How Monica Perez built Notion’s CS function from scratch

Notion is the poster child for product-led growth. 

When Monica Perez came on board as their first CS hire four years ago, they were already at $40M in ARR—with just 30 employees—and it’s grown 10x since. 

But back then, the enterprise plan was little more than a packaging experiment.

Contracts were sold without segmentation. Customers could add seats anytime they wanted. And Customer Success couldn’t follow a traditional playbook for a product with essentially unlimited use cases.

Growth was coming from every direction at once—what Monica calls “herding cats.”

Her challenge was to bring order to that chaos without slowing down the growth engine. 

Over time, she went from inheriting a handful of scrappy enterprise accounts to building a global CS organization with specialized teams, health scorecards, and repeatable playbooks.

Here’s how she did it. 

Growth Bytes

Top takeaways from Monica:

• Keep AEs tied to accounts post-sale to capture growth, so CSMs can focus on onboarding and adoption.
• Onboard clients to features in phases. Focus on core, simple use cases to drive early adoption rather than hitting them with your entire feature stack at once.
• Scale product education by training internal champions, running large group sessions, and creating user communities.
• Measure onboarding with a clear scorecard. Aim for an “80% complete by day 90” benchmark.
• Give Product quantified feedback tied to revenue, so feature requests actually make the roadmap.

How to support customers across infinite use cases

Notion’s biggest strength is also its biggest challenge: it can do almost anything. 

That makes it infinitely valuable in theory, but it also means Customer Success has to be deliberate in guiding customers through the sprawl.

In the early days, Monica admits the team tried to lead with the flashiest features. 

“We originally came from the philosophy of, ‘Notion is so cool. It can do so many things. We just need to teach you the most advanced possible things.’” 

But they quickly realized that approach left many customers overwhelmed.

Instead, they shifted to what Monica calls a maturation journey. The idea is to meet customers where they are with their current product usage and build momentum step by step. 

“That maturation journey can take years. But we do want to start with the initial “aha”, the core value they’re hoping for.”

The first step is almost always the same: focus on the basics that everyone understands. 

For Notion, that’s documentation, note-taking, and wikis. These use cases are the common denominator across departments, and getting them right proves value early and makes adoption much stickier.

Once that foundation is solid, the CSM can expand persona by persona. To guide the process, the team uses a use case map—a playbook of core workflows by role. 

Over the course of a year, that map becomes a roadmap for introducing new value.

• For example, they might start with company-wide documentation, working with comms leaders or a COO to configure a central knowledge hub. 
• From there, they’ll move to engineering and help build runbooks. 
• Next comes Product, where PRDs and roadmaps can live in Notion. 
• Marketing follows with content calendars. 

Each department unlocks a new way to use the product, often replacing a specialized tool that was only being used at 10% of its potential. The more use cases a customer adopts, the stickier the product becomes.

How Notion structures its CS team

Scaling that kind of adoption required Monica to think carefully about how she structured the CS team. 

For starters, Customer Success couldn’t be a handoff—it needed to be a partnership. Account executives stay with the customers they close because expansion is baked into the business model. 

“The account executive will close a deal, but they will actually stay on that account. So that allows for a really seamless transition. And because we still have a very strong ”land and expand” motion, it's really important for the AE to help realize that additional growth throughout the year.” 

Meanwhile, CSMs step in as trusted advisors to guide onboarding: 

“We did consider at one point having a separate onboarding function, but we realized that Notion's onboarding is not super technical. We're not doing a long data implementation. It's a SaaS tool, at the end of the day. We found that if the CSM is driving the onboarding, they're positioned as an advisor really early on, and there's a lot of trust building that happens.” 

While they don’t have a separate onboarding team, they do split the team up into specialized groups: 

• Digital Success: tech-touch, scaled through email and digital channels
• Scale: startups and SMBs
• Mid-market: companies in the growth stage
• Enterprise: large, complex deployments
• Regional teams: tailored support across geographies and languages

How Notion handles customer enablement at a massive scale 

One of Notion’s quirks is that adoption tends to start wide. Even smaller accounts often roll the product out company-wide, which means the CS team has to think about customer enablement differently. 

Training a handful of admins isn’t enough—they need programs that reach hundreds of people.

To handle that scale, they typically start with a train-the-trainer model: 

“We try to get all of those director-level department heads involved initially. They’re the ‘Notion council’ internally.”

Each council gets its own charter and responsibilities. Admins are trained separately with dedicated enablement tracks.

From there, the focus shifts to end users.

“We will run very large group training sessions… multiple hundreds of users.”

Many companies make these sessions mandatory, requiring employees to complete Notion training before they’re given access to the tool.

And then there are the communities.  

“Notion is really big on communities, so we try to create little mini communities within our customer accounts. As a very small example, we encourage our larger customers to create Slack communities for any sort of Notion help or Notion best practices.”  

The guideline is to include about 10% of licensed users: 

“If they bought 1,000 licenses for their 1,000 employees, we try to create a Slack community of at least 100 of those that are almost like the customer success managers on the ground.”

Monica’s team will join those channels too, but the real goal is self-sufficiency: “It’s around them helping themselves as well.”

How Notion measures onboarding and account health 

Training isn’t enough on its own. Monica also wanted a clear way to measure whether onboarding was actually working.

Notion uses different onboarding plans depending on company size. A smaller “scale” customer might only have a pared-down plan for a 200-person deployment, while enterprise accounts can go through as many as 55 onboarding steps. 

To keep it consistent, Monica’s team created a formal onboarding report card in Gainsight.

“The goal is to have a score of 80% by day 90.”

That “80 by 90” benchmark gives the team an objective measure of whether onboarding is on track, while still leaving room for flexibility on larger, more complex accounts.

In the early days, the team relied on intuition about what success looked like—things like monthly active users or the number of templates created. But as Notion grew, Monica asked the data science team to test those assumptions.

“I said, ‘Hey, we measure all these onboarding things. Are these the right things to be measuring?’ They said, ‘Okay. We’re going to do a massive regression analysis… and look at all of the customers who expanded or retained, had really healthy outcomes. What did they look like 12 months prior?’”

The analysis revealed seven key metrics that strongly correlate with long-term retention and expansion. Some signals mattered a lot—like integrations set up early in onboarding. Others didn’t matter at all.

“We were looking at things like, Are they using comments? [The data team told us] ‘That doesn’t matter. Don’t even pay attention to comments. Comments have no correlation with retention.’”

How Notion handles renewals and expansions

Keeping customers engaged—and growing—takes a mix of executive alignment at the top and hands-on enablement with users at the bottom. And the whole thing runs on data.

“Data is king. And data tells a story. We’re extremely data-centric in everything that we do. We have very robust health scores… they’re updated daily.”

Monica’s team watches for signals big and small—like when a customer suddenly adds a batch of seats or quietly removes them. Those shifts don’t always change a health score right away, but they’re still red flags. Weekly reports make sure she and her CSMs catch those changes early, and that intel drives which accounts they lean into.

From the top down, Notion runs quarterly business reviews, roadmap sessions, and partnership syncs. 

Customer stories play a big role in these conversations. Monica and the team “do a lot of success story and use case curation. We're able to collate those stories and bring that back to our stakeholders. We can say things like, ‘Hey, we know for a fact that your engineering team is building their runbooks in Notion. They told us that they love how snappy it is. They stopped using Confluence as much, as an example.’”  

From the bottom up, the team invests in constant education.

“Notion has a learning curve. It’s not like we onboarded you, and then you’re off to the races forever.”

That means ongoing trainings, use case development sessions, and even onsite visits to run quarterly new-hire sessions at fast-growing accounts.

Finally, there’s a data-driven re-engagement motion.

“If we see health scores dropping… we will prospect into that account or continue to multi-thread into that account to figure out what’s going on. Who are those influencers that we need to re-enable and get them excited about Notion?”

The idea is simple: re-ignite a single champion, and their influence can ripple to dozens of other users.

To stay ahead of churn, Monica’s team runs monthly red account reviews with leadership and builds action plans for any account flagged as at risk.

How Notion’s CS team collaborates with Product

Of course, expansion isn’t just about account management. It also depends on how fast the product itself evolves—which is why CS works hand in hand with Notion’s Product team.

The relationship between CS and Product hasn’t always been smooth. In the early days, getting attention for customer needs was a struggle.

“We were fighting for attention for a while, and prioritization was kind of tough.”

That changed as Notion grew and introduced more specialized product teams. These days, the CS team “are constantly collaborating with Product. It's a very open flow of information.” Product will even join CS calls: 

“We have clear counterparts now that have the same vested interest as my team does.”

CS also built a system to make customer feedback impossible to ignore. Every feature request is captured in Gong, tagged, and tracked automatically.

“We roll it up to the total ARR impact. We roll it up to the total number of accounts impact. It’s really quantified, which I think product teams love for prioritization reasons.”

Once a quarter, Monica’s team delivers a Top 10 wishlist to Product, backed not just by anecdotes but by hard numbers tied to revenue and account impact. That rigor makes it far more likely those requests make it onto the roadmap. 

How CS fuels company growth

For Monica, the most important ingredient in a successful CS program is belief from the very top.

“One of the most important things is that the company and the CEO or founder really believes in the mission of customer success… It actually should be the heartbeat of the organization.”

At Notion, that belief turned CS into a growth driver. 

“A lot of what we have today in Notion on the enterprise plan has been because of how we’ve elevated that voice of the customer and what they expect out of our offerings.”

Monica sees CS as the owner of the customer relationship—the function that makes sure customers are heard, guided, and supported in ways that drive adoption and expansion.

And while process matters, she warns against copying a one-size-fits-all playbook.

“If I had brought in all of the principles of CS that you get out of a typical textbook and applied them at Notion, it probably wouldn’t have worked. You can’t just fully plug and play.”

Her approach: start from design principles, not someone else’s playbook—and build the CS motion that actually fits your product and customers.

Watch the full episode

Want more insights into building out a CS function?

Watch Monica’s full conversation with Alex Krakov on Grow & Tell, Dock's podcast for revenue leaders.