We’re on a huge and difficult mission together to make toolmaking ubiquitous. Which is why I’m so excited to introduce two new leaders who will be uniquely helpful on this journey.
Teams can’t expect you to see into the future — a pre-mortem meeting can help you plan around risks and address these issues, keeping your project on track. But most product managers don’t use them, even though pre-mortems might save their launches.
Danielle Baskin is a product designer, situation designer, visual artist, and the founder of numerous eccentric small businesses such as a Branded Fruit, Dialup, and Maskalike.
On the journey to starting a company, there are many pitfalls that can get in the way of your success. Here are three problems most startups face — and how a knowledge base helps combat them (with examples from fast-growing companies).
From a personal habit tracker to a central operating system for your team, try one or all of these templates to help you reflect, plan, and grow.
Looking back at two years of growth, we wanted to take some time to consider how we can build a lasting company, one where everyone can do their best work and go after Notion's mission together. The result is a new set of operating values.
You’re probably very familiar with sprint retrospectives. However, retros aren't always documented. When retrospectives are documented instead of just discussed, then the team has a focal point for the next sprint and can take those learnings forward.
Teams often try to apply in-person collaboration techniques to remote work. But distributed teams face their own challenges — here are some solutions to keep teams connected.
Gretchen McCulloch is an internet linguist — an analyst of the language of the internet, for the people of the internet. She's the author of the New York Times bestselling "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language," a Resident Linguist at WIRED, and was formerly the Resident Linguist at The Toast.
Use Kim Scott's Just Work template to quickly record instances of workplace injustice and respond based on the role you played.
A project charter spells out the goals, deliverables, budget, timeline, and people involved in a project. It serves as a starting point to get the team aligned.
How we reimagined our template gallery as a marketplace for millions around the world.
Whether you’re a manager meeting with a direct report, two project team members, or a CEO meeting with a potential investor, one-on-one meetings will bolster the confidence and trust you need to keep your startup running smoothly.
Omar Rizwan is a researcher and developer interested in new computer interfaces and new ways of programming. He previously worked at Dynamicland, Stripe, and Khan Academy. He’s a prolific creator of interesting projects such as Geokit, Screenotate, Hijack Your Feed, and many others.
With a meeting agenda template, you and your team can stop wasting valuable time. The best template will give guidelines for what needs to be recorded but leaves space for lightbulbs that may pop up in the moment.
Internal documentation might not sound like the most exciting project, but when done strategically, it will speed up your team’s collaboration, onboarding, training, and overall communication.
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) don’t have to be painful to maintain or systematize. Having an SOP template in place will set your startup up for success. With an SOP template to start with, standard guidelines, and rigorous taxonomy, SOPs can become the resource they’re intended to be instead of a pain.
Understanding the three knowledge types and how to categorize them, apply them, and use them is called metaknowledge. Leveraging metaknowledge can help your company improve productivity and reduce the likelihood of knowledge getting lost when employees move in and out of roles.
Organizational learning takes one person’s or one team’s learnings and codifies them for the rest of the team to benefit from. When this centralized knowledge is accessible by everyone, it helps the whole team level up.
Former Slack Head of Growth Merci Grace's six templates cover foundational processes like willingness-to-pay interviews, your first landing page, and remote brand sprints.
Try the template that Netflix used to differentiate themselves and build a memorable identity.
Howard Rheingold is a writer and educator known for being one of the first thinkers to treat the internet as a social and cultural environment.
Say it with us: the Powerpoint pitch deck is dead. Raise your next round on Notion instead.
Many existing teamwork models are based on teams that interact in person at least some of the time. And that’s what messes with efforts to work well remotely — we’re taking in-person strategies and bringing them into the virtual world.
We just launched Notion in Japanese! One more important step toward serving our global audience better.
A startup’s job is to grow, which it can’t do successfully without a codified and simple-to-use process documentation system.
This months-long project migrated Notion’s PostgreSQL monolith into a horizontally-partitioned database fleet — an effort to make Notion faster and more reliable for years to come.
At Notion, we use Notion for everything — here are 7 custom tools we built to replace other software, complete with templates your team can use.
Browser distractions can have a ripple effect on company-wide productivity. The right Chrome extensions can help you and your team curb the most distracting parts of the web. We’ve pulled together a list of the best Chrome extensions for productivity to keep your team focused.
We're growing our credit program and partnering with industry leaders to help more young companies win.
Working to catalog and preserve institutional knowledge to make it easily available for your team takes a little time and effort. But by taking it on, you can save money, improve collaboration, and get an edge on the competition.
Few teams actually codify why they're doing what they're doing. Former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner developed this template to help companies do exactly this.
By formalizing your startup’s knowledge-sharing process, you can better ensure teammates are aware of all the information regarding company ideals and operations.
Notion Consultant Fede Sanchez fell in love with productivity tools when he was a teenager in Spain. Now he runs productivity bootcamps and UX/UI courses to teach others how to do their best work. Here are his best insights and tips for using Notion.
Alan Kay, or the “father of personal computers," is best known for his work on object-oriented programming languages, windowing graphical user interface design, and for leading the team that developed Smalltalk.
Physical lists, PDF format lists, and spreadsheets are clunky and time-consuming. These methods are also most of the rigidly one dimensional to-do list templates you’ll find on the web. We explain why they’re lacking and show you how you can create tasks list templates for your team that can help you get more done.
A big part of our vision is connecting Notion with every other tool and system you use, so you can streamline, automate, and centralize your everyday work. Today, we're taking a big leap towards that reality: we're acquiring Automate.io, a company that has spent the last 5 years building connectivity and integrations for 200+ other software tools.
Get the most out of school with these Notion templates for students and teachers — organize all your assignments, roommate to-do's, and club projects in one place.
Gain a competitive advantage over other startups by baking in this element of knowledge-sharing as early as you can in the startup lifecycle. The long-term health and success of the startup depend on it.
One of the most impactful open-source tools for Notion (and the whole internet, really) is Babel. Here's why we decided to sponsor their team with $10,000.
To stay adaptive while allowing for sustainable growth, startups must internalize the importance of knowledge transfer and incorporate it into your day-to-day.
Improving performance and user experience by moving from a client-rendered marketing site to a static site generated by Next.js.
Security and privacy have always been top priorities. Here's a breakdown of how our SOC 2 report reaffirms this and makes all our efforts in this area transparent to you.
"Youtube had always been a hobby for me," says Ahmed. "But once I got to one hundred thousand subscribers, it hit me that this was a real business. When I got to one million, I was lost. I didn't know how to keep up."
Done right, an employee onboarding system is scalable to allow for team growth and shares continued learning opportunities to support employees — all to achieve the overall goal of reducing employee turnover.
Creator of critically-acclaimed puzzle games Braid and The Witness, Jonathan Blow is an independent video game designer and programmer known for his thoughtful development and fiercely critical eye.
Organizations like Medic Mobile, Wikimedia, and Greenpeace use Notion to collaborate and stay organized — but we hope this is just the beginning.
Courteney has a job that she didn't know existed a year ago. As companies grow, their wikis and docs grow too. And hiring a Chief Notion Officer is becoming foundational to their success.
Collaboration needs to be concrete and focused from the get-go, both of which are often missing from a startup’s collaboration strategy. Here’s how you can nail them down.
Time is of the essence for Erika and Arnelle, two co-founders who are racing toward the holy grail of startup success: product-market fit.
Inspired by computer pioneer Ted Nelson’s concept of transclusion, Synced Blocks allows your content to live multiple places. Edit once, and changes are reflected everywhere that block is synced.
Your public Notion pages now have a new home, which puts your personal branding at the front of those public pages links.
A single source of truth gives startups a single place to plan project and organize all their most vital information.
It was settled — Alex and Sachin were going to quit. Both at Facebook, they knew they had a good thing going ever since they were paired on a project.
Our mission is to make it possible for everyone around the world to tailor their software tools. This news is a big step in that direction.
Every email message is turning into a frustrating game of telephone. That's why we asked Slack for advice.
Former Apple and Khan Academy designer-artist-technologist, May-Li Khoe pioneers new ways for humans to interact with machines.
These COVID-19 responders needed a new way to track their work, fast.
Cross functional collaboration is essential for teams of 10 or teams of 100. Here’s how you can create a framework to enable it at your startup.
Notion’s data model enables the product’s most foundational component: blocks. Through blocks, we allow users more flexibility and better control over their information.
It’s our priority to ensure the trust and safety of everyone who views Notion pages on the web. Today, we’re rolling out policy and product changes to strengthen these efforts.
Performance should be a feature. So this week, we implemented SQLite on our desktop apps to make page load and navigation faster.
Custom workflows unlock your team’s capabilities. Managers need a process for identifying their team’s needs and building a workflow to fit those needs.
Four experts discuss the life and belief systems of computer pioneer Richard Hamming.
Most companies understand the need for documentation. But it needs context to be effective for your team — putting everyone’s work into perspective.
Pam’s work made computers accessible to groups like social workers and hippies, providing a resource network for anything they needed.
Ever wondered how the Notion team uses Notion? Wonder no more. Hopefully it inspires some uses in your own workspace.
Former Senior Research Fellow at XEROX Parc, Stu made significant contributions to Human Computer Interaction, like the design of Engelbart's mouse.
Knowledge management systems unite all your company knowledge in one place. Here’s how to build one that’s easy to navigate for your team.
Your onboarding process should extend way past the new hire’s first day. Here’s how you can develop custom employee onboarding to meet your company’s needs.
A self-described “controversial figure,” Ted’s ideas have influenced modern computing and the role these tools should play in our lives.
A great creative brief encompasses everything from background information to deliverables. Here’s a template that can be used for any type of project.
A consistent decision-making process leads to effective decisions. Here are four frameworks to use depending on your situation.
Key differences between Kanban and Scrum may dictate which fits your team. But you can also build a hybrid model that pulls the best from each approach.
Attendees, action items, follow-ups, and more — effective meeting notes need to cover the spectrum. Use this template that accounts for it all.
One of the titans of internet communication, Louis invented the datagram in the early 1970s, paving the way for the internet as a revolutionary tool for distributing information.
A core member of the Apple Macintosh development team in the 1980s, Andy designed and architected the original Macintosh software system.
