Helping Atlas turn spreadsheet chaos into a scalable & collaborative AI-powered Notion system

4 weeks from kickoff to a workspace Atlas trusted enough to run their business on

Phase 2 underway before Phase 1 had even wrapped

Atlas is a Canadian healthcare marketing agency running about 30 projects a year across a lean, 6-person team split into two pods. A month before this engagement, they'd just moved off Google Sheets into Notion — but the new workspace was already showing the same cracks as the old one: no clear home for new databases, tasks assigned through comments instead of ownership, meeting notes disconnected from the clients and programs they belonged to. With a fall hiring push coming, "good enough for now" wasn't going to hold.

A month-old Notion setup, already cracking

Garrett, Atlas's co-owner, had tried Asana and Monday before landing on Notion — neither had solved the real problem, which was never the tool, it was that a 6-person team spread across two pods had no shared, real-time view of who owned what. The tipping point was the Work Back Schedule: still structured like the spreadsheet it came from, hard to maintain, and disconnected from everything else Atlas was building. Garrett brought in Comma rather than patch it internally.

What sealed it wasn't a feature list — it was speed of understanding:

"Your ability to understand our organization in a couple of calls is really impressive... it feels like you have a deep understanding already."

Garrett O'Neill, Co-Owner, Atlas

Four phases, one very bad Tuesday, zero records lost

Comma ran the rebuild in four weekly phases — Foundation, Collaboration, Personal Dashboards, Onboarding — testing everything in a private space before it touched the team's daily work. Midway through, someone exploring a personal dashboard accidentally deleted the entire Pipeline database — roughly 200 entries. Nobody re-typed a single one: the team pulled up Notion's version history and reinstated the database exactly as it stood, in an afternoon. It became proof, on the spot, that a system built to be this flexible wasn't fragile — and it directly shaped the guardrail that followed: the Wiki got locked, and permissions across every central database moved from full edit access to "can edit content."

By the end, Atlas had a centralised database hub, a redesigned Program Tracker with a live drag-and-drop timeline, a Notes database linking meetings to every client and project, and — beyond the original brief — a library of one-click AI skills for turning meeting notes into tasks.

The result: one place to work, instead of six

The real shift wasn't the deliverable list, it was where people actually worked. Instead of hunting through comment threads to find who owned what, every program manager and account manager now opens one personal dashboard, pre-filtered to their own work by owner, due date, and status. Each pod has its own collaborative view of call history and active projects instead of carrying it in someone's head. And the Work Back Schedule that used to be a spreadsheet wearing a Notion skin is now a live, drag-and-drop timeline the whole team can see at once.

Atlas didn't just sign off on Phase 1 — they expanded immediately into Phase 2, integrating ad campaign data and AI-assisted reporting across Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit.

"We had a fantastic experience working with Matt. He immediately understood our business, identified the gaps we were trying to solve, and quickly turned that understanding into a Notion workspace built around exactly how our team works. Matt was thoughtful, sharp, efficient, and incredibly easy to work with. We couldn't be happier with the result and would highly recommend him."

Garrett O'Neill, Co-Owner, Atlas

Still running project management out of spreadsheets? Talk to Comma about building a Notion workspace your team can trust.