Notion State of Mind

What does Notion look like inside a 3,000-person company? Mike Beall joins Bryan and Josh to share how Affirm uses Notion at enterprise scale, from workspace design and team adoption to the challenges of building a system that works across dozens of teams and thousands of people.

What makes a great Notion consultancy, and how do you scale without losing what makes your work valuable? Bryan and Josh unpack why Notion State is choosing depth over volume, the role people and relationships play in creating long-term client value.

Notion is a horizontal tool, designed to be customizable across every industry. So how does a build actually change from one industry to the next?

In this episode, Josh and Bryan break it down to the primitives, drawing on dozens of client builds across tech, finance, and professional services.

This week, Josh and Bryan are playing a little game of Blink Ranking Notion Features. They’ll rank features as they come, best to worst, without knowing what’s up next. And the catch: no changing the order!

Comment your own top five for a shot at a t-shirt.

This one's personal...literally. Josh and Bryan pull back the curtain on their own Notion setups, what they've automated with AI, and why they both walked away from "the perfect system." Comment your own setup for a shot at a t-shirt.

A few years ago, Notion was just the app for taking notes. Somewhere between databases, relations, and AI showing up, the internet started asking whether or not it's still a note taking app. Even Notion's own team took to X this week to chime in on the debate. In this episode, Bryan Takayama and Josh Redd take on the question.

Bryan realized he hasn't clicked the "New" button in Notion in months. That observation kicks off a bigger conversation about what actually changes when AI moves from answering your questions to acting on your behalf, the agency pyramid, and why handing more control to AI means holding onto your own principles tighter.

Bonus: leave a comment with your take - we're picking one person to send a t-shirt to!

In this episode of Notion State of Mind, Bryan and Josh unpack what’s starting to grind their gears about the way we use AI at work. It’s not the em dashes, obvious LLM phrasing, or the fact that people are using AI in the first place. It’s what happens when we start using it to replace the thinking, judgment, and effort behind the work.

Notion is the easiest software in the world to build in. It might also be the hardest to make stick. Bryan Takayama and Josh Redd dig into why those two things are connected, and what most people miss until they've already learned it the expensive way.

A 100-person company has 4,950 pairs of people who might need something from each other. Bryan Takayama and Josh Redd walk through Metcalfe's Law and Brooks' Law to illustrate why a growing network gets more valuable and a growing team gets harder to run.