The cheat code for savvy teams looking to build scalable and fault-tolerant Notion workspaces from the start.

Notion is hard™

Over the past years of running Notion Mastery and consulting with teams as Notion-Certified Consultants, we’ve seen it all when it comes to complicated workspaces and complex workflows. By the time organizations come to our team to help fix their Notion-based systems and align their teams on “how to Notion”, their workspaces are a jumbled mess of databases and systems, inadequately designed permissions, and misalignment on internal goals.

While much of this discordance is expected when adopting new software, much of it comes down to one of two factors:

Number 1: Notion is very open-ended, complicated, and largely unopinionated

“You can do anything with Notion”, they say! And so maybe you tried to do everything.

• Maybe you grabbed an all-in-one template that does a lot for you, but you don’t know how to customize it. You don’t know how permissions work in practice and so now you’ve got a workspace with a bunch of members who’re breaking things.
• Maybe some team members really like Notion and so each of them builds their own independent systems that work for their team only (or maybe even just them!).
• Maybe you even “asked” AI to build something for you, but since it was done-for-you, you don’t understand what “you” built!

You are paralyzed by choice and by the myriad ways to set up this complicated software!

Sounding familiar yet?

Number 2: Notion is fantastic when most of the folks on your team have a good understanding of how the product works on a fundamental level

Maybe *you—*as the architect, as the person responsible for Notion—maybe you know what you’re doing (hey, but maybe not?), but when it comes to getting folks to use your systems, they…

• Delete properties
• Wipe entire databases
• Move core components to their private section of the workspace
• Accidentally publish private data to the web
• Are creating their own versions of the systems you built
• Set up advanced AI integrations that potentially expose your data to the world
• and so on, and so on…