Formo increases business agility with Notion
Formo is a food biotech company that’s working to transform how we get cheese. And while revolutionizing how future cheese is made — using microorganisms instead of cows — the company is also swiftly growing, working to cultivate business agility as they scale. To keep up with changing strategies, onboarding new hires, and handling their OKRs, Formo turned to Notion as a tool that offered a unified solution.
Emmanuel "Kojo" Afoakwah
Strategy & Business Operations
Adopting an all-in-one solution increases business agility
When Formo first started looking for a solution for their siloed databases, projects, and a way to document the many ideas of a startup, they weren’t won over by more commonly known, singular-focused tools like Asana or Google Docs. They wanted a transparent and collaborative connected workspace that allowed them to bring their scrum-inspired frameworks together so they all lived in the same place.
Formo sees business agility as the ability to create a number of business ideas, reduce and prioritize the ones that feel most likely to succeed, pursue them, fail, iterate, and continue to fine-tune your focus. It’s about reorganizing and shifting ideas that aren’t useful away. When company leaders came across Notion, they were drawn to its multiple capabilities. Not only could they increase their business agility, but they could onboard, train, and create company information (wikis) as well.
Notion’s biggest draws were its kanban boards and databases with subtasks, which allowed Formo to break down their strategic objectives into manageable pieces. Explains Kojo, “With our kanban boards, we link our OKRs to the tasks each team has — and because everything is joined in a single place, we are able to combine all these different business agility tools in Notion.” Notion supports creating transparency at Formo. People can see things from all across the organization, including a company roadmap and risks, while aligning their day-to-day work with the bigger picture.
We really love the database with subtasks because then you have one database for each thing you're doing. It simplifies things, lets you have a few things to focus on, and gives you a tool that enables you to work on different things at the same time.
Strategy & Business Operations
Streamlining the onboarding process optimizes efficiency
When Formo was a smaller company, onboarding was an easier process. But within a year, they went from 25 people to 90, which demanded a more streamlined process that saved time and optimized efficiency.
There were several goals for creating an onboarding process within Notion: to answer questions, to give in-depth team information, to train how to use a kanban board, and to walk new employees through business agility. Formo found that creating tasks that had people use kanban boards was effective, as was using videos. The onboarding process that Formo created within Notion has had a tremendous impact. Kojo said, “We are able to onboard in half the time it used to take us.”
The onboarding process familiarizes new users with Notion as well, giving them a foundation to continue using the product during their time at Formo.
Being able to pivot strategies quickly and effectively
Because Formo grew fast, they found themselves in the position of needing to adapt quickly. In the early days of the company, strategic assumptions with high impact were refined on an ongoing basis. These changes could be quickly translated into the company operations through Notion. Notion gave them the ability to pivot their GTM strategies quickly and effectively.
Kojo said, “We have to adapt to market changes or key results as fast as possible. Notion helped us with its kanban boards and having a place for our OKRs, and a single source of information.” Formo creates quarterly OKRs, where they set targets for teams. Elements of the OKRs change every few months, and they go back, review them, and document everything within the Notion databases.
They are able to use the key results to pivot and create new objectives and subtasks.
Notion lets us document postmortem meetings we use when we make mistakes. These are retrospectives that let us reflect and generate new action items. These action items go into the kanban board.
Strategy & Business Operations
Combining transparent collaboration towards common OKRs while leaving room for creativity
Formo uses OKRs to drive their business. They are an agility tool that measures meaningful change, improvement, and growth. They help create quarterly priorities. Formo uses team kanban boards as a central part of their project management. Team kanban journeys convey business focuses, deadlines, and acceptance criteria.
Kojo sees Notion as a creative tool. The user interface encourages creativity and allows a user to present information in a unique way. It makes it easier for teams to collaborate within or across other teams. It also is a tool for everyone to provide input that leads to the creation of new OKRs.
