How Sendbird created company-wide transparency with Notion
Sendbird improves user engagement and retention with scalable in-app chat, voice, and video API. Notion helps them catalog knowledge, information, and ideas across the entire company.
JaeYeon (Eric) Kim
Product Manager
Mission control for a fast-growing org
Sendbird has tripled its customer base since 2019 with internal headcount not far behind. They needed a way to onboard new employees and create a working environment biased toward action and results.
They built team workspaces on Notion, which every new employee sees upon joining. With information neatly arranged in subpages, it turns a potentially daunting experience into an organized portal that enables org-wide transparency. Now, even when Sendbird is hiring aggressively, new employees can hit the ground running because they have access to knowledge from day one — delivering immediate value.
We use our homepages in Notion to organize our thoughts.
Product Manager
A living repository of customer knowledge
App development is a heavy technical lift. To add Sendbird’s chat platform to existing apps, engineers learn a lot about each customer’s product — how it’s architected, how it’s maintained, who the key stakeholders are, and so on. Before, this valuable, in-depth information lived exclusively in engineers' heads, making information sharing a chore.
Sendbird built out a Notion database packed full of individual customer insights. As they’re working, engineers add insights and observations to customer entries — architecture diagrams, conversation transcripts, and technical documentation. It takes the knowledge out of their heads and into Notion where it acts as a shared collective brain.
Now, new engineers can search through tons of acquired knowledge, learning about the customer’s app and getting up to speed in minutes.
As industries grow and change, Sendbird stays on trend
Name an industry and you can bet Sendbird has a client in it. Each vertical has its own app development eccentricities and learning the ins-and-outs of each vertical took months, if not years.
Sendbird resolved to share insights from its team to give every developer the knowledge of an industry expert, accelerating customer implementations.
Their developers came together and condensed disorganized Google Docs into a public-facing wiki on Notion. Now, everyone can access in-depth industry information on their own, reducing the burden on Sendbird’s engineers to answer simple questions, queries, and concerns.
Our sales reps also use Notion as a learning center. It helps them answer more technical questions from prospects instantly.
Product Manager
An inspiration board that informs product development
The messaging space moves at the speed of light. To stay at the front of the industry, Sendbird takes inspiration from everywhere — like feedback processes from SaaS companies or feature activity reports from an investment platform. Before, this inspiration lived in Pinterest boards, Google Docs, and Evernotes.
Now, when someone stumbles on a good idea, they save it to a centralized database on Notion. Every few weeks, the relevant team members vote on their favorites. The most popular ideas move onto the official product roadmap and eventually into Sendbird’s product.
Notion keeps ideas on one platform. Instead of ideas getting lost in Google Docs or Evernotes, good ideas flow from Reference Collection to Roadmap to Live with zero friction.
“Notion makes it easier for us to run through experiments,” says JaeYeon. “It’s easier for us to present ideas, vote on our favorites, and select ones to develop.”
