notion

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People talk a lot of shit about /notion and how it becomes a hellscape for teams as they scale

In Nov of 2022, the @endaoment core team and contributors doubled down on /notion like the crazy people we are 

This week, we crossed our 10,000th (!!) work item—we call them issues

HERE'S SOME GRAPHS & INSIGHTS LEARNED:

First, you gotta feel the pain to get the gain. After we launched V2 in Oct22, we were pooped 💩, literal shit was smeared all over the place. 

Sometimes projects, sometimes epic, sometimes documents sometimes tasks were littered across multiple tools. 

I wrote this diatribe as to why it hurt so much & what to do:

working on @endaoment, hosting /philanthropy


First, you gotta feel the pain to get the gain. After we launched V2 in Oct22, we were pooped 💩, literal shit was smeared all over the place. 

Sometimes projects, sometimes epic, sometimes documents sometimes tasks were littered across multiple tools. 

I wrote this diatribe as to why it hurt so much & what to do:


So we got serious about a few things:

1. Unifying all planning, bug tracking, big idea thinking and individual work Items in one place. 

2. Marrying time based DBs w/ depth based dbs. (2wk sprints w/ work items, 6wk releases w/ chewable projects, 12wk Q's w/ big brain epics

3. Using story points to track effort 

It worked. We started seeing productivity scale, scale with health, and scale fast. 

No more fractured documentation, everything is in Notion 

And every work item has its relative weight & priority. 

We started slow, but over time, our story points ramped up:

Now that we're at 10,000 issues created, we're starting to see some interesting trends. 

Trend 1. We overuse High Priority: 

We need to improve our usage of P0 and P1, not everything is an emergency.

Trend 2. Most work items (issues) are lightweight and quick hitting: 

Largely this is dominated by reviews, where someone needs to look at someone elses work. Makes sense, but interesting to see in action

Trend 3. Most issues are opened & resolved inside of 2 weeks. 

This is great!!! This is what we want. Issues closed within 2 weeks of opening. 

However, we have some real stragglers that get left behind...will be important to get those closed out rather than having them linger.

Trend 4. Reviews & Chores take up everyone's time. 

Suprising that we don't have more bugs, probably a mis-coding of bugs as features. 

Nice to see a healthy percent of PTO, but frankly, not enough to keep our team from being burnt out. The total PTO story points really confirm this.

Trend 5. Core team gets most of the work done. Full time members of Endaoment.tech and Endaoment.org are on the left, all of our volunteers, vendors and contractors are on the right. 

Would love to see greater adoption of the system by outside parties, but its complicated.

Overall, we wouldn't be where we are without our doubling down into notion. 

If you are disciplined, committed and open to refinement—you can make a system that serves as a force multiplier. 

The best part: we have the data to show when people are burnout or thriving and anything between. 

Good night & good luck. 

Trend 2. Most work items (issues) are lightweight and quick hitting: 

Largely this is dominated by reviews, where someone needs to look at someone elses work. Makes sense, but interesting to see in action 