I wanted us to be the best team in notion and Mia at using notion this is Kieran doy the head of solutions engineering at notion emia and he's about to share some Insider secrets on how to use notion the only way that you can get Improvement is by change you cannot improve by doing the same thing the same way Kieran helped some of Europe's largest companies and Enterprises adopt notion at scale a beautiful notion page that doesn't help is useless um and I would much rather something simple that is impactful which makes him the perfect person to talk about how to adopt notion where to put your priorities and most importantly what traps you should avoid so in this episode you learn the problem most companies struggle with when they try to adopt notion and all of a sudden the structure starts to fall apart the one thing every company should Implement in notion is the most transformative thing that you can do a notion uh for a company an often overlooked but super important step when you try to roll out notion in your organization that step is often really quick uh in implementations but it shouldn't be and a simple yet effective trick that you should use before doing anything in nocean regardless of if it's you wanting to change how you use notion personally or the largest Enterprises in the world it's the best place to start so what would you say is your 2-minute elev way to our life pitch yeah sure thing so I have the the business and the personal uh side of that uh life pitch so um from the personal side um living in Dublin uh with my wife um our dog and our five- Monon old baby um so uh that takes up pretty much all of my spare time that's not notion at the moment just keeping a little one alive um in terms of professional I similar to yourself I had like an unusual ual route uh into technology uh not the most kind of straightforward path um I'm actually qualified as an environmental scientist um I I had a grand Ambitions of making the world a better place um and came out of University um at the very beginning uh of the financial crash uh in in the mid 2000s and it didn't turned out there weren't a lot of companies willing to pay uh for for people who uh wanted to unfortunately um it's not the way it back then I think it's a lot better now but to invite part of my degree I learned a program H in a language called or which is a statistical package um and I was at the time living in London and there was a niche uh in consultancy uh for that particular skill so um I ended up working in the IBM ecosystem uh doing implementation for four years uh in London and it was amazing time to be in London um you know was around the time of the 2012 Olympics it was very great atmosphere around the place and it was a really interesting time to be working with IBM products because it was really at that point where Enterprises were transitioning from on Prem to Cloud uh and really starting to take it Ser like Cloud had been around for quite a long time like Salesforce and NSU um but really like the large Enterprise was starting to take it very seriously so that was really interesting to me me and then I had the opportunity to join Oracle a couple of years later um and they were really going all in on cloud at the time uh Larry Ellison the the founder and the CTO of Oracle was like really pushing cloud and based what I was seeing that was just really really exciting and I had like that was where I was introduced to solution engineering which I'll get on to in a minute um and that was just like the most wonderful place to work and learn I was surrounded by incredible solution Engineers uh incredible people uh spent almost four years there and the opportunity came up to be the first solution engineer in Dublin at slack uh and slack just I felt like one of those Technologies where the grandwell was behind it um and I was proven quite luckily uh right uh and it was one of those transformative Technologies I had the most incredible time there um got to build a team I got to work with so many amazing clores uh really really for you know and then I had the opportunity uh this just over a year ago I celebrated my year anniversary at notion at the beginning of June uh to come to this congratulations thank you thank you so it's absolutely flown um but I had the opportunity to come here and I'm sure I'll get on to Y notion in a while but it was just uh yeah the it had that same feeling um it was that balance between The Head and the Heart that I had at slack no sh had that same feeling so uh I know I've gone over a little a bit over two minutes there but uh hopefully that's a view on the the person on the professional yeah that that's amazing thank you so much for sharing that and yeah I would love us to talk a bit more about slacker today I think we're most about Focus about notion but maybe one other day I I'll get some insights show you how to set up slack the perfect way but uh yeah I'm I'm a little bit yeah I'm a little bit Rusty now but I'm sure there's one or two things that we can share yeah probably a lot more that I know about it but yeah uh you mentioned Solutions engineering and uh before I actually look like when I first met you and you mentioned your solution engineer afterwards I looked up what it actually means because I had no idea what a solution engineer does so maybe you could just quickly quickly explain you know what is that job profile what does it yes a solution engineer I like to say is the best job that no one's ever heard of um so I I get the really like it's it's an incredible job you get to work essentially you sit in between three kind of pillars you sit between the product team sales team and the customer so if you imagine a triangle we're right in the middle um and we get to essentially work with all of those groups of people to best utilize the product that we work with and that involves lots of things so it will be um big deep customer workshops uh where we're figuring out use cases and uh you know going old school getting post that'ss on a whiteboard and and journey mapping together and then building that out in in notion um or any product really um it's demonstrations it's presenting at events um it's also less glamorous stuff like you know um going and working with our product team on you know the Nuance of an integration so uh you know notion we have tons of Integrations with lots of different platforms how our customers want to use them uh it could be slightly different we're very fortunate that we're talking to those customers all the time so we might want to go and and make some enhancements on particular things and um we would work with our product team there and we also work with our our sales team because we are working with customers all the time so um I always like to think of customer buying notion has to make four decisions uh so they have to make a commercial decision the thing that they're they have the money are they're willing to pay for the product that it is there has to be a value decision in that obviously it needs to you know do something that they really really need or it's not doing right now or they can't do right now they have to make it or a legal decision in that they have to sign a contract and they have to make a security decision they want the data to flow a certain way the solution engineer really helps with everything except for the legal uh we help with the value if we do a good job with the value that helps with the commercial um we help with the security we tend to be subject matter experts in um you know how I would say what would call customer trust um so we tend to touch a lot of of of of different parts of sales processes um existing customers product enhancements um and in said events so like I that's why I say it's the best job that nobody's ever heard of because you get to do so much you get to use different parts of your brain you get to be creative um yeah it's a very exciting field within software to work and it it's SS like a super cool cool mix of of a skills and B B activities right like this this combination role so I'm glad a lot about Solutions engineering I'll definitely keep a keep an eye on on these roles and yeah but uh that is that all relies right like that was like the general way of what you do and now you do that specifically for notion and uh just the same way some people have never heard of solutions engineering a lot of people also has still haven't heard of notion right so if you you know come home to a to a family did all like you know like a bigger Gathering and someone asks you know what do you do and you say like well okay I'm Solutions engineer at notion they're like well notion what is that like how how would you usually try to to explain what what noal is all about yeah that conversation happens so frequently so I feel like uh if I'm out of family do um and I'm talking to like my younger cousins in their 20s and teens they all know notion and they all think like oh it's so cool you work there and I talked to like any Auntie or uncle and they they like why don't you work with IBM anymore like so company yeah yeah I I know that uh so yeah it's it's really interesting and really funny um what I tend to do is is I I like if I'm if I'm explaining it to somebody who doesn't know notion who is um in some way it literate what I'll do is I'll get them to take out their phone um and I'll just kind of say like so like you have your notes app they take out their Notes app and and then I'll say it but you also probably have like a a to-do app as well right um and and and you that that type of like something that you might be using to like uh you know a third app you're probably using for meal planning um and then you'll have something that you have your calendar yeah well notion actually takes all of those things and condens it into one place so not only do you not have to think where something is but you also get the advantage of they're all connected so you know the uh going shopping item on your to-do list or in your calendar is directly connected to that meal plan that you have so all the ingredients are there um that kind of connectivity just reduces stress in life and that's a good thing um and if you can imagine that in your personal life it's the exact same for your work life you probably have five or six applications that you use regularly to store knowledge or to utilize knowledge or to interact between knowledge and time and notion is the kind of place where all of that should sit and it just makes your life far less stressful um so yeah that's tends to be my like method for for explaining what notion is to to family members or people you might meet in a bar or whatever yeah I'm curious how do you do it that it's a good question I'm I'm struggling with it right that's why I like ask everyone like what what is your secret uh I also I tend to go with the uh you uh when it's like more from a business perspective that it's yeah it's like it's sort of this like all in the central hub for your activities right notion doesn't necessarily have to do everything that you need to do on a daily basis but it can be that that starting point for for all activities right so it's sort of becomes this this uh Command Center is a loaded word but like it's the central point so you whenever you start anything you you start from here right so no matter whether you're looking for a document whether you're trying to do some work whether you're um uh looking up something right like it's you you have one single starting point and that removes so many decisions uh it's like a yeah it's it's a tool that helps remove other decisions because you don't need to think about it could be there it could be here like you know 10 different Windows now it's like it reduces this uh yeah multitasking uh on on in your digital digital work life that's like currently what I what I try to to do but it's I feel like it's still not quite there I like the value proposition that did you have vide right like with the stress I like that is very very tangible and and yeah I I think mine is different from yours and that I'm maybe focused on a user uh rather than business um certainly when I'm talking to businesses I take a very similar T to you so I would think about a business no matter what the entity is in a business um and you may remember this from when we met in Berlin um talking about like the different spheres of influence within the business the individual the team or even like the department or business-wide those entities all have different types of knowledge that they store and that can take the form of very structured knowledge like project management tasks or um even your own personal calendar that is structured knowledge but then there's also unstructured knowledge meeting notes uh uh brainstorming sessions all these kind of things notion is a great place for both of those to interact and for the unstructured to become structured or for the structured to benefit from the unstructured um I feel like when you it's such a tactile product pitching it is hard showing people and getting them in it they see it so clearly and I remember the first time seeing relational databases work yeah and you know that just sounds intimidating doesn't it relational databases it's like yeah oh I don't like somebody's thinking like databases that's Oracle stuff like that's scary I don't want to go near that but like Rel relational databases will transform any business if you put them in there um every team would improve by having um a companywide Central database and then being able to create relations uh for their own personal team like so powerful uh so when I saw that when I try to explain that it's really difficult when I show it people love yeah I I agree and I think actually that's like uh Notions biggest contribution to the whole productivity or you know workplace Suite both on the for the personal use cases and for the business use cases is like this democratization of of database right like making databases accessible to non-engineers uh before I did you know like a few small like web development C I had no idea what what SQL is right these sort of things but if you play around with a loal database long enough you start to develop like sort of like an intuitive understanding it makes sometimes a bit harder because as a non- technical users you look at it and it looks like a spreadsheet and it does some weird things that you know like figuring out what the difference between spreadsh databases can be a bit tough but again you you learn by by by trying and and using it and then later when you when you learn the fundamentals of what you know actually is behind it and you're like ah this makes a lot of sense that it's like so accessible and so approachable uh through this interface so I think that's actually like the yeah probably the biggest contribution uh that that notion has had on the biggest impact on on the whole Space yeah I I actually before we move on I owe you a big thank you because uh there's something that you said um I think it was in Berlin when we were presenting at the same event uh where you were discussing the difference between databases and spreadsheets um and you just conceptually were just had add a database up on the on the screen behind you and you said the difference is data spreadsheets work across and down databases work across and it's just such an easy phrase for people to actually go okay so now I'm actually thinking about something that's actually 3D it's in if there's depth here rather than a flat spreadsheet um and that just really helped me when I'm articulating the meristics get them to take that first step so I I owe you a big thank you for that oh I'm glad to hear that like I I remember that it was I think like a post lunch session where I talk for like 30 minutes on formula so like my apologies to everyone in the room there we had to sit through that like right after after a good lunch but it was a was a really fun fun event I I loved it I love formulas so I love it yeah me too me too uh but speaking of formulas actually formulas and database is I think a perfect that way to the next question because it's about like what what do you see people most commonly struggle with when it comes to no like databas and formulas are certainly like to maybe like easy uh feature things but maybe you have like more of a you know like meta answer to that like in in the sense of yeah but what do you see yeah so so there are definitely some some technical things that I see people struggle with uh let me give you two two ansers so so one is maybe a little bit mad at and the other is um what tends to happen with a company starting out with notion is that one person uses notion in their personal life and they're using a tool that's not quite good enough or maybe they're using three tools when they could be using one and that person says I use this thing in my personal life I think it will be perfect here can we try it as a team and that team start using it and they probably have really good structure because that person who brought it in owns it is passionate about it wants to make make it successful uh and then the project that that team is working on grows and another team come in and another team come in and all of a sudden the structure starts to fall apart because nobody is responsible for it um and that I would say is the number one thing that I see people struggle with is the the you know their notion workspace does not have a plan they don't have Team space structures they don't have that centralized database and the relations built out that I was talking about and that leads to the benefit of notion actually getting eroded a little bit um so that's you know where my team and some of the other teams here in Dublin office and globally come in where we try and like build those structures build those best practices from day one build amazing team space hierarchies and and and and workspace designs because if you do that just the value you get it it doesn't just goope a little it it it it shoots up the other one that's maybe a little bit more meta is change um when you go the so when I came here first um slack had been bought by Salesforce maybe 18 months no we've been bought maybe two and a half years but had been Salesforce company for about 18 months and Salesforce is a huge company 880,000 people um all very very good at what they do but it's also quite a competitive place um and the idea that you would put your meeting notes in a public space for all to see um you know in these big companies it's quite quite a a change um a lot of us have worked in those big companies so we get that we have that kind of way of thinking built into us this is for me this is for my team um and all of a sudden moving to to notion where every apart from like maybe a one to one with your manager about your career or maybe some HR conversations like everything's open um that is a huge mental shift uh to make but the value that it unlocks is huge because I can use notion Q&A to ask a question and I'm not just searching my notes I'm searching everyone's notes so I am so much better at work because of that I like that sounds obvious but getting people to go I Am shifting from private first to public first with my note taking with my team's notes with our team meetings with uh our tasks our projects that requires a big shift that is change management uh that's the kind of stuff that traditionally like McKenzie or BCG get paid millions and millions for um and you know we're trying to do that with notion and bring that that change that's the kind of thing that I think a lot of people struggle with is when you all of a sudden have to to to really truly benefit from this product to its full potential require that that shift in work and the way you think about privacy at work um yeah yeah that that's really interesting having those conversations and I was I look after all of Europe and it's really interesting to see Regional Dynamics at play as well so like in the nordics for example that's a very normal thing and they're very comfortable with that uh whereas maybe in southern Europe that's less of a cultural norm um and it requires a little bit more coaching uh and stuff so it's really interesting actually just to even see within our kind European region the different kind of cultural Dynamics at play yeah all so so many so many uh good points are there like I I yeah I see a lot of the same patterns uh both like the the the the growth perspective right like I think it's one of notion strength that it like sort of like spreads very organically in in companies but it's you really notice the the saying you know like what brought you here won't get you there with these things like what thing things that work well for an individual because you know you can just like you know cover the cracks and you're still like a one human on the other end who who knows a lot of things you can you know like uh the system is fairly forgiving and also if you have like a small team with two three people uh that that work with the product and everyone can just just maybe in the same room or like talks to each other on a regular basis still fine but a second right you you crank things up and you you add like five 15 or 50 people into the mix they're very very different challenges and the uh you notice it only when it then you know becomes uh a bit more uh yeah chaotic and things start getting lost again and all of the sudden you feel again like okay this is now in a similar position as I was you know like one year ago when I had like a combination of G Drive Google doc like you know it's I have documents everywhere I don't really know where to find it and it's yeah because you you don't don't have the foundation in place right to to help you late it on the line but I'd like to uh also like maybe go a bit further into the change management perspective because I think that's such an underrated discussion about notion in particular like notion and B2B like my my job title says like no cons actually like I think like at least 50% of the job is helping teams change and adapt to to that new tool so I would be really really curious to hear um if you say you know like it's a big part of the conversations you have like what are your you know um some some angles or like some some you know ways that you've seen work well with teams to help them adopt a to more transparency and then B also in general right like when it comes to adopting a new tool with a somewhat steep learning C in particular in the beginning yeah um so to answer part a um I think that there are I don't I don't think carrot and stick Works in this situation I think it has to be all carrot um people need to see what's in this if you're asking somebody to change the way they work they need to see benefit in otherwise they will revert back to their previous way of working so what we tend to do is try and find two or three like solid use cases that a customer has what we'll do is we'll go over to their office or we'll jump on uh a virtual meeting room for for a couple of hours we'll speak to tons of people we'll ask them what they do every day it's when we're having these conversations we do not mention notion uh it actually helps more if they don't know anything about notion and they talk us through what they do every day um what are the bottlenecks what works well um who are their direct reports who are their stakeholders um what are their timelines like Etc um and by being able to piece that together we can almost you know if you do that with 10 people you could build a pretty good knowledge map of a company and then it's our job to go away build that out in otion presentent it back to the customer and all of a sudden that Enterprise is now seeing yeah you know a transformation in how they work um and a tangible benefit because the bottlenecks that they spoke about or the deadlines that they were missing they're no longer at risk of being missed or the bottlenecks have been smoothed out um I find this approach works really well because it's listening to the customer it's trusting that they know their business better than anybody else and it's trying to help um what I find doesn't work is trying to come in with a very strict this is notion this is how you're going to use it off you go because you're showing no trust you're showing no empathy uh you're saying that you know their business better than they do and yeah all of a sudden they're going to you know try it for a week uh and then it's going to fall away and it's going to become shelfware um and that's that doesn't work for us we sell on a a license per year model we want to make sure yeah the most important thing for us is that people find huge value from it um and want to bring more people in that's how that's how we continue to grow so um yeah that would be the um the answer for like the um part A of the question I'm sorry I've forgotten what part B was yeah no no part part B good question let's refer back so like yeah part A was the the that that part with the uh yeah the implementation I think part B was about the um um like the Steep learning craft right like notion as from Mod technical side um whether you have any you know maybe from some success stories with other companies or like things that you've seen work well in order to bot on the group that is not the notion Champion right that is not the person who in their free time builds like you know for for hours in in the system and those knows everything in an alge completely um so I I had a very interesting experience in this when I first started an ocean we were working with um a large European TV company yeah and we went on site to do a workshop and kind of I was brand new in the job trying to flex a little bit trying to show my value um yeah and I was sitting beside um somebody who had been in this company for 30 years and and they uh I was just kind of showing them one or two things on notion and I just kind of started a new line and indented with with the Tab Key and they said oh stop show me that again how did how did you do that and I was like oh it's just the tab and they're like that's like 10 spaces in one and I was like yeah yeah and it just dawn on me that that for some people that we're working with yeah the journey isn't just notion it's yeah you know in general this new language that yeah you know everybody younger than them in the company speaks uh and that was really important for me just to understand right there are layers to this and this is not just bringing one person on board this is are one type of persona on board so what we would tend to try and do is build a hierarchy of users um so at the top you want the sponsor the person who's brought this in who is responsible for this and has tied it to something strategic for for an organization below that we want a kind of smaller group that we would call like our admin so they're going to be people responsible for administering notion um whether that's connecting it into things like a a single on provider or um making sure that we have like really strong rules around guests or uh good team Space Management Etc um and they're kind of like the people who will be getting a lot of FaceTime with the notion team um and then next we have the most critical layer and and that is the champion Network and they are like that they're the trainers who are going to Train everybody else um so they are the let's say we had a 400 person notion implementation they are the 20 to 30 people that we are going to incentivize uh and reward uh yeah with lots of like notion training notion enablement really going in deep on their use cases with the idea that these will be really influential people and they'll bring that back to the business uh and they will train the trainer they will be um they'll be the ones who'll actually show everybody in the company uh how to get get notion so that step is often really quick uh in implementations but it shouldn't be that needs to be something that we take time on that we pick the right people if you get if you get like the person in your yeah if you got that person in your team who's going to like build beautiful databases and I don't say that as a joke I really mean build beautiful databases and um take care about like how our team spaces look and understand formulas and buttons and all these types of things if you get those right type of people and you motivate them correctly your implementation is going to be incredibly successful if you just pick 30 people off the list yeah it's not going to work as well for you you might get lucky but most of the time it won't work so I think and then after that then you have your main users um and there should be a methodology for those main users to be able to like become Champions but also for them to be able to provide feedback uh in a really clear way and um there should be opportunities for like one to many type enablement and things like that um but yeah I think that when you get that hierarchy working well and you have regular meeting cadences with those that hierarchy your opportunity for for a really successful notion implementation that helps the customer that achieves the Strategic goal of that sponsor at the top is going to be so much higher yeah yeah I I agree and it's like it touches on another part that I think like uh people sometimes tend to forget when they get very excited in the beginning about notion and just want to roll it out quickly to the company is that it's it's like a said it and forget it thing right like no no tool is like you you neither tools nor methodologies so you can't just like you know throw them into the company and then expect them to like sort of self organize there's a reason why why companies have it teams right that that whose whole responsibility is to just keep like the the back end running and notion needs to be treated in the same way with maybe the the the the special part that is like much closer to operations than a lot of the other IT solutions so it's like usually you have this like hybrid role of a person right who who needs to on the one hand do the technical stuff uh and like administer and like you know set up things but also then needs to know exactly okay these this is how the operations work and then that in particular in bigger companies rather uh someone will have to have that as a role assigned to them maybe not full-time depends on the size of the company right if you're a smaller team you you can get away with someone doing that parttime but with like 400 people you need one or maybe like two people right like whose sole job is to just administer that or else uh you yeah you'll have this like one time Boon and then like over time right like the all systems move towards chaos and you need to constantly try to fight back there uh so I think that's a a very important point for everyone right like when they're planning their adoption thinking about okay like uh do I do that not just with no pretty much um any tool out there yeah completely I remember when in my very in that role I was talking about earlier when I was working in the IBM ecosystem the owner of the company that I was working for in one of my first interactions with him uh he said something that I have sworn by ever since and I think it's completely true he said software is easy and people are hard software does what you tell it to do people don't um and that's where I think like we get Mak I I see it happening time like that is a well-known wellestablished truth yet I see so many implementations where all the time is spent on the software and we rush the the people part um the people part is so important uh human beings are um beautiful complicated nuanced things um and people do not like change and we need to make sure that change is easy for them and there's benefit to it um and that's where it works where it works well um so yeah I completely I think you and I are very aligned uh and you probably are living that same experience as a consultant all the time yes oh oh yes oh yes the the change management is the hard part right like there a lot of there are so many people who can just build not like it's a technical skill but like it's it's not that hard to learn the big challenge is then like taking those technical skills understanding what the other person needs building that and then helping them uh adopt that and also if they they don't want to adopt that by like being able to to change the plan and the system so that it works for the person because if you build a system and the person uh doesn't use it it's probably not the person's fa not necessarily right it's probably your fault with either the system or the implementation along along the way completely speaking of like all these people using using Notions do you uh you know when when you encounter so many different types of of people using notion or bringing notion into the companies I'm just curious are there any like you know like archetypes or like typical people that you encounter along the way where like uh and I'm asking like also like from this perspective what you just mentioned right so if like you know someone who wants to roll out notion to their company um it's like hey but like how do I find these these Champions right like uh are there any any tips and tricks to to discover them like they share some some common themes uh the tips and tricks to discover them if you can figure that out uh please let me know but definitely some common themes right um they are people who are curious and that is regardless of level that you know I'm currently working with people who are uh in entry-level analyst roles write up CTO of some of Europe's biggest companies and the commonality across all of them is that they are curious when I started at notion um I did I project management was a new world to me so I did a course in project management to learn and in the very first class um the lecturer kind of put up this challenging slide where he said that um for you cannot improve something without changing it um and I find that the people who who gravitate to notion who want to bring in notion are people who live with that kind of philosophy um that they see the only way to get better is by being curious by changing by experimentation um they're the ones who bring in notion trying to find them is the hard part um yeah but what we tend to see is those people will bring it in and they're usually Builders um and in the successful implementations they're also influential um and that and I don't mean influential being that they have a very lofty title um it could be that just really good at their job uh and we've all been surrounded by somebody who's really good at their job and you're like how do you do it can I buy you a coffee and figure out like what it is that makes and they show yeah and and that's influence right or it's it's you know it's the high performer it's the it's the the person who's maybe been there for a while and kind of has a bit of nouse and and all that kind of stuff so influences is kind of packaged up in in different ways um but if you can kind of capture some somebody who is curious is a builder and is influential that's Goldilocks that's that's absolutely perfect um and then we can work with them to try and have them realize that goal um improvement improvement H and that comes about through change so yeah a bit of a long-winded answer but uh yeah um yeah if if I wish there was like a LinkedIn filter for that so we just find that individual um unfortunately it doesn't exist and obviously like there are certain types of roles that tend to to gravitate towards ocean you mention that it can be I find notion is funny because it can be as technical as you want it to be um and quite technical people tend to gravitate towards notion so uh we see a lot of people like for instance developers uh using notion uh either individually or as teams um but also I think roles that tend to work with a lot of documentation and roles that work very cross functionally uh fine notion so um I found like marketing teams so people who work in like marketing agencies where they might be working with you know it's so easy to share documentation in notion across the walls of your company um and that's something that's super powerful for a marketing agency um they work incredibly cross functionally they have strict deadlines they have tons and tons of documentation lots of different approval workflows and it's almost different for every client notion was it's as if notion was designed for them so yeah we we we tend to find um that it's it's you know often technical roles but not restricted to technical roles um yeah people who it's it's almost people who have the people that software has forgotten and need to build their own tool and yeah yeah yeah and the kind of people that like you know like that that get annoyed by things if they if they don't work smoothly that's like the that that's at least like Al like the how how I got into it it's just like I'm very impatient person and if I have to do like 10 clicks where I think you know like one click should be enough it's like you know come on like the like I open up a tool and it looks like you know like a Windows 98 interface which is very common in in my background of you know like legal software it's like you know can't work with that sorry uh need something that that does a better job and it's much smoother so yeah that that in the combination of the V diagram that you share that's like probably where you find most offf absolutely yeah yeah speaking of like the the marketing ones and like these different use cases um what would you say like in in in your day-to-day life right when you go to customers and you build solutions for them what are kind of the most typical workflows why that you develop for for customers and where you would also say okay like these are like very easy wins if you as a company want to go on adop notion yeah I think it goes back to what I was saying in the beginning around your structured data and your unstructured data um and if you think of a lot of companies right now they'll probably have a a legacy tool that they use for something they might have a legacy tool it might be Excel but they probably have something that they use for project management and those projects hopefully are tied to company goals and then they have their day-to-day work so you know you have all the meetings that you have every day that are either individual with the team and you have these blocks of work where you've carved out time to to get things done and that's all over the place so as an employee I often don't feel connection to our company goals even though the thing that I'm working on is related to a task that's related to a project that's related to an objective of our company I often don't see my work valued in anyway putting in a system in notion and it's really easy to do it can be over complicated but really the 60 70% lift at the beginning to just do this step of having an individual's work connected to team tasks connected to Department projects connected to company objectives is the most transformative thing that you can do in Ocean uh for a company after that there's all the amazing things that you can do to improve your individual productivity and your team's productivity and your company's productivity but if you build that Foundation right and that's where I spend so much time because so many companies do not have that structure in place um that yeah that would be the thing that I would say like is the there are like obviously like cool like specific use cases that we do like we're working at the moment with um a music label and building out how they're interacting between the artists uh uh album releases and concerts and the people who work for the music label that's really cool and it's really fun and you get to test notion in different ways yeah but you know the uh I suppose the unglamorous side of it is like a lot of it is companies that AR aren't structured I don't have an Optimum structure I'm putting that Optimum structure in place because I can tell you as an individual the feeling if you feel like you are part of something and you're impacting your company in a huge way uh you're what you're working on directly impacts the objective of your company you're going to work a lot harder you're going to take a lot more pride in your work it's truly transformative for you as an individual and notion offers that uh in a way that I don't know any other software can or does that's true like it it can create a lot of visibility and and meaning and uh it it's a very simple change right like all these these elements exist already in in the company probably hopefully uh if not then that's the the first part to to start but a lot of times when like you you have uh this like you have this planning element in your company and you have this execution layer and they they just don't talk to each other right like they they happen separately it's different people who do a and who do B and then like both people talk to each other like you know like why did you do this plan why did you you know not do this task and everyone is like well I I didn't know right I didn't see and the it's like these little tweaks right like you you get so much more traction uh on on on all the things and you make sure that like all this like Collective energy but you have good people in your company so the the goal of notion and any of this system is right to just like get out of the way and make sure that like every person can can do the work that they actually should do every day and not have to you know be bed down with like admin task like copy like like my my favorite new new things like Life's too short to copy paste right no one no one should have to copy paste information from from one thing to another or like you know like update things in three places because the tws don't talk to each other and yeah just having this like Smooth line from like the top to the to the bottom it's like it's so easy but like it's uh it's it's no it's simple it's not easy yes exactly it's simple it's not easy I love that yeah Franchesca in my team um who I think you've met before as well she talks all the time that everybody is a project manager and that makes your life filled with admin uh your working life notion makes that easier uh it allows you to actually just focus on being productive and not focus on like you say copy paste um so yeah I I I love how you phrase that yeah well it's uh yeah there's a lot of a lot of fun things that you can do in N to make make your life easier there for sure yes but uh let's also maybe get go back to one thing that that we talked about in the beginning and that is like this this typical scenario right where people they they start with something in no uh and it feels good in the moment and then later down the line right like a few months later with like a few more teams uh in the loop they realize oh shoot you know this this isn't serving us anymore um do you uh yeah what what do would you say to people who might be afraid of starting notion now right like maybe a smaller company that is not like an Enterprise client or like that that you know doesn't have a huge budget for an implementation it's like worried that um if they get it on now right uh it might hurt them later on the line do you have anything there where you would say um yeah yeah firstly that's like a very normal and very real concern I have and I'd almost be more I would be surprised if customers didn't have that concern because if they did I would almost say they're being naive um because you're bringing something in to change the way you do things and there is the reason you would do it is very obvious there is huge benefit but there is also the risk that this doesn't work that the person who brought it in looks a bit silly and that you spend all this money um and that is that is whether you're buying notion or you're buying Salesforce or you're buying a new facility um or moving to a new office all of these things are the same for a company right and and I think the most important thing that you can do in that situation is due diligence right um so speak to us uh understand what that process looks like understand the professionals that we have in our team that make that job really easy for you speak to our other customers um speak to the amazing uh notion Community like Consultants like yourself people who are spending every single day drisking this process uh for companies I go back to what I said in a little bit earlier around the only way that you can get Improvement is by change you cannot improve by doing the same thing the same way you maybe can drive efficiency but you're not going to improve anything so if a company fundamentally needs to change um then yes like you have to do it what I would say is it is very good that you are thinking about the risks and we want to work with you to be risk averse and we want to do it in the safest way possible that works for your business and that can go from the macro roll out right down to the minutia of like when are we going to do Imports uh when are we going to do enablement uh how many departments are we going to roll out first like obviously we would love for you to roll out wall at wall but we know that doesn't make sense sometimes so we'll start with these departments because they're working on this project and we want to make sure that's super successful so yeah we have tons of different ways of making sure that that process is done correctly but I would never be concerned if a company is showing concern I think that's a really healthy thing um and you know like I'm sure you see it all the time um I don't know if your role or my role exists if companies don't have concern because they'll just do it themselves and they get it wrong or they don't but hey it's companies that take things seriously that mean that um you know our ecosystem exists and that we get to work together and work with them yeah that's that's true and and it always depends a bit on the individual situation right like and and in some companies you have like uh a lot more leeway right like to experiment to to get things wrong and to try over again right it's like you can Tinker yourself right like you keep things in our particular if you're like you know like an early stage startup or so you probably don't have like the the resource but you have also like the freedom right to to get things wrong like adapt quickly um and another situation so like might be be better to get outset up by like just shorten the the adoption Cur and the time it takes you to to figure these things out because other people have made a lot of mistakes for you so can learn from them get it right a bit quicker and then the other thing is always right like the um uh like what what I also sometimes try to to to illustrate is um if you're at this point right where you're looking for a solution um then clearly not everything is running perfect in your company right if you're super happy with how your processes are and like everyone is just like coming to work like oh this is a dream uh chance chances are you're not looking to you know change things up much so like the you know like not doing something not trying to fix it it's like the you know it's the devil you know but uh it's also like a the there is just accumulating cost like the like the chaos in in your system it just gets larger right like the amount of documents that you lose it like Legacy tools will just like keep growing so uh yeah it's always a balance of like the yeah the unknown risks and the uh the risks that you that you learn to live with every day yeah completely agree yeah uh speaking of the you know like some some things that don't run so smoothly uh I would love to know like you know like notion internally using notion are there you know any any workflows or any challenges you know that that you already experienced in your time at notion where like a workflow wasn't like Optimal then you you use notion to solve something like that is there you know maybe a story that you can share there with us yeah it's a really good question so um not to give away too many uh internal Secrets um but maybe to kind of tell a little story so when I I started I was the first solution engineer in Dublin uh we already had Marshall and Massie who were working in and New York and Tokyo respectively and I built out a team so I've got an amazing team here now brenol and Franchesca and we're expanding that team at the moment and I set us a little goal a couple of months ago so I wanted us to be the best team in notion am Mia at using notion um seems like a pretty normal thing for a team in our position to want um but what we decided to do was like look at our processes and how we worked as the three of us how we worked with our cross functional stakeholders and kind of right how do we optimize everything that we're doing in noce like we're doing a lot right now in slack we're doing a lot right now in Google Drive and that is because of our biases from where we've worked before and we have this amazing tool and we're not challenging ourselves to use it for everything so that was probably that was like a little kind of light bulb moment for us as a team and we decided to just kind of go and completely rip up our team space and rebuild it um and start using our own in some cases champagne and in some cases dog food and um when it's like trying to find out like because we need to stand over this to our customers and we need to be able to like advocate for these things and I find if you have a personal use case that you're passionate about you are so much more convincing um because you actually truly believe it you truly care um so we looked at right well we work as I say with sales people all the time how do sales people request us what are the bottlenecks that we have when salese request us so we previously had slack channels and they would post about the customer or prospect that they wanted us to work with and it would usually involve us going back and asking like five or six questions and uh we use a CRM in here so we would probably check Salesforce as well and it was kind of clunky uh in that they had a request and by the time we accepted or declined the request it might be two days of back and forth so we said all right like let's design a workflow in notion uh so we are capturing all the information that we need to capture um we're doing it in a really programmatic way and then we're building uh a a workflow or an Automation in that database so that it's going to notify Us in slack we can have an internal private conversation just the three of us about how we want to work with that um and then get back to to to accepting it uh with another button in inside the database that that s not a message back to the to the to the sales rep what we've done is we've been able to take something that was a pain take something that was you know sitting in multiple products uh put it in a single place yeah mean that we can have a private conversation as a team make the best decision for the customer and for the salesperson and get back to them as quickly as possible so we're able to get back to people quicker there's less stress there's less products less mistakes when you introduce more products you introduce more complexity you introduce mistakes less mistakes and we don't want to make mistakes for our customers so that just little thing that we do now has just smoothed everything out for us and we do that with lots of things um and that was a big step for us was just even philosophically thinking we're going to be the best at using notion in our company um and challenging ourselves uh to to use it in a really interesting and fun and useful way um so yeah um I won't speak for any other teams uh that might be doing things better or worse than us I will shout out in particular though Anya uh who's our head of both uh International marketing uh her team use notion in a really really cool way and we're I don't know if we're neck and neck yet but they were the ones that when we started this project we were trying to catch up with yeah yeah oh yeah AUD is amazing I I need to talk to her and ask her okay like what are what are her secrets of setting up that for yeah she would be incredible guest yeah yeah well I'll add it to the to the list I already like asked her once whether she would be interested so so hopefully um but yeah I think what I also like what what I really loved about your story right now is that I think it illustrates a very very underrated uh point with notion adoption and that's the like know your process part and it's like something very simple but like uh if you you know ask someone like you know like how do you you know how do you actually work like how does your work look like they they or like if your F asking like well do you know how your work looks like that well everyone would like yes of course but I do it every single day but if you don't challenge yourself to Think Through like okay what is actually every single step that has to happen for me to you know deliver my product to to my customer and like it doesn't matter like where you work in a company right you will always have an at least an internal customer an internal product that you're responsible for and that you have to deliver and if you really think about like all the single steps all the single decisions that have to happen and take the time to to write them out and realize oh well here's a bottle deck that is unnecessary and this is actually the one key step that is the most relevant so maybe when I build out my notion system this is what I might want to focus on first rather than you know setting all the the icons and colors which is very fun and rewarding but if it's you know the 8020 of like this impacts your work every single day versus this is a nice to have then maybe there's a good but like just knowing again right like what your process is is this like huge unlock which will make everything in in your work and particular when building notion so much easier yeah um completely couldn't agree more um a beautiful notion page that doesn't help it's useless um yeah and I would much rather something simple that is impactful I'm a I have a huge I have them right here on my desk like sticky notes I'm a huge fan of the humble sticky note I think this is something the project managers are very good at that I'm the skill that I'm learning only the yellow ones same but uh what I'll always do if I have something like if I have a goal just get a Sharpie or a pen and a sticky out and just start putting how do I get here what are all the steps that I need to do um and and think of them as steps not tools too often like I was saying in the beginning people will think of okay so I need to do this and jira and I need to do this and GI Hub and I need to do this in in slack and this in email and you're actually not thinking about the steps there you're thinking about tools yeah think about the steps I I need to create a project I need to have a kickoff meeting I need to do X Y and Z yeah and all of a sudden now I have a complete map of what I need to do who are my stakeholders when do I need to involve them with a really clear flowchart and I you know the humble sticky note um can kind of unlock that for you and that's when that's only then can you start building uh yeah so yeah that that for me is is just such a crucial thing and it regardless of if it's you wanting to change how you use notion personally or yeah the lar Enterprises in the world changing how they want to use notion orol for that matter it's the best place to start oh yes I I agree like it's uh it's a it's a small small habit change or like a like it looks like a only you know a small part but if you if you rush that uh and then skip forward you'll you'll regret it later down the line completely um yeah so your team wanted to be the the best at at using notion internally um I'd be be curious uh what does do to help you know train their new joiners on how to use n right is there like a like program in place is it like you know you need to pass a certain exam before you get hired how how does that work yeah so for my team in particular the bar is high because your job is to talk to customers to talk to our product team about notion um so we hold a really high bar both pre to hiring someone like we expect you to be able to Showcase some cool stuff in notion to us in the interview process but then also we will take you by the hand once you start and enable you um one of the first things I think and like we were saying earlier notion is so tactile I don't think that you can truly learn some people can I learn differently um I learn I'm a very tactile learner um I think the best way to learn notion is building um and getting in um so what we do is we set tasks for people and the first thing that you do when you get here is you build and this kind of stems from before it feels like forever ago before we had home in notion uh and you had to build your own personal OS uh to kind of navigate like all your tasks all the pages that you use all your notes all that kind of stuff um and people can get really creative and complex the worst thing that you can do is just download a template for that because you skip the learning um and you skip figuring out how things work so that is the most important step is in the first week build because if you don't build if you just borrow you'll never understand thing um the thing that I always tell every new hire is that you only ever get one chance to be new I I would much rather somebody take six weeks to ramp up well then four weeks to ramp up poorly because they're going to be here for a long time they're going to be talking to lots and lots of people and they need to know what they're talking about um so yes we do like lots of like kind of smaller enablement and uh um different things and we have like one-on ones and all that kind of stuff but the most important stage is building building early uh you should never be afraid I think actually that's probably the thing that I would love to is like in everyone's first week they're going to do something on a very public page that they probably shouldn't do uh they'll add a block in or they'll change a property or something like that and the important thing to know as well is like that we always is you're new that's okay we can we can we can restore a page to a certain point like we can delete it it's like nothing is permanent notion um and I think that that's just getting that out of the way that there's no because the the last thing you want is people to have to be fearful of a tool or using a tool in a certain way yes there are rules there are things that we should all do in here but yeah you should feel the psychological safety to use this tool to its maximum um and I think that's like almost like a right of passage that you have to go through have to mess up something you have to add like something to the global uh project database or something like that uh that isn't to be there that's totally fine um somebody's going to go in and they're going to fix it and they're going to let you know that it's totally okay and here's what you should do start and that's I think the collective responsibility in onboarding is so important uh just to let everybody know like you know this is what you did it's probably not the right thing to do that's totally okay here's what you should should do next time and having a positive attitude about that yeah oh yeah I I love that I love the the build not borrow part in particular I think that is that is so important like I I like I have like a hate love relationships with with ocean templates I think they're like a like a super good thing to have but I think like most people just use them wrong right like you need to use them as inspiration you need to uh use you know use them to look at it see like okay this is like what other people do and then you can go in and like try to deci okay and this is how it works and then you can can do it yourself but expecting you like with this this box of Lego that if someone else builds you like this Lego piece and particular if it's a complex Lego piece that somehow randomly fits how how you want to work rather rather unlikely and you yeah you lose so much opportunity on on yeah figuring something out completely I think if you ask yourself like what is the goal of you learning notion yeah you know it's you want to understand the Dynamics of how things work um if you're just like hey I need this thing for a meal plan I don't need to know how it works our community have built amazing templates for exactly that um if you're like I want to be able to talk to people about this thing yeah then you need to get to the level that our amazing Community are at building templates you need to like understand how that stuff works um and I think that that's probably the difference in you have the the people who want to use this and the people who want to understand it and if you come into an ocean to work you want to understand yeah yeah yeah that that that makes a lot of sense uh now we we're coming up to the the hour so maybe to to be respectful of your time right and to to wrap things up even though I I I could like keep going for another two three hours to just talk about this maybe just what one last question and that would be um sort of you know like if you could you know ask everyone I encourage everyone to that uses notion to follow one specific best practice or you know to do one specific uh uh thing uh what would that one be there's lots that I would love to say here but if I could just encourage every team to do one thing is at the top of your so regardless of what your team does at the top of your team team space build some buttons and those buttons should be your most used things so if you want to create a new project or create new meeting notes or um add a task to a project or uh whatever it is build buttons that are connected into your databases down below because what that will do is it's going to create the right pay avors and the right paths for people so instead of somebody just creating a new page when they want to start a new project or creating a page in private when they want to have some meeting notes uh or some minutes for a team what you're actually doing is creating them hopefully with a really clean template uh that's you know means that you're working at the same methodology for the entire business and capturing things in the right way but now they're also all being stored in the right place and that is going to in a way that you can't imagine yet supercharge your team that is my one piece of advice is buttons are the most powerful and underused I know you might argue formulas but I'm going to make the argument for buttons buttons are the most unused and most powerful thing in notion pick your team databases for notes for projects for tasks create three buttons for them at the top of your team page quick links and it will make everyone in your team's life easier and you're all going to get to benefit from the Collective brain of that team so um if you could do that today you'll have a more powerful team tomorrow yeah amazing uh I I agree and I would also say like it's it's I would use buttons before formulas I think they are the the bigger like the the formul formulas are really nice they are really fun they can do some really really cool stuff but that's like the in the 8020 that's the 20 right like that that will get your notion Works Space to to the next level to like the that that end zone but there's so many quick wins and lwh hanging fruits on the on the way there and yeah particular when it comes to designing UI that encourages smart chines and the right user Behavior right without again like reducing clicks big fan of that not having to to look at a lot of different places uh amazing yeah well perfect thank you so much for this this was like absolutely basic conversation learned so much that was super super cool to get some some insights into you know what a solution engineer does it notion and how how notion things about you know solving these problems for customers so yeah thank you so much for for coming on today by my pleasure with is it's so fortunate that we get to work with people like you at Ocean and and and I'm very grateful to to get to spend an hour in your company today yeah well hopefully uh soon again and until then have a have a good time thank you so much for my interview with Kieran if this got you interested in using notion for your business but you don't quite know where to start don't worry here is a complete notion for business setup guide everything you need to know to go from a blank page to a fully operating system just click here and I will see you in a second