How Lukso Introduced A Company-Wide Notion Operating System

Meet The Company

Lukso is a web3 company building both a blockchain platform and an incubator to revolutionise the digital creative economy. Established in 2017, Lukso is built on a Layer-1 Ethereum-compatible network that integrates advanced features to cater specifically to the needs of creators, designers, and brands. The company focuses on improving digital identity, asset management, and creative collaboration in the Web3 era.

When we started our engagement, Lukso had raised $18 million and employed 50 professionals across six departments, with a rapidly growing team. They required a best-in-class digital workspace to align the team, support the expansion and accelerate their growth.

The Challenge

Lukso faced a set of challenges that are very representative of companies transitioning into their scale-up phase.

In a small and rapidly iterating team, processes and workspace design are often put on hold. This works fine as long as everyone sits in a room and can talk frequently, but cracks start to show as soon as the growth phase sets in.

Since Lukso didn’t have a clearly defined tech stack, teams had started to organise themselves around different methods and tools. Some were working in ClickUp, others in Notion. The teams in Notion all had their own, isolated systems which meant that many processes were duplicated and cross-functional collaboration was nearly impossible.

Management was lacking a central source of truth to easily manage projects and docs and individual contributors had a hard time figuring out what all was on their plates – and what to prioritise.

This resulted in a lot of friction. People had to follow-up constantly, spend more time in meetings and often had to reinvent the wheel because teams were not on the same page.

How we structured the Notion Consulting Process

Based on our initial discovery phase, we decided that our BTIM Process together with a Snowball Rollout would be the best fit for Lukso.

The BTIM Process breaks down into the Build Phase (1), the Train Phase (2) and the Iterate & Migrate Phase (3). When combined with a Snowball Rollout, it’s particularly well suited for larger teams that want to completely revamp their processes.

Here’s how this Notion Consulting approach looks like in practice:

• Build Phase: During a complete revamp, we design a Notion Workspace tailored to your unique business model and organisation and build it from the ground up. Prior to the build, we conduct interviews with key stakeholders to make sure we know exactly what you need in your day-to-day operations.
• Train Phase: Once ready, we start training your team with dedicated 1-on-1 sessions and One-to-Many Workshops to ensure everyone knows how to use the new system.
• Iterate & Migrate Phase: With the team using the new system, we quickly collect any feedback and rapidly iterate. Oftentimes, teams only realise the full potential of Notion after seeing a well-tuned system in place, so this phase brings up new opportunities that no one previously thought possible. We’ll also start migrating all your data from the old system to the new one

A Snowball Rollout is often the best method to onboard a large team to a new Notion System.

• We start by identifying System Admins and Notion Champions. These are key players that will be internally responsible for the system. We train them from Day 1 of the Build Phase, so they know exactly how the system operates.
• Next, we look for the department or team with the strongest Product-Notion-Fit, i.e. that is best suited to be the Early Adopters. This could be because of the average Notion Level, daily operations that align particularly well with Notion or simply because they are the most motivated.
• We onboard the Early Adopters and have them start using the system first. This provides us valuable first feedback, enables a smooth transition and starts word-of-mouth excitement for the rest of the company.
• Then, we start “rolling” the snowball further downhill and start onboarding the second and third department. At this point, the internal Notion Champions can typically start supporting the process, which means we can onboard more and more people.
• Whenever a new team joins, they’ll already find a working system, with real data and can experience the biggest benefits immediately. This in turn makes Change Management significantly easier and improves overall adoption rates.

By combining the BTIM Process with a Snowball Rollout, we were able to create a completely new system for Lukso and onboard the whole company to it in just 8 weeks, all while training the internal Notion Champions to run the system after the engagement would end.

Implemented Solutions

During our engagement, we created a best-in-class Notion Setup for Lukso that was designed to scale with a rapidly growing team. We can break down the implemented solutions into three big categories:

• The Perfect 80 / 20 Workspace
• A Modern Knowledge Base
• Optimising Supporting Workflows

The Perfect 80 / 20 Workspace

The Perfect 80 / 20 Workspace is our approach to building company workspaces from the ground up and is rooted in a simple idea:

20% of our inputs inform 80% of our outputs

As Notion Consultants, our job is to quickly identify how these 20% look for your company. Then, we design a workspace around these 20% that forms the basis for your new digital office.

This has a huge advantage compared to trying to map your whole business to Notion from Day 1. The “Time-to-Solution” is shortened massively and you can start using the new system in as little as 2 weeks.

In the case of Lukso, this meant building a project-agnostic workspace around the “Holy Trinity of Notion”: Projects, Tasks & Charts.

Since Lukso was growing rapidly and had a wide type of tasks to focus on, the most important 20% were about giving them a simple yet powerful way to manage projects across departments.

This might look very different in your company. Some other examples include:

• Content Pipelines for Content-First Teams
• Deal Pipelines for Venture Capital & Private Equity
• Sprints & User Stories for Engineering Teams

When developing a Notion Workspace, we follow proven engineering frameworks and divide the process into Backend (your company’s data structure) and Frontend (the way your team interacts with the system).

Since the level of Notion skills varied wildly across departments, we decided to provide two different Frontend experiences.

• A simple “New to Notion” Dashboard
• An advanced Dashboard for experienced users

That way, we could abstract away the more complex aspects of Notion and give new users an easy to understand system with a much lower learning curve.

And thanks to our Global Database Architecture, users can effortlessly switch to their new dashboard whenever they’re ready without having to migrate any data – all information is automatically displayed.

A Modern Knowledge Base

Once the Perfect 80 / 20 Workspace was set up, the project management side was already operational for Lukso.

The next big challenge was Knowledge. Particularly early on, teams often de-prioritise creating documentation. This is understandable since time is always scarce, but it will greatly hamper your ability to scale further down the road.

Our recommendation: create a flexible culture of documentation early on and demonstrate to your team how it creates significant time savings within a short timeframe.

In order to do this, we need to address the two main concerns around documentation:

• It takes too long to create documentation and I don’t have time right now
• No one uses existing documentation because it’s hard to find

We solved both these issues with our Notion Knowledge System (NKS) for Lukso.

By integrating Knowledge Management deeply with the action side (i.e. Project Management), we make it super easy for anyone to create documentation on the fly.

No one needs to worry where to save something – and thanks to a large number of connections to other elements in the workspace, documentation naturally comes up in the context where people need it.

After building the system, we conducted a company-wide workshop. During the workshop, we guided the team through a range of exercises to identify quick documentation wins and get a head-start on them.

We also shared a range of strategies and hacks to create documentation at next to no additional time investment.

This meant that Lukso was able to kickstart a new culture of documentation which in turn significantly increased their ability to onboard new team members and execute on their growth goals.

Optimising Supporting Workflows

After we completed the BTIM Cycle (Build, Train, Iterate & Migrate, see above for more details), we had a proven Operating System for Lukso that was tailored to the team’s specific way of working.

From that point, we continued by tackling workflows outside The Perfect 80 / 20 Workspace. One of Notion’s superpowers is the flexibility that allows us to tailor the tool exactly to your process. This really shines when it comes to your supporting workflows that take up considerable amount of time without being at the core of your business.

In the case of Lukso, that meant building out dedicated pipelines for content production (Marketing Team), event organisation (Operations Team) and handling contractor invoices (Finance Team).

Each workflow was first mapped with the key stakeholders before building the corresponding databases and dashboards in Notion. And thanks to our scalable database architecture during the BTIM Cycle, these additional workflows could easily be integrated with the rest of the system.