Moving to Notion (and away from Atlassian)

TL;DR; In this blog post you will hear how my new venture team dropped an Atlassian product and picked up Notion. It is still early days for our team but there’s been a lot of learnings already. This post describes why I selected Notion, the benefits and how your team could make the change, too.

I’ve written two follow up posts: Notion for delivery & 1,000 tickets in Notion.

Context

Earlier this year I started a new venture and during the first week I vividly remember looking around the room, at our morning stand up, noticing the twenty other new team members standing around, waiting and staring at the big screen to see the venture progress. It was extremely inspiring and overwhelming at the same time.

The problem to solve

In my role I am faced with the challenge of forming a new team from the ground up. Sometimes it will be a small team of two all the way through to more than twenty new faces on day one. No matter the size, the stages of forming, storming and norming a new venture team presents a lot of challenges. In this scenario, there are many strategies to help support an inclusive, collaborative and efficient environment — one of them is the tools you collaborate on.

Prior to this venture, I had been using a combination of tools to ensure teams across design, engineering, business and product were collaborating effectively. See below a list of previously used team tools:

• Confluence: Knowledge sharing, documentation, wikis, key decision registers and more…
• Trello: General business task management and venture team progress alignment
• G-Suite Drive: Docs, Slides and Sheet management
• Miro: Research capture and roadmap building
• Slack: Team communication and knowledge sharing

This list does not include a number of delivery team tools such as Figma or JIRA. I will come back to this.

I am a huge fan of all of these tools and their product teams, but I was consistently hearing the same comments from all of the teams I work with:

Where do I put this?

Where is the product documentation?

I need a summary of how all the work streams are progressing

In summary, across all the teams I have worked with, it has been too common to not know where to do the work or where to find the work. This leads to silos and inefficiencies forming too regularly.

Why Notion

It’s only been five weeks and very much still an experiment, but our team has embraced a tool called Notion and it’s had a huge impact as a solution to this problem and helped our team support a collaborative environment.

When starting the new venture earlier this year, I was formulating my view on how I could solve this problem of confusion and silos. For me, a key value proposition for a tool that would allow me to promote an inclusive, collaborative and efficient environment was “all your team’s work in one place.” This is what I found with Notion.

Notion was built to solve the problem of chaos with too many tools. Here is a summary of the four key features:

01 Notes & Docs

Notion is by far the most flexible notes and docs tool I have ever used. You can add over 30 media types and the drag and drop functionality makes it super simple to use. Embedding files makes any cross tool collaboration manageable. This is super important and will always occur with specialist tools required for design teams etc.

02 Knowledge Base

The minimalist look and feel allows you to make it your own. Every stream of the team can have their own space and make it their own. There are great templates for different team types and easy navigation.

03 Task Management

The Kanban Board is on par with Trello, but wins me over with all the custom views you can have (view tasks in a calendar is great for tracking deliverables). Worth noting, I’ve not used the Kanban board for engineering delivery, yet.

04 Spreadsheets & Databases

Flexible tables for all your product, design and engineering decision register needs. I can’t speak for technical comparison against excel, but a commercial team member recently mentioned the following at a retro — “I can’t believe I moved away from excel and towards Notion for some tasks.”

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In summary, this has felt like a direct replacement for what I always wanted to experience with Confluence. I never felt like I could promote and encourage a team to use Confluence when I personally couldn’t navigate quickly and confidently around a space.

Making the move

More than anything, it’s going to take ownership and commitment from a team member to drive the adoption. So, if you want to make the move… here are some tips from my journey so far.

01 Make it feel like home before you invite people

One of Notions value propositions is its clean look and feel. This provides a blank canvas and fresh start for a team. However, this also presents a risk for new team members to feel lost or disorientated.

Before you invite other team members into the space, ensure you set up a very basic structure to the pages.

• Create a home base with your mission and purpose at the core
• Make sure your Kanban boards are up and running
• Embrace the emoji’s and make sure you have a cover page for the important pages.

An initiative that we used to kick off our use of Notion was to ask all team members to create a Bio page. This helps the team become familiar with the way Notion works and it really helped us get to know each other.

01 Take ownership of the move

If you are the one driving the use of a new tool, it becomes your responsibility to make it a success. Along with making sure things are set up before the team enters the tool, you will need to educate and document how to use the tool and lead the adoption.

• Notion makes this really easy with great help and support pages
• At every opportunity, promote the use of Notion and stay on top of the teams behaviour. A great way to do this is ensuring people are linking to their work in the Kanban boards

Other learnings and considerations

My favourite parts of Notion

• Flexibility: Serious drag and drop.. everything can go anywhere. Other tools feel so rigid..
• Templates: Amazing templates — kanban board is simple and easy to use for any type of work. The structure of the wiki templates make structuring work super simple
• Embed anything: Easy to embed files from other sources and interact with them (spreadsheets etc)
• Emojis and banners: A small thing but brings some cheers / joy to many small elements

Peer to peer communication — Slack

Notion has not replaced Slack for our team. There is limited chat functionality with the Notion product but it does support comments and discussions on pages and tasks.

I have used Slack to promote the use of Notion and forced myself to only share Notion links.

Delivery Tools

To date, we have not formed our delivery team or kicked off a specialised delivery sprint. I am anticipating that our engineering backlog and task management will need to be run inside JIRA. I will update this post when this has kicked off.

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This is just an experiment for now and I’m sure there will be a lot of new learnings on the journey. Overall, it’s been a great experience learning about Notion and seeing a group of amazing humans form as a team around this tool.