autonomy than that in the systems that we want to deploy.

And it's to the point that you were getting to earlier. It's like, what is the balance between autonomy and ownership of your system versus standardization and how people are adopting it? We want to give them the ability to use the ramp and the ball and the gutters if they want. But we also want to make sure that they feel like they have their own template So they have their own views or they have their own way of interacting with this information to make it feel like it's still their, their system and their, um, their, their tool. Yeah.

Yeah. This really highlights, I think, uh, and we can kind of wrap up with this, but, uh, when I really think about like what we do and not just like what Notion's about, but what do we really do? I think when you kind of boil it down, it's like we, and I always struggle to put my finger on it, but we, we really help people do their best work. There's so much about work and systems and digital information where you're spending so much of your time and your effort and stress just doing all the things around your actual work. Like it's the busy work, it's the meta work, it's all that stuff. And again, it can happen in Notion, which is why it can sometimes feel like it's failing and why we help companies make it right. But at the end of the day, it's about letting talented people actually be talented and do the thing that they were hired for in the company and, you know, kind of operate at their best. And that's what makes people feel fulfilled in life and successful. That's where real value gets created in the company when that's all set up for them to have success. So we're putting people in a place not to— yeah, bad analogy that I gave with the bowling, maybe in some sense where it's like that feels really narrow and you can only do this one thing. But what we're trying to do is give you a place to, to work in, like a digital office that, you know, is clean and it's organized and you know where things are and, uh, you can actually get to work.

Said in the framing of, of one of our clients, it's, we don't want the product manager whose responsibility is designing a feature for the, the solution they're selling to the market to have to think about the project management system that they need to build to build that feature. We want them to be able to enter the system, document it and do the job that they are supposed to be doing, not figuring out how to do that, that sort of program management piece.

And on that note, what ends up happening is that a lot of people, uh, who have a job start to become the Notion builder, the Notion expert, and then all of a sudden 50, 60, 80% of their job is trying to build up this Notion system and maintain it where, you know, they should be, you know, an operator or something else. That's where, you know, just makes sense. Bring us in. We've got, we've got the experience. All of a sudden I'm on a sales pitch here, but we can help.

I think it's just, it's right though. I mean, everything that we've talked about, I'm sure is a pain that many organizations and many people using Notion are feeling.

And our job is to one, reduce that pain, but also to take ownership of it. Um, it shouldn't be on the shoulders of somebody whose job is also to be a function of the business.

All right. That is a wrap on the Notion State of Mind podcast. Of course, I thank you for, for hanging out with us. And, um, you know, as we, as we do more of these, we'd love to hear your feedback, your comments, your questions, your appreciation for my analogies. And, uh, if you have any critiques, be sure to, uh, send them to bryan@notionstate.com. Otherwise, we'll see you in the next one.