What are you using for writing with your team? – notes/docs/knowledge bases
Hey everyone!
Curious to know what are you using for writing and collaboration with your team and why?
There are tons of tools for personal notes, docs, and more visual collaboration. When it comes to collaboration the well working tools are probably fewer.
With the teams I worked in the past we used mainly Confluence / Google Docs / Office. Then I moved to OneNote and Notion but soon hit the ceiling. Then I started working on my own project solving this.
So, I'm curious to know what's the current state? What are people really using for work?
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We used to use Google Docs, then Dropbox Paper, and then moved to Notion in 2019 and never looked back. We wrote an extensive piece about it when we did which may be of interest:
https://www.gosquared.com/blog/how-we-use-notion-to-work-together-at-gosquared
Surprised to hear you hit a ceiling with Notion — keen to hear more. I wouldn't say it has solved everything, but it feels like one of those products where it can be used and abused in a team setting unless carefully managed!
Hope this is helpful, Filip!
Thanks for sharing! The problem with Notion was that we were spending more time designing the workspace compared to actually adding information and using it. It was a bit overwhelming. Apart from that search could have been faster/better and it felt a bit hard to link pages.
Mostly because of those problems and because we wanted to link information from other tools I started working on saga with focus on speed, simplicity and connecting more tools.
We're a remote-only team and we mainly use three layers of communication.
Tandem - for synchronous communication, as well as a sense of "we're all here". It looks like an old MSN/ICQ instant messaging client, but allow video call at the click of a button and you see who is online or not, support for "rooms" and (optional) exposing what app you are currently working in. Tandem is great to get rid of the "I'll schedule a meeting with you just to talk to you"-syndrome.
Slack - for short-term async communication and discussions.
Notion / Figma - Notion is used more for collaborative long-term information, and Figma is the more visual approach to it. Collaborative mode in Figma with several people, while being on a video call at the same time is working really well as a replacement for "the office whiteboard".
Very cool workflow! I was an early user of Tandem as well and then moved to around.co which is also a great product.
Curious if you are connecting the information stored in Slack / Notion / Figma somehow? Are they integrated or you don't need this actually.
Not so much connection between them since it is very different types of communication. Anything in Slack is regarded to be gone within a day or two - beyond the border of scrolling. :)
But it could be that for example the #ops channel in Slack got a link in it's description to a Notion document outlining our process and guidelines for dealing with incidents.
Notion documents linking to Figma sketches, etc.
We've used Tandem for a long time as well. It had a period in the beginning when it was a bit unstable, but now we're really happy with it as a complement to the rest of the communication-stack.
When it comes to writing and collaboration tools we do use Google Docs, but we also use Coda, which is similar to Notion except i feel like it's more organized and easy to collaborate with. As for ideation frameworks, we use BRIDGeS, and SCAMPER as well.
Coda is very powerful indeed. Thanks for the framework suggestions. I guess you are using something like a visual canvas for this?
yep, you can basically replicate frameworks anywhere right but for BRIDGeS we use the provided template (this is the one https://railsware.com/bridges-framework/)
Notion + Google Docs
Thanks for sharing! That seems to be a common pattern. Curious what's still missing so that people use 1 tools instead of multiple.
I would be curious why you use both? Would not one of them be enough?
Notion is a wiki: pages are interconnected and it's way faster than Google Docs.
Google Docs is for stand-alone documents.
But why do you not use notion for stand-alone documents either? ... sorry I just know notion from youtube videos. I'm curious to understand.
A wiki page is a very simplified form of a document.
You can't change the format, the font, draw accurate tables, customize the print result or share it like a file.