Case study

Transforming the Notion of a SaaS software publisher

Knowmore is a SaaS publisher offering a digital adoption platform, through an approach that combines usage and learning. The company brings together around thirty employees, and its clients include groups such as AIRBUS, Crédit Agricole and Pernod Ricard.

1 · Context

A white paper by Knowmore

Knowmore is a publisher with over 20 years of experience which, until recently, worked for a handful of carefully selected key accounts. Then the company took a turning point by evolving its product into a SaaS solution, with the ambition of delivering its services on a much larger scale. This strategic choice proved successful and Knowmore is going through a phase of accelerated growth.

This change of scale brings about a multiplication of projects that are complex by nature. Each deployment project calls for a clear vision despite the large amount of information to take into account. Fabien Taillandier, Product and Customer Relationship Director at Knowmore, observes that their tracking tools struggle to deliver on their promises. On top of that, each department has its own tools and there is no shared repository.

After a few iterations, Notion stands out as the ideal solution to centralize information and collaboration across the different departments. Fabien then decided to call on me for support throughout this organizational transformation.

2 · Challenge

Knowmore’s digital adoption platform

Co-build a repository in Notion that lets Knowmore track its activity precisely.

The brief at a glance

Model Knowmore’s business
Build an intuitive Notion despite the complexity of the projects
Train Fabien Taillandier to master Notion and to assign access
Design UX-friendly templates for the key databases
Long term: support Knowmore on various challenges, within a process of centralizing operations in Notion

3 · Roadmap

Exploration workshops

These let me grasp the problems to solve and cover the full scope of the mission. We refine the pre-identified needs and the frictions observed. The first workshop is macro, to understand Knowmore’s business and the way they organize themselves to carry out this repository project. The following workshops focus on specific points, to capture the subtleties of the project.

Analysis & proposal

I study the information gathered during the exploration workshops, which I consolidate by going meticulously through Knowmore’s Notion workspace. This analysis leads to a deliverable that includes: a mapping of the company’s Notion information system (the workspace as it stands before my intervention), a critical analysis of the existing setup, and a schematic proposal for a new organization within Notion.

Building an MVP

As soon as we agreed on a new organization, I set about designing the Notion workspace. This is the production phase. It is carried out through co-construction, with checkpoints to match the reality of the digital adoption SaaS’s activity as closely as possible. In this case, I chose to build a Notion MVP in a separate space, so as not to disrupt the teams’ work.

Transforming the Notion workspace

Once the tests prove conclusive, the work done has to be integrated into the company’s Notion workspace. The main challenge here is to capitalize on the existing work without losing any data. I sort the useless elements from the relevant but under-optimized ones. In the end, we get the best of both worlds: a tailor-made Notion workspace that holds the important data from the old space.

Change management

The goal is to minimize the friction tied to the Notion’s evolution. To do so, I train the employees over video calls. It’s an opportunity to go through all the features and answer every question. I also produce tutorials in the form of short video capsules. This makes it possible to offer structured onboarding on a dedicated Notion page. On top of that, I place links to specific videos, contextually, directly on the Notion pages.

Feedback & fine-tuning

Three weeks after the new workspace goes live, we hold a meeting to gather the feedback reported by all the employees concerned. As a result, I fine-tune the Notion so that it fits the teams’ usage as closely as possible.

Long-term support

Working directly with the product and customer relationship director, I help the company integrate certain processes into Notion and set up automations via Make, to save time and gain precision on time-consuming tasks.