In this blog post, Lisa Fan, Mengying Li, and Jessica Zhang from our Data team revisit a previous topic, "How Notion uses Notion," this time with a statistical approach — seeing how data can offer insights into how our team utilizes our own product — and how your own team can use Notion as well.
Everyone and every department has their own characteristics when it comes to using Notion. We took a look at Notion’s “social network” — the web of interactions between page creators and visitors at the department level — and it’s fascinating to chart the collaboration patterns, and their result: less tribal knowledge, improved alignment, and collaboration.
We launched Teamspaces back in August 2022 so that cross-functional teams and working groups could have their own dedicated areas to get work done. Every employee can easily access other teams’ docs and curate their own sidebar to reflect their priorities, interests, and teams they work with most frequently.
This all makes teamspaces data an interesting window into how any team works. Here’s my own teamspaces sidebar:
We also use both open and closed teamspaces — open for letting colleagues access high-level information about a team (members, key documentation, ongoing projects, meeting notes, etc.), and closed for information that only certain people should be able to access, like management updates, confidential recruiting processes, and sensitive financial info.
Notion currently has 53 open teamspaces, 6 closed teamspaces, and 26 private teamspaces. Every employee has an average of 7.8 teamspaces in their sidebar, under each of which there are 4 or 5 parent pages offering quick access to important documents.
The most popular teamspaces at Notion (after the company-wide teamspace) are Sales & Success and Product & Eng, with 11% of employees visiting each one in the past week.
Notion has a set of global databases that are central to most key workflows across our company. We do our best to put all our work in these databases in order to remove information silos and speed collaboration through transparency. The database with the most entries (81,000) is Paper Trails / eng-notify records, which aggregates all configuration changes by Notion engineers.
<aside> <img src="/icons/meeting_gray.svg" alt="/icons/meeting_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Suppose an engineering team and a Marketing team meet to discuss a project. Here’s what they might run the meeting with Notion databases:
Our core databases store a massive amount of data and are viewed by dozens of people every day. Here’s a look at what’s happening in them:
| Database name | Function | # of views created for this database | % of Notinos who are weekly active editors | New entries per week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Docs | Documents used to collaborate and not meant to be lasting wikis in the sidebar | 84 | 12.0% | 101 |
| Meeting Notes | Meeting agendas and notes | 90 | 15.4% | 180 |
| Projects | Tracks high-level projects and launches from product and engineering | 172 | 9.6% | 59 |
| Tasks | Tracks lower-level bugs, issues, feedback, etc. Tasks often ladder into Projects | 380 | 29.4% | 679 |
| People Directory | Directory of all Notinos | 52 | 2.8% | 13 |
Because our core databases store so much information, teams often create their own views in their teamspaces. The Collections team, for example, wanted a view of the Meeting Notes database which only includes meetings their team attended. So they added a view filtered on Team: Collections.
Compared to the main Meeting Notes database, which contains 13,300 meeting note entries, this database is a lot more manageable -- it has just 62 meeting note entries.
