Kin + Carta’s design team cuts shallow work with Notion
Kin + Carta helps companies transform their business through consulting, engineering, design, and marketing services. Its design team uses Notion to add structure to their meetings, roadmaps, and documents. Now, the whole company uses it to power transformation projects.
Making meetings effortless with templates
Kin + Carta’s design team runs weekly staff meetings for project leads to set high-level strategy for the company. (Think of the magazine meeting from The Devil Wears Prada, but far less terrifying.) Meeting notes used to live in a disorganized Google Drive.
Now, they keep all meeting notes in Notion and use a customizable template. They can embed all kinds of media in the doc — task boards, people review databases, and so on. It’s automated many of their old manual tasks, freeing up people to do more of what they actually want to do: design.
Our Google Docs would freeze and crash because we had so much content on one page. So we built out a database in Notion and it works perfectly.
Design Operations Manager
A shared workspace for client and agency
Before Notion, Kin + Carta lacked a written roadmap for many large client projects. Workflows, processes, and plans lived in the design lead’s head.
Now, the team creates a Notion workspace for every project, where they can plan work, store assets, and organize documents. Both client stakeholders and internal employees have access to these workspaces, allowing for easier communication and collaboration.
“We always have to show the value in what we do for our clients,” says Scott. “Notion allows clients to see our plans for the next three or four months and what we'll achieve by the end.”
This information used to live inside meetings and emails. Today, clients can see what Kin + Carta designers are working on and examine the context behind their decisions.
Moments of connection in a virtual world
In-person design meetings at Kin + Carta were next-level. People would meet up and make “cool crafty things,” says Scott.
Introducing Notion helps them emulate that in-person magic even when coworkers are hundreds of miles apart. Using a template, the design team makes sure every virtual meeting has a dollop of fun to keep everyone engaged. The template suggests icebreaker sessions, highlights birthdays, and selects someone to present a mini-update on their work. It maximizes their time together and keeps everyone engaged within their remote team.
We can quickly build out a meeting agenda for a large group of people and still make it interactive and fun.
Design Operations Manager
Defaulting to transparent communication
Like many tech companies, Kin + Carta were early adopters of Slack, which transformed how the company talked to each other on a daily basis. They learned to rely heavily on direct messages — Teammates would share content and assets in private threads, which made it hard for other teams to find what they needed. At one point, they had a Slack channel just for finding documents.
To fix this, the team built out wikis on Notion, organizing dozens of Google Docs and other files into one searchable library. When someone needs to share a logo or project doc, everyone defaults to Notion. Knowledge is much more visible — People know where to look for something *and* how to find it.
“What drove us to Notion was how flexible it was,” says Scott. “You can write something up fast, add links in, create tables, and rearrange any of this whenever you like. We no longer have twenty Google Docs links open at once.”
