Flexible project and customer management in Notion
PKSHA Workplace develops and sells AI SaaS products designed to shape the future of work in Japan. With a large team of engineers, their development team uses Notion to streamline its development processes and workflows. Inspired by the development team’s success, the customer success team also adopted Notion to improve customer management and operational efficiency.
Reducing workload by managing development in a single tool
The development team once faced a major challenge: constantly switching between different tools. Development was managed across several platforms, making it difficult to keep information in sync and stay organized. As Engineering Manager Miyoshi explains, “When we were a small team, using multiple tools wasn’t a problem. But as development scaled up, more roles and processes were added. Each role had its own status updates, making everything increasingly difficult to manage.” With different roles tracking their progress separately, keeping track of everything became an uphill battle for the product manager. To solve this problem, the team brought all their development progress into Notion, making it easy to track everything on a single page. This significantly reduced the workload involved.
When every team shares information in Notion, we can understand each other’s challenges. When that happens, we want to do whatever we can to help. Our goal is to build a culture where teams support one another.
Seeing the full workflow in one database
How does the development team actually manage projects? The answer is simple: they use just one database. This database covers the entire development lifecycle, from initial consultations and requirements definition to sprint planning, development, QA, testing, and final release. The database is divided into approximately 50 different stages, with customized views that display relevant information for each stage. Managing everything within a single database significantly reduced oversights and bugs, and made handoffs to the next phase smoother.
Using Notion also fostered what the team calls a “culture of drawing.” With the shift to remote work, team members could no longer gather around a whiteboard in a meeting room to sketch out ideas and make sure everyone was on the same page. Instead, they use Notion as a digital whiteboard. During remote meetings, team members use Mermaid, a tool that generates diagrams from code, to create visuals directly in Notion and explain their ideas. By supporting various forms of expression—including visuals, text, and code—Notion enables development professionals to bring their ideas to life.
Bringing team information onto one page
At PKSHA Workplace, where Notion is used company-wide, employees can view pages from other departments. Inspired by the development team’s pages, the customer success team began using Notion more extensively. They created a team wiki, consolidating OKRs, CRM (customer relationship management), meeting minutes, team knowledge, and member profiles. They designed this information to fit entirely within a single page without creating hierarchical categories. Endo, who designed the page, explains: “I looked at examples from other companies and created a layout that consolidates everything in one place.” The page now brings together everything the team needs, making Notion an essential part of their daily work.
At one point, we accidentally deleted all the information in Notion. However, we were able to restore everything easily using the page history feature. As a SaaS provider ourselves, we learned something valuable from this safeguard.
Improving customer management in Notion
The customer success team also uses Notion to keep all their customer information in one place. Team members can easily see which customers they’re responsible for, along with each customer’s status and contract details. By using Notion as a CRM, the team can stay on top of customer requests, respond more quickly, and build stronger relationships. Notion is especially useful during contract renewals, when the team needs to confirm whether customers want to continue. To ensure timely follow-up, they’ve set up Notion to display upcoming renewal dates, so they know exactly when to take action. Endo explains, “Keeping information up to date is the most important part of CRM work. But it can be hard to keep up with all the updates. With Notion, we can set detailed conditions that make missing information easy to spot.” With Notion, teams can manage both development and customer relationships in one place. Looking ahead, Miyoshi hopes to bring in information from all departments. When teams connect, they can spark new ideas and create unexpected synergies. Why not use Notion to bring your team together and see what’s possible?
