They loved Notion — But their system wasn’t built to scale.
| Client | Patreon - Video Production Team |
|---|---|
| My Role | UX Researcher and Information Designer (Discovery & Design Sprint Lead) |
| Team | 2 Information Designers, 2 Developer, 1 Engineer, 1 Project Manager |
| Industry | B2B: Creator Economy / Media & Entertainment |
| Tool | Notion, FigJam, Slack, Fathom (AI-transcribed recording), Zoom, Claude (workspace audit & mapping) |
Patreon's video production team runs a complex operation, creating content for multiple shows and platforms. Every week, they produce episodes of Digital Spaghetti — a flagship YouTube series featuring creator interviews — plus a Patreon-exclusive full-length cut, vertical shorts for social platforms, recurring series like Cut by Cut and Shot by Shot, and content for the CEO’s Instagram. There are a lot of moving pieces on a tight timeline.
On top of that, they were managing all of it through a single, sprawling Notion workspace.
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💡 TL;DR
The video team faced significant challenges with manual Notion updates. I mapped their workflows, identified automation opportunities, and designed a system that reduced project setup from 15 minutes to 2 minutes; a solution the team now uses daily.
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“I think it happens again because those options are buried deep in the sub-menus, and with so many different rows, a lot of these fields don’t always get filled in. People are often moving quickly, and it’s easy to forget to update those details” — Colin M., Video Editor & Producer
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Video production team was struggling with a fragmented, manual workflow in Notion that made it difficult to track video projects from ideation to publication. The existing system required excessive manual updates, caused team members to miss important tasks, and created confusion about project status, ultimately slowing down their ability to produce content for their YouTube channel and related platforms.
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❗ The core problem: The workflow had become so deeply nested and manual that the team stopped trusting it; and stopped using it.
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