Primer unites its fast-growing teams on Notion

Primer integrates dozens of online payment providers into a unified checkout. Its remote-first team uses Notion to organize knowledge, coordinate work, and supercharge growth.

Insights from

Monika Ocieczek

Product Lead

Erin Potter

People and Operations

Jamie MacLeod

Engineering Manager

Use cases
Documentation, Project Management, Wiki
1

Engineering's collection of knowledge — past and present

Building Primer was a heavy technical lift so engineering was the startup’s first team — and its fastest growing. New employees were joining every week, which made managing sprints and organizing projects tough, especially with people spread around the world.

Now, they use Notion to power their work, keeping engineers informed, on track, and productive.

All their plans, proposals, and docs live in Notion. They even save rejected ideas, helping engineers learn from past thinking. With a single source of truth, everyone can stay informed and on-track as the team grows.

tools
Save every iota of context — forever.
Notion adds structure to our proposals: problem, proposed solutions, and questions. We use comments to provide feedback and advice.
Jamie MacLeod
Jamie MacLeod
Engineering Manager
2

All teams come together in one place

Primer faced a double whammy of startup challenges: it was born in the pandemic and went remote-first from day one. With employees in 18 different countries, they needed a centralized workspace that could bend and bow to fit any requirement.

They use Notion as the hub for everything — a lightweight issue tracker, wiki, project management tool, and loads more.

“The more functions we have in one place, the better,” says Monika. “Notion is flexible enough to create different types of content so we can build product roadmaps, design processes, product spec templates — anything!”

Notion keeps Primer's team biased toward action, because when they're not bugged down looking for information, they're able to move quicker with a full field of vision.

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Primer HQ helps new employees get to know the industry, Primer, and their new team.
3

Onboarding doesn't stop after week one

With hundreds of players and thousands of moving parts, the payments industry is devilishly complex — and Primer’s employees have to know it all. Since the industry is evolving at breakneck page, it's a challenge that never entirely disappears.

Their people team build personalized onboarding guides on Notion for each new employee and grant them access long before their official start date. It introduces them to their onboarding buddy, walks them through Primer's product roadmap, and even invites them to their first Friday social.

But preboarding and onboarding are only the beginning. There’s way too much to learn about the ever-moving payments industry during their first day, week, or month. Notion powers Primer’s culture of continuous learning — everboarding.

checklist illustration
Onboarding templates give new hires a consistently amazing experience.
We can document everything and promote self exploration of Notion through our onboarding. That initial knowledge transfer is super important.
Erin Potter
Erin Potter
People and Operations
4

One tool.
Infinite customization possibilities.

Primer doubled its headcount in the past year and plans to keep on growing. With new teams popping up every month, they needed somewhere to store information and share working practices that are specific to them.

So each team built out a homepage on Notion, personalized with gifs and images to make it feel like their own. This allows each team to curate information and present only what’s important to marketing, product, or engineering. It gives people a sense of community — a virtual office even though they’re hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other.

“We have a brand new data team that didn’t exist before,” says Monika. “They have a home on Notion, which makes them feel more established.”

It’s great for transparency, too. Engineers can hop into the marketing homepage to see what promotions are coming up. And sales reps can dip into the product homepage to find out what new features are planned.

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New or old, large or small, every team has a home on Notion.

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