How Dott’s writing culture centralizes knowledge on Notion

Dott helps people skip traffic jams, polluted streets, and busy public transport with shared e-scooters and e-bikes. Its team began documenting meetings, processes, and decisions on Notion to create a long-term memory as a foundation for scale.

体験談

Evan Reeves

Engineering Manager

用途
ドキュメント、Wiki、プロジェクト管理
1

Cut ramp time with a robust onboarding process

When Dott was starting out, onboarding was informal. Managers relied on ad hoc processes that lived in their heads. But as the startup scaling, they realized they needed something more robust and repeatable so every employee received a consistently supportive welcome.

Dott designed a centralized onboarding template for all new employees with boards for each employee’s first day, week, and month. With their improved process, new employees ramp significantly faster. Before, engineers took three days to get set up and begin contributing. Now, they’re up and running in a few hours.

checklist illustration
Formalize onboarding tasks on Notion to make sure nothing is missed.
There is an overwhelming amount of onboarding products we could have used — but built the same functionality on Notion.
Evan Reeves
Evan Reeves
Engineering Manager
2

Create a paper trail for every decision

As a cross-continent rental service, Dott tackles a lot of complex challenges — technology, regulation, consumer behavior, the list goes on. You can’t solve big problems in one meeting. You need to chip away at them over time. Because there wasn’t a record of earlier meetings, Dott’s engineers spent a lot of time recapping progress and retreading the same ground, rather than discussing new ideas.

To accelerate their work, they introduced a discussion database to document their decision-making process in Notion. Now, during meetings, engineers record what they’re talking about. What have they learned? What are they planning? Why did they take a particular decision?

It creates a sort of long-term memory for the team. If engineers can’t make a meeting or want to check why they made a decision, they can find out in a couple of clicks. Ultimately, it means no more guesswork or Groundhog Day followup meetings.

Dott-2
Turn live conversations into permanent written records.
3

Transparent teams create alignment

As a small team, it was easy for Dott’s employees to know each other and what they were working on. As a rapidly growing company? Not so much. There’s simply too many people.

To create transparency, they created a centralized staff database on Notion, detailing titles, projects, specialization, location, and so on. Views allow people to quickly see different views of our team - whether by location, by team, or by hire date.

Individual contributors can watch their team grow. Managers can evaluate their resourcing. Leaders can decide where to invest next. And everyone can watch the company grow with insight into what’s happening next — and why.

イラスト – ドキュメントを見ている人たち
Turn a rapidly growing company into a transparent team.
Multiple people in multiple roles now have better visibility into who we're hiring and when they're joining the team.
Evan Reeves
Evan Reeves
Engineering Manager
4

An analytical approach to port-mortems to accelerate learning

As a fast-moving startup, things inevitably go wrong. What Dott needed was a way to avoid making the same mistake twice.

They created a post-mortem template on Notion, ensuring engineers approached each fault with the same scientific rigor. Now, they have an in-depth record of outages, including what they did to fix the issue. They use extensive metadata in the database, too. At a glance, leaders can see whether outages are internal or external — and what’s causing them.

“Postmortems make outages easy to investigate and reference,” says Evan. “It’s useful for backend engineers who are looking for tested solutions and managers searching for trends.”

Recording outages, their causes, and fixes means Dott never repeats a mistake. In fact, every outage makes them more adaptable and resilient.

Dott-4
Comprehensive postmortems help Dott grow more robust.

Build a culture of documentation on Notion

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