How to build a digital office for remote work

good morning good afternoon good evening to all of those who have joined us from various places around the world we're so excited to get started this morning um my name is brittany i lead the sales team here at notion and we're so excited to have you all join us today for our very first ever webinar um we put together some really awesome content for you all and we're really uh hoping you guys get a lot out of the session so we're gonna go ahead and jump right in so for those of you who may not know too much about notion um we're an all-in-one workspace for your docs wikis tasks and project management and we know we know those are a lot of buzzwords that everybody in the industry is saying right now and so we'll tell you a little bit about why we think notion is different and it's really for two primary reasons the first is we're gonna bring everything together in one place so you can really consolidate a lot of the tools you're using and stay connected the second is we're gonna make all of these workflows super customizable and we're really excited to show you a couple of examples of this today and i'm andrea i'm on the marketing team and brittany and i are going to be your co-host today and we also have david from our team as well who will help us out with the live demo so david do you want to wave and say hi i think you have to if you if you say hi then you'll show up on the screen hello everyone well uh thanks david so um you know it's really great to see so many people here um i'm personally calling in from my bedroom and i know that britney is calling in from her garage so strange times and i'm actually curious to see how many people are using their bedrooms as a makeshift office um and we want to see the actual numbers so just click the raised hand button at the bottom of the screen oh wow all right that's a lot um the world we live in yeah so a lot of us are all in our bedrooms um we're definitely you know in the same boat and yeah most of us are working from home many of us have never done it before and it seems like you know every day we're just figuring out some problem or challenge to keep people aligned and keep work transparent so right now being able to adapt to this new reality this new normal it's really one of the biggest competitive advantages that you can have right now so um we're super excited today to help you learn some strategies for better remote work so hopefully you learned some things and um quick housekeeping item in case there's any issues with zoom and i'm you know it's probably not going to happen but just in case um and you know brittany and i haven't reconnected on the original link within 10 minutes um we will reschedule the rest of the session and send you an email um with the details just in case so you know we don't want you to stay here on the call just waiting thanks andrea so let's go ahead and get started and as a salesperson i personally always love to start off with a good story um and so today we're gonna do that we will start with a story and all good stories they're gonna need a main character and we're gonna call him doug so doug is a product manager who recently for better or worse just like us all is working 100 from home and this is what his desktop looks like frightening right don't know how he can get any work done but somehow we've all managed to figure it out uh right now doug's exploring a new product feature and he starts out by jotting some personal notes down in evernote and he needs to start turning those notes into a google doc so that he can later present it to his boss and so at the same time he's doing all of this he's also needing to search for a product roadmap powerpoint that he made a long time ago i know we've all been there remember that feeling when you know you created something you know you saved it somewhere but you can't remember the name or where for the life of you well same with doug and he finally found the version who knows if it's the right version it was buried in some email chain and on top of all of this you know doug needs to share this proposal with his engineering team so he emails it to the project manager who then will forward it on to the engineering team and so now a week goes by doug hasn't heard an update not a shocker right um naturally he pings the team in slack and they give him the dreaded news that okay sorry doug but the project's gonna be twice as long as we originally thought is all of this giving you a headache yet yeah bernie just looking at this setup makes my brain hurt um but what's crazy is that most of us do the same thing every day like i have a ton of tabs open right now and it's just it's kind of sad um you know like multiply doug across your company and think about the time the focus um all the information that's lost and you know doug's a fictional character here but um he represents like the hundreds of teams that we've talked to who've had this exact narrative and these exact challenges and you know these are pms or design leaders individual engineers um even department directors so if this sounds like you at all then you're definitely in the right place so brittany do you want to walk us through our agenda totally um so today we're gonna start with uh first where we see remote teams start to break down um then we're gonna go into what we mean by a digital office and really why we think you need one um and then we're gonna walk through the main pillars of building a digital office um lastly we're actually gonna leave some time for a q a at the end so we're also going to be stopping throughout the presentation to field some of these questions so please please please um don't be shy submit your questions in the q a section anytime we're going to be keeping an eye on that and addressing them both throughout the presentation as well as at the end cool thanks brittany so before we talk about how to build this digital office um we just want to dive a little deeper into the challenges of remote work and what we've seen um are pretty typical challenges so this is the notion office and most of us used to go to something like this every day and when you're in the office you can talk to your coworkers your work just feels really visible to the rest of the company but you know what happens when you don't have an office what happens when all of us are working in our bedrooms and we're only interfacing with each other on zoom and you know brainy i know you're managing a team of nine right so i imagine that's like especially hard when the whole team's remote yeah yeah i don't know about all of you who are joining with us today but i'm you know constantly talking to my friends who are sharing just how hard this transition is you know it's a huge new experience we never could have anticipated and oftentimes a lot of people are feeling isolated and it's just honestly all around tough um and we i know have all experienced at some point that feeling of i hope uh my colleagues know i'm doing my part and i definitely hope my boss sees how full my calendar is so he knows or she knows uh that i'm actually working and doing my part um and i know we can all empathize with this but you know it's that constant glance to slack to see who has that little green dot or doesn't you know we all know what i'm talking about and you know as a boss it's really really hard to know during these times how to make your team feel supported and really able to do their best work uh today's reality it's just tough and there's no needing to beat around the bush here yeah i feel the same way especially the um the slack green dot thing i think i'm always kind of paranoid like i want people to know that i'm online all the time which i don't know how healthy that is um but those are the tools that we we have today so um to break it down these are the three ways in which remote teams tend to tend to break down and this is again based on what we've observed when we've talked to a lot of newly remote teams so the first one is that um there's just no home base what i would call it because people don't feel part of one team let alone one company and you know someone when you join and you're a new um co-worker and usually everyone in the office they'll know and they'll like come and say hi to you and they can welcome you but now like if you join a new company you have to like awkwardly message people on slack um just to figure out where to find something and you know even when you're not new maybe looking for things like really important things like how to enroll in benefits or even more important like your company-wide goals and you just have no sense of what's accurate or up-to-date so what we've found is that out of all of our users who built a digital office 98 of them are able to save time by cutting down on things like searching for documents or you know asking teammates where things are um so that's that's a big difference uh brittany do you want to talk about the second challenge yeah so when you don't have a home base like andrea was talking about you know no one really knows what each other is doing no one knows what other teams are doing and it's even hard to know just all around how decisions are being made and without visibility into these types of things it's just it makes doing our job honestly pretty tough um so take a example and i'm sure this has all happened to us before let's go back to our friend doug um you know doug sends an email with a new process um on how we're going to be documenting feature requests um but not everybody is going to be on that email chain so obviously not everybody's going to see it so what ends up happening is doug has to answer the same question over and over and over again from different people who are asking about said process change um and we've all been there right either on the asking or the receiving end of those questions and i don't know about you andrea but literally it's the worst feeling when you ask a question whether it's in slack or a different chat messaging system and someone just replies with a link to the thread no like hey yeah let me get that for you it's just kind of makes you feel like oops clearly i should have been following that channel and i should have seen that and you know let's actually take a step back and imagine a world where there's really no need for that to happen anymore because everything that we need to know is just documented and stored in your digital office so what if we didn't have to send any of these really long explanatory emails even at all and even better what if there were no more passive aggressive pings yes please um it's actually not as crazy as you think so we recently sent out a survey to our customers and we found that the people who have a digital office in notion were able to send and receive 26 less emails and um internally actually at notion we have zero internal emails because everything is either a notion or slack um so that's the second challenge um andrea i'll turn back over to you to talk a bit about the third yeah thanks brittany so the third one is that you know surprise surprise collaboration is really hard you know most of the communication tools that we rely on right now which is basically slack and zoom um it's very synchronous so if you missed something you missed it but you you know we don't do project work this way like you know say product and design are working on a launch together and maybe the designer is using figma to create launch graphics but then the stakeholders that she's trying to gather feedback from they don't even know how to use figma and like this is a real example that i've seen recently so we found that if you have one place for asynchronous conversations like a digital office um people actually complete projects 32 percent faster so simply having a place where people can comment on launch plans um you know look at designs together talk about the specs um and provide feedback it really makes your whole team that much more efficient yeah so again this is why it's so important to have a digital office and especially if you want to keep your team productive and feeling supported not just now you know we once thought this was the future well the future is now and so we're all just trying to survive during these times and let's not add stressful work environments to an already long list of things we're dealing with right now um so i think actually looking at the time it's probably a good time for us to stop and see if there's any questions andrea i think that's that's good yeah definitely so let's take a look at the list all right so the first one is what are some tools that you can get rid of by using notion um that's a great question and um honestly it can vary largely by um you know customer to customer but when i think about personally the conversations that i have with all customers we really hear most often customers replacing a lot of point solutions and so these are going to be things like your confluence your google drive or sites some of the project management tools like trello or sauna um and really even some jira replacements and i think if we think about it really the the beauty of notion is that um you know a huge driver actually as to why companies turn to us is because it's so so flexible so you may come in with a specific use case say um you know a wiki for an example and you might want to immediately replace confluence but as you get into the tool and you get more and more experienced with it you realize just again how many different workflows you can create and you start to figure out what other tools that you're using today could be replaced and so um you know you might start with as wiki as i mentioned but realize like oh well some of the project management and task management workflows can start to replace asana and it can just snowball from there um and like i said i really think the beauty about notion is that you know it's different because you can go buy a ton of different pieces of software out there and as a team you're kind of forced to adapt and modify your process to work around around the way the tool is built and designed and notions actually the complete opposite of that and so you come into notion with your own process your own workflow and you create notion to work the way that you work and i think that's the key difference um so hopefully that answers your questions um continue to field more we're gonna stop um throughout the presentation but thank you so much for um the folks who submitted that all right so we've been talking about this idea of the digital office but we haven't totally explained uh what it is and put simply you know your digital office is your digital equivalent of a physical office um but the devil's in the details here um because if we really try to define this it's you know your customized all-in-one workspace where you can collaborate with your team and other teams you know you can share updates and knowledge asynchronously and i saw that someone asked what asynchronously means it just means that you're not live like on a zoom call you can do it on your own time or whatever time zone that you're in and yeah you can work on projects together where you can really see and understand each other's presence and contributions so um brittany do you want to explain a little bit more about what we mean by customizing all in one yeah um i think it makes most sense if we just show you so let's go back to our good friend doug um how many apps did he have to go through if you remember looking at that screen just to push one project forward you know what if instead um you knew how to create a relationship between your docs your wiki and your tasks so that doug um creates some meeting notes about a project feature he shares it with the relevant stakeholders as he's doing here and includes all the important details and then he links it to the meeting notes so that all of the context is there and as he finishes up here once he's all done it will voila get shipped on time looks like magic right well it's not and in all seriousness as you just saw not once did doug have to break his flow you know trying a million different passwords um he couldn't remember if it was you know one exclamation point or one question mark he didn't have to search through his dreaded email inbox to find that powerpoint presentation and really this is the beauty of having all of these point solutions in one single space like notion so i was explaining during the q a um notion doesn't dictate how you work and so the flow you just saw that uh doug had created a notion that was completely customized and it really adapts to the way that doug and his team already worked and this is really what we see is the future of work where instead of working with scattered documents and so many different apps all of your work can start to become bundled together and we can all say goodbye to the million tabs we've all once had in our browser yeah um thanks brittany so i think another thing to point out is really speaking to the fact that everything is bundled together this presentation that you're seeing it's built in notion two so we actually like have the presentation and the demo all in one workspace so truly we're just trying to consolidate everything all right so um we're gonna show you different a few different workflows that make your digital office really effective and these are based on working with lots of teams you know from companies like wall street journal pixar nike all the ones that you see here so these are really hopefully best practices that you can take back onto your own teams and we're going to demo three main workflows in notion so the first one is going to be company and team wikis that act as your home base then shared documentation and then a project management system that basically it keeps everything bundled together cool so um thanks to david to uh driving the presentation in the demo so let's get started the first one is company wikis and uh going back to that challenge about not having a home base so your company wiki it's that one page where everyone knows to go if they have a question it's basically like your central page in your workspace and ideally this page it should have your companies all of the important docs so that they're really easily accessible and people know um exactly where to go for what so think your strategy your mission we can click into that um company policies employee directory yeah so like here's your potential mission page with all your values and what you put here really reflects what kind of company you are so um since we're creating our digital office you can kind of think of this company wiki page as like your office front door right it's the way that everyone comes into the workspace every day and once you're in like we all know how to make a cup of coffee um we all know where the meeting rooms are bathrooms et cetera it's the same idea as this digital office wiki so a great idea is to again like i said document your mission and your company goals here so that people can really easily stay aligned and i don't know about you but nearly every company that i've worked for in the past has struggled with okr tracking you know the dreaded time at the end of the quarter where we all have to figure out what we're doing next um and notion is actually the first company where it's super clear like not only what my team goals are but like all team goals and how they all roll up to what we as a company are are trying to achieve so and surprise surprise it's because everything is in notion and it's related to each other so it's honestly it's amazing um yeah and then david did you want to click into the company goals just to show what that looks like yeah exactly so you can have goals for each team you can make this a database whatever you want um cool so brittany do you want to talk about a couple other good use cases here yeah there's a ton of fun um stuff to talk about here so another great use case is going to be company-wide policies and as i'm sure we can all really um right now with this work from home transition there's a lot of changes that are happening constantly and quickly and i know for us personally um at notion we have had a ton of changes with our expense policies or our home office stipends and even how we communicate with each other um before all of this quarantine notion actually was all about that in-person work and so we really had to quickly adapt and we had um our team draft up some really really helpful communication guidelines that just make working remotely that much less painful or stressful um you know having all of these things written down and of course easily referenceable it really helps create that um connective tissue that's missing when we're not all in the same physical space um you know no one's left feeling alone or out of the loop and okay okay so we've all been here maybe you slept in one morning and missed a big announcement but the beauty of having it all documented in your digital office is you don't have to feel bad you know when you wake up you can just go exactly um to the place where it lives in notion and read up on what happened and why and so um another really good use case is the example of an employee handbook and this is really useful for both new hires and existing teammates um i think we're all we can all kind of empathize we're going through times where we've had to either hire um as well as on board people during um this remote life we're now living and so for new hires they usually get to have that in person onboarding experience so as a replacement you know having an employee directory in notion um is like a really great place to have people get introduced and it's also a really good opportunity for the rest of the organization to know exactly where to go and read up on their new colleagues and then you know know exactly you know who's new and what they're doing and how you can connect with them yeah um this is great and really to make it feel even more like a home base you should definitely customize the homepage to match your company so you can really make it whatever you want right brittany yeah i mean like i said everything is in notion super customizable so um you can do things like upload your logo um you can add a branded cover photo and even emojis we all love emojis i'm sure you've all been seeing them here throughout the presentation um and so one best practice that we highly recommend is as i mentioned earlier it's establishing communication guidelines so um i mentioned when we started to work from home our team came up with a new one recently as well and it's a great and easy way to get started it's honestly just as important as your company mission or goals because um having people know how they should be talking to each other remotely really can make or break your team so things like how you use slack channels you know how to give feedback um how to communicate big updates you know these are all things that you are going to want to include in something like this to help set expectations um and i'm sure you've all been thinking throughout this like okay wow all of this looks a little you know super impressive it looks a little intimidating hard to create and actually it's not that at all um everything in notion is fairly simple to create and the best part about it all is you don't have to be technical you don't have to be technical to create things and um you can build really polished looking guides in just a matter of minutes and so the whole point of a digital office is that it really helps and enables everybody to contribute and use it and i think that's really the key um so andrea do you want to talk about team wikis yes so um we covered what a company wiki looks like but i think to really round this out you want to have a wiki for each team um so you can see on the sidebar here that there's one for product for hr engineering design marketing sales support um and you can really you can customize this to match your company structure so if these aren't the teams or you have like multiple sub teams and lots of departments you can just you can make it whatever you want and um the key here is that the wikis aren't just for show right you want people not just to reference them um like once a month but you want them to spend time in this digital office every single day where they're doing um real everyday work alongside your knowledge and your task management so basically team members should be able to talk to each other inside of each of their own their own home pages so let's use marketing as an example so this is marketing's wiki and you know you can add things like the people on the team um you know what we do what's our mission what's our priorities for the week you can add things like brand assets all your typical stuff that's usually like floating around in a google drive somewhere um but the other thing is that you can have like your entire um editorial calendar in here where like real writing is being done yeah we can click into the calendar and you can see what's in in progress maybe click into that scott belski blog post and then inside this card right like you can write the entire draft and you know all that ambient information like you know being able to chime in on a conversation or maybe you're in the office and you overhear your teammate talking and then you pull them aside to offer feedback you can do that completely online now so it's really really easy for another teammate to just comment on the draft here and then discuss the draft with the writer so basically teams can they can have this shared space for their work um like marketing but um they also provide transparency to anyone else in the company who needs to be up to speed on what that team is doing so um for example we just go back to the marketing wiki like let's use brittany and me right brittany's on sales so sales can just pop into the marketing wiki and they can see like what are some of the current projects they can find testimonials and other assets you know if an account executive needs to talk to a customer and they really need a good quote they can just pop in here and find it themselves um and yeah it's all it's all customized so your team's wiki should really reflect that team's priorities so marketing's wiki looks like this but you know let's look at the engineering wiki it has like totally different information um so they may have like code guidelines or the roadmap or triage rotations really whatever works for your specific team and your specific company yeah honestly i can't tell you how helpful this has been just in my personal experience just recently the other day my boss had asked me to kind of draft up everything that sales and marketing is working on from a growth perspective and i was like ah it's gonna like take two hours of my time i mentally blocked out two hours on my calendar and um i actually navigated over to the marketing teams wiki in notion and um surprise surprise our marketing team is um awesome love them they had a database that had all of their priorities with a property that was called growth literally made my job so easy i was able to just filter and then um create a copy basically of that and give it back to my boss and so it was just such a total time save and it's just a real life example of how these wikis can help in ways that we don't always originally anticipate um so can't give my um you know support for uh team wiki's more than enough um all right so we're just about at 9 30 so let's stop i think andrea for um another question yeah great and again we'll we'll answer one question here and then we'll move on and answer more at the end so okay this is a good one um i work at a large enterprise with multiple sub teams and departments i like the idea of this digital office but what if i don't want to share everything with everyone yeah so um definitely that makes sense and we have a lot of customers who like i said they have lots of teams and sub teams and departments so um what we just showed you it's really just one way that you can set up your digital office so um you know say you have like five sub engineering teams that make up your whole engineering team you can also just create one workspace for that one sub engineering team or for just the engineering team um so that means that only the people in those workspaces can see what's in there um and there's also like a whole permissions menu to make sure that you're only sharing things with like certain individuals or groups so it's really what you want to make it and there's lots of levels that you can set yeah that's a great question um like i mentioned we'll save some more time um for questions at the end i'm personally getting excited to answer some of these that have come through um so let's kind of jump back uh to the demo um now that you've seen your home base and you kind of have the idea of what that means what it entails you know as we're looking at these wikis have you noticed um that all of the documentation that's linked there you know that's the second workflow we're gonna talk about um and it's really what encourages transparency and helps reduce silos amongst teams and there's two types of systems that we've seen be really successful with our customers um the first is going to be creating a database for something as simple as meeting notes and it's making this accessible for the entire workspace so if you're anything like me you know i used to have my meeting notes on like my notepad a random piece of paper um my apple notes on my computer just literally all over the place i personally like to think of it as organized chaos but throw me a bone and empathize with me here um nodes can just be scattered around in a ton of different places google drive email you give the gist but having a meeting nodes database can help provide structure and just more broadly consistency so that everybody within the company knows exactly where to go to both document and also review um different notes that people have taken themselves and so a few ideas to help get you started um meeting notes can be used for things like documenting user interviews i know andrea has used this a lot for the past interviews that we've done sales calls my team documents all of their sales calls in our meeting notes database um you can do things like project updates um posts you know launch postmartems and literally any type of meeting um a couple of things to point out as we're looking at this um what makes it so useful is that your database needs to be easily searchable um with tags for departments and uh the participants of the meeting itself so that it's super clear who to reach out to and um you know if you have questions or follow-ups you know exactly who to contact that way no one's out of the loop um everyone can see customer learnings from sales you know recent proposals from products and any sort of like marketing event like a launch plan or what have you um and at notion you know this database for me personally has been so incredibly helpful as we scale our business and more specifically the sales team that i'm um a part of and you know it's really because all of the conversations that we have are stored in this database so um you know when people knew are new and were onboarding them what's really really helpful is from a sales perspective i can just you know point them to the meeting notes database um you know have them search a specific customer name and they can literally see the entire history of all the conversations we've had who had them what was said etc in a matter of you know minutes and i don't know andrea but like for me i can't tell you how many times someone um saw a meeting note that either i had or someone on my team had and they knew somebody who worked at that company and was able to just provide an additional layer of context as well as um you know sometimes even a connection to someone that they know and it's just so incredibly helpful again it's kind of going back to this idea of when you make things transparent when you make things accessible and visible to everybody um you just don't know the downstream impacts in positive ways that these things can have and so meeting nodes database um is just a perfect example of that yeah thanks brittany um i totally agree i'm like constantly jumping in and out of this database um even um in our internal team at notion just to like see what's going on you know because there's like there's so many meetings every day and you can kind of like keep track of um the pulse of who's doing what and what's happening so it's really great for that to feel like you're you're in the loop um and to tie this back to the wiki i wanted to also give you an example of how the two are intertwined so we have our design weekly sync here and say they have their sync and then one of the action items they have is they realize they'd save a lot of time by creating a graphics making guide for the rest of the the marketing support team and this is something that we just discussed on our marketing team so it's um it's top of mind um but inside of the meeting notes they can start to brainstorm a draft of the guide and then they can just turn it into the actual guide when it's done so the really cool thing is david's showing here you can just drag and drop the guide into the marketing team's wiki for easy access yeah that's a really great example and honestly it's why it kind of pays off to have all of this in one's place and in one tool so that there's no need to transfer documents from one format to another email you know all of those things doug was doing um so the other main workflow we've seen is a docs database and so you might think like okay well you know how is this different than meeting notes that we just saw and there's certainly some similarities but think of the docs database as a place for all of your documents like your product specs your proposals a request for comment um really any type of documentation that pushes a project or something forward um so let's say you are preparing for your team's quarterly business review and you want to share this with the entire company um no no i don't mean adding it to the all company email distribution list um i literally have nightmares from my days at microsoft where uh the reply all tragedy struck i don't know if anyone's at a big company and can relate to that but talk about productivity killer um so the docs database is where you're gonna go and start housing all of those things that need everybody to see them so that they can comment you know ask questions um start conversations around it um really i i don't know personally i've often spent a ton of time drafting up either a proposal or something that you know i want to share with a team and i think like okay i've really covered all my bases here um super polished i think it's a great idea and then i share it with you know my boss or the greater team and so many people can contribute and what makes you know makes an idea that i thought was once great even better and that's what is so powerful you know talk about teamwork um it just you know reinstills why sharing things more broadly and giving more opportunities for people to contribute can really have a larger impact um so it's this type of asynchronous work that can happen in a doc's database right you're you know you're giving everyone their own voice and their ability to impact how decisions are made i think that's why that's why this is so powerful and brittany i don't know how you feel about this but i feel like once once you have this docs database and it builds and builds then you really you end up with like a nicely detailed record for all of your major decisions and projects um cool let's stop for one more question let's see okay so from from varoon how does search work in notion how easy is it to find a misplaced page um that's a great question and um the short answer is that it's really easy we actually back in january we just upgraded our search just to make it even more powerful and i think we had in mind all these customers who were you know using confluence or google drive for all of their documentation and then they ended up not being able to find anything and like all these docs went to the graveyard right they couldn't they just it wasn't used anymore um so all you have to do is um you can apple p or just click the search button and um everything with that keyword that's related will will show up so i actually use this like on a daily basis to find things um and that replaces my need to ask my teammates like oh where is this you know that feature process doc like doug was talking about um so it's definitely we tried to make it like as easy and useful as possible uh great so let's keep going um so we've gone through company and team wikis and meeting notes and docs and you know even if you leave the webinar now please don't but all of those will already do wonders to increase transparency and productivity between your teams but the third thing that we want to show you it really brings this all together and that's your customized project management system so there's two workflows here that we've seen you know all of our customers use over and over again and surprise surprise the first one is a product roadmap so here every card is a project and you can open any of these cards and then nest any related work inside the project yeah so you can see like you can have your specs here any sorts of docs um you can have notes bullets points to use action items tasks you can really link anything together so it's all bundled the other really important thing here to call out is that you can create different views and filters to sort you know find the things that um you need at that moment so let me just double click on the custom views for a second because this is what makes your roadmap way more advanced than your typical powerpoint um and we know like roadmaps typically fail because no one's using it so you really if you want it to be useful you need every single team to be referencing this and everyone to be aligned on like your product vision so you want to make it as easy as possible for different teams to get what they need and custom views are the best way to do that so if you go to the views here you can see that there's a ton you can make whatever you want so you can create based on team status quarter anything so yeah let's go to okrs um yeah that way like every team they can view just their work but they can also see everyone else's but that way they're not distracted by you know this like gigantic board and they can just see what they need to see yeah thanks for pointing that out actually these views are a total lifesaver um so once you have this type of product roadmap built out you know this should really be the only version that ever exists you know it's always up to date um and you want to keep it visible kind of what we were talking about earlier in the demonstration is you want to keep it visible so that everybody knows where to go and a good place would be like your product wiki or even the company home page again just so that it's easy for everybody um to find it um and since i'm personally from sales you know here's an example of how i would use different views um i there's been countless times where either i'm on a call or uh one of my colleagues is on a call and a customer asks you know do does notion have a specific feature or is this something you guys are going to prioritize and you know we can't stay up to date on all things we're you know growing and moving pretty quickly here and so um what is so powerful is having all of this kind of documented in a roadmap or a projects kind of um database like this i can while i'm on the phone with the customer navigate over to the product wiki see what is prioritized for the in quarter or future quarters and get back to the customer literally while i'm on the call and we have this thing called a dri designated responsible person and so i can see exactly who is who the dri is reach out to them in slack ask them further questions about the specific feature my customer is asking and like again all while doing it on the phone and so what normally could have taken two three follow-ups you know another meeting emails um can all happen because everything's documented in notion and in your digital office and so um things like this it really helps break down silos and keeps everybody aligned um on the different priorities that people are working on yeah that's a great example brittany um and so what britney's been showing you here it's very good for excuse me high level strategic planning um so you can track all your quarterly or even like your yearly roadmap items depending on how you plan but you again you really want to make sure that this digital office it's a place for your day-to-day work too so i want to talk a little bit about lightweight task management um because i think you know you have a particular team or even for like a singular project um you need like a lightweight board that isn't as big as this this kind of this road map um yeah because like sometimes you don't want a jira like board or maybe like kanban boards aren't really your team style like you just want your bullets and your checklist um and you really need something easy to spin up that just connects people cross-functionally um and you know i know as a marketer like it's a bit intimidating to use jira since it's like a it's like a hardcore engineering tool right and like i don't want to use confluence either but you know all of us have projects that we need to manage so you know say let's do an example um say you're a small design team and you just need to keep track of what projects are in progress and in the backlog so you know the design team they can create a view to see tasks by status like what you see here or you know they can do it by a designer so that's one example and this is it's very easy to spin up right um and then say you have like a particular project where you just need to do all the planning together somewhere and i thought it'd be funny to use this webinar as an example because you know we built it we built all the planning and notion and you know i don't really need a full-blown kanban board with status and everything because the stakeholders are just being brittany and our head of marketing um but there's still like a lot of moving pieces involved and you know we're not sitting next to each other in the office like we usually are so how do we manage this project together well so i i put a designated space for webinars in the marketing wiki so that i can do all of my work uh there so yeah this is like a um like a sanitized version of our webinar plan and i can literally keep everything here like all the planning the checklist um even like the outline if you want to click into that i don't think there's anything in there um you can scroll down a little bit more you can see the figma designs yeah so everything is literally in this one page and going back to meeting notes and docs right i can link any of the relevant ones here so that literally anything related to this event is here in the same place so these layers make it easy to find anything you need and basically build yourself a dynamic index of all the work being done across the company um yeah brittany it's such an improvement over you know diving into your email to find a google doc that i shared with you a month ago right yeah um just like last week i personally wanted to know where we are with the webinar and i didn't have to ask andrea i just went to the doc and you know self-served um all right so we're just um a minute over 9 45 so we're actually at the end of our demo um and i know we threw a lot of stuff at you um we went through company and team wikis that really helped create that home base we went through meeting notes and a doc database that encouraged transparency between departments and teams and task management systems that really help make collaboration easy and so we hope with all of these different use cases it helps make a bit more sense around what a digital office could look like and it's really having all of these things working together in tandem um and it's also just so customizable that instead of searching for information and feeling isolated in our bedrooms you know your team you can just focus on doing their best work um so we have some time for q a i hope you guys enjoyed the demo um we're gonna start fielding through the questions that we've been receiving um continue to um send questions if you have them we'll do our best um so um andrea i can take the first one if you like yeah sure cool um so jean asked for the docs page when you created that doc and wanted to share it with the whole company how do you alert the company about it um of course without getting into the reply all issue that's a great question and so um the beauty about notion is that all members within your company are going to have access to notion and so kind of pivoting to our permissioning structure all of the pages or databases in this case the docs database um are going to have the permissions granted at that page level so in the example of the docs database a best practice is giving workspace access to everybody that's a member of the workspace that way um everybody can view um they can create um and contribute to the docs that live in that database and if you'd like i know somebody else asked a question about slack you can also connect that page to a correlating slack channel so that anytime let's say a document gets created or a document gets updated that slack channel will get a notification and so again just another layer of visibility around what's happening within your workspace or your digital office and so um in order to avoid people doing the reply all you want to make documents accessible to more people um so that they can self-serve and then of course um integrate into things like slack to help provide an additional layer of transparency around what is happening in your digital office great that's a great question um and i'll just all keep going so we have one from jen and jen's asking i want to use notion but my cfo and it director won't improve for the entire firm so we hear this a lot um and she's asking can i use for just myself or with a small team without the entire enterprise um so yeah great question i think um it definitely is a big decision and it's you know it's hard to get like hundreds and hundreds of people onto the same tool um so we definitely encourage you to start using it with just your team and we actually have different plans that um account for all of these different use cases so you know if you want to just start trying it by yourself you know you can sign up for the personal use case um we actually our personal plan is free right now so you have an unlimited amount of um blocks that you can use and um you know say that you're on it and then you want to spread it to the rest of your team then you can get on a team plan and you can just put your credit card down and buy that for you know 10 people or so um and then you know as you continue i think the best advice we can give and i think brittany can talk about this too is um you show how much notion is impacting your one team and that'll convince other teams slowly um and then eventually we have an enterprise plan if you wanted to get you know your entire company on there so we definitely have plans that fit like all your needs and your requirements so you can you can start small yeah definitely um okay the next question up is from taylor um in my company we use confluence as an alternative and the internal quote is the place where documentation goes today what steps has notion taken to ensure documentation doesn't get buried and surfacing the most important workflows you are involved in um that's a great question and so i think we can tackle it in a couple of different lenses um so i think the kind of key differentiator between um a tool like notion and a confluence first is um traditionally confluence has been utilized by more technical uh departments or end users and so because of that it's really built with the technical end user in mind and so kind of going back to what i described with notion in that it's super flexible but you don't need to be technical in order to use it i think that's the key differentiator because notion has use cases that touch every type of person within an organization and you don't need to be technical in order to get a lot of use out of it it tends to have an impact on the overall adoption and engagement and so um you know unfortunately this is not the first time i've heard that documents go to die in a confluence type environment and i think that really has to do with you know um again people create it and then it's just left there whereas in notion because there's all of these different people who are involved in the process and the documentation it becomes to not just this one to many anymore it's a many-to-many type of environment where it becomes this ecosystem of living breathing artifacts and so some of the things we've helped and or to me we built into the product to help here is um not having a true distinction between a read-only user and a contributor now granted at the page level all of the different permissions you can give people can get that granular but at its most fundamental um kind of membership profile we only have admins and members and we feel that was designed to help with ongoing engagement and adoption um and so by making it again this many to many not one to many really gives people this autonomy and power to help contribute update content and keep it growing um so that it doesn't become stale um from a future perspective we're always looking for ways to help improve the um kind of visibility around documents so that we can get more and peop more people engaged um so more to come there but hopefully that answers your question taylor cool and then i actually wanted to follow up with a similar question because someone let's see where's that question uh pedro was asking comparing this tool to jira there are some similarities so what are the advantages of notion and i think like we all know that you know atlassian is confluence plus jira plus their other tools so there's some similarities here but i think it's good to point out that um jira is again like confluence it's very much an engineering tool like i don't know any teams besides engineering product who would even like want to go into jira um so there's lots of like tasks and bugs um but you know for all of your other teams like marketing sales support um customer success like they're kind of out of the loop um so again like you can have basically both your confluence and your jira in notion together so that like everyone can see what's going on like i can kind of just dive into like our engineering roadmap and it's very clear to me like okay this is prioritized for q3 um versus i think i would be a little intimidated um honestly if i knew that like everything was in jira and like the road map was there and i was like okay i guess i have to talk to an engineer to figure this out um the other thing is that i think what we were demoing here again is like one way that you can do like your product roadmap for example um and while jira really like locks you into the agile scrum format like you have your epics um and like you do your your sprints and everything if you're not like trying to do the whole agile scrum thing with your team you can just use like whatever project management system that you want in notion and really like set it up to to work for you and i think like the fact that you can add like any types of information inside cards and setting up instead of having to like use the really rigid setup of fields that's also like a big plus so you can just like we were showing in the roadmap you can link your meeting notes or your plans or your specs and it's kind of it's um it's very flexible yeah i hope that helps awesome um let's take one from nathan nathan asked how does notion as a company take care of the security aspect of all of this how is our data stored in the back back end um great question so um happy to talk a little bit about about our security practices we're also um used by companies like samsung ibm um and so when we think about the larger enterprises um you know trust is like all that we have and so we really take that responsibly um so a couple of um key points to address this we use tls everywhere within the data center and out our data is going to be or your data is going to be encrypted at rest and at transit um we run 100 on the cloud using aws um within a virtual private network that can't be accessed um via the public internet um and then we have amazon cloud trail turned on at all times um and from a practice perspective we perform quarterly independent security audits um and so um that helps establish you know um that and then we'll notify within 72 hours of any sort of data breach we have an entire dpa that many customers um can leverage and so um the last thing i think all worth that's worth pointing out here is we're also currently in the process of getting stock to certification and so um that's to come we have all of this information and more available on our help and support center so if you do have any questions about security you can either reach out to the team at notion sales that make notion.com or um you can always contest contact us on our website um but certainly check out our help and support center it's um a great resource well thanks brittany um so we are actually and we are nearing the end of the hour um and i know that we didn't get to a lot of questions um and you know really thankful that you know there's so much interest and so many so many questions so please please reach out to us at sales that make notion or you can go to our website because we're very happy to discuss further and answer all of your questions and you know do a personalized demo all of that um so yeah i want to thank you all for joining i know brittany and i had a ton of fun showing you around this digital office and uh we hope you did too yeah thank you guys so much for joining i know this is um a big time commitment so we really hope you guys learned a lot and can incorporate some of these different strategies into building your own digital office in notion um so definitely reach out to us there's different ways that you can get more information you can head over to our enterprise landing page at notion.so enterprise and you can learn a bit more about the different plans and the teams um also someone had a question about different case studies we have a plethora of different case studies housed um on this side as well so definitely go check that out um we're going to send everybody a follow-up email with the zoom recording as well as several additional resources based on the questions asked and so um again thank you so much for your time and we hope everybody has a great rest of your day all right bye

Channel: Notion

Views: 1,939

Rating: 4.9298244 out of 5

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Id: PvCIl0C93zg

Length: 59min 34sec (3574 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021