How Atlas rebuilt a month-old Notion workspace in four weeks, before a hiring push

4 weeks from kickoff to a workspace Atlas runs its business on

*Phase 2 started before Phase 1 had finished*

Atlas is a Canadian healthcare marketing agency running about 30 projects a year with a six-person team split into two pods. A month before we started, they had moved from Google Sheets to Notion, and the new workspace was already showing the same problems as the old one. New databases had no clear home, tasks were assigned in comments rather than to an owner, and meeting notes weren't linked to the clients and programs they belonged to. An autumn hiring push was coming.

What was going wrong

Garrett, Atlas's co-owner, had tried Asana and Monday before Notion. Neither fixed the underlying problem: six people across two pods had no shared, live view of who owned what. The tipping point was the Work Back Schedule. It was still structured like the spreadsheet it came from, hard to maintain and disconnected from everything else.

Garrett chose us after two calls:

"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

How we built it

Matt led the rebuild in four weekly phases (Foundation, Collaboration, Personal Dashboards and Onboarding), testing everything in a private space before it reached the team's daily work.

Centralisation. Every database moved into one central hub: the pipeline, the Program Tracker, tasks, and a Notes database that links each meeting to its client and project. We redesigned the Program Tracker with a live drag-and-drop timeline, which replaced the old Work Back Schedule.

Collaboration. Each pod has its own view of call history and active projects, so that knowledge no longer lives in one person's head.

Personalisation. Every program manager and account manager opens one personal dashboard, filtered to their own work by owner, due date and status. Every task now has one owner and sits with its project.

AI, once the structure was in. A library of one-click AI skills turns meeting notes into tasks. It wasn't in the original brief.

Halfway through, someone accidentally deleted the Pipeline database, about 200 records. We restored it from Notion's version history the same afternoon, then locked the wiki and moved every central database to "can edit content" permissions so it can't happen again.

What changed

The biggest change is where people start their day. Nobody hunts through comment threads to find who owns what, and the Work Back Schedule is a live timeline the whole team can see at once.

Atlas moved straight into Phase 2, which is now live. It brings ad campaign data from Meta, Google, LinkedIn and Reddit into the workspace, with AI-assisted reporting on top.

Who owns it now

Atlas runs it themselves. The final phase was onboarding, so new hires can find their way around the workspace from their first day.

"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 us about building a Notion workspace your team can trust.