A recorded onboarding curriculum that doubled the team across 20 countries

Amma makes the pregnancy and family wellness app used by 25 million people across 193 countries. The content team is led by medical doctors and psychologists, and what they publish is held to evidence based medical standards. The team that builds the app is fully distributed and has no central office. In 2023 they had around 25 people on staff and were hiring fast. Their HR team had a problem. Senior time was bleeding into onboarding calls, and hiring was about to make it worse.

New hires had to arrive into the Notion workspace already knowing how it worked, without a senior having to brief them in real time across timezones. Live onboarding was the bottleneck. With the hiring plan they had in front of them, it was going to become the limit on team growth before anything else did.

The deeper problem was upstream of HR. The existing team itself used Notion inconsistently. Pages got written and not read, decisions happened in DMs, no shared rule about what a project page must contain or which view of a database was canonical. A team that holds itself to evidence based standards in its medical content was not yet applying the same discipline to its own operational knowledge. Teaching new hires conventions the existing team had not committed to would have produced inconsistent new hires.

Six live workshops with the existing team, ninety minutes each, over six weeks, in English. Plus a closing Q&A. Every workshop was recorded. Every session came with a workbook the participant completed inside their own Notion: a video segment from the lecture at the top, interactive blocks to try in the middle, and a checklist of what should be true of the workspace at the bottom. Alongside the workshops we produced a set of onboarding materials built for new hires who would never sit in a live session.

By the end of the engagement Amma's HR team owned a curriculum they could hand to any new hire, in any timezone:

• Seven recorded video lectures, ninety minutes each.
• Six interactive workbooks, one per teaching session.
• A workspace map of how Amma's Notion is organized and why.
• Onboarding materials that walk a new hire through their first week, written for somebody whose first contact with the team is the curriculum, not a senior on a call.
• A documented set of conventions: page templates, database schemas, dashboard rules, knowledge architecture, and the API scenarios the team uses to offload repetitive work.

1. Notion Basics. A team using the same tool with different mental models cannot operate consistently. The session resets shared vocabulary on blocks, pages, databases, and relations. Everyone leaves with the same definitions for the same things.
2. Building Systems in Notion (Going Beyond Templates). Templates are where most teams stop, and the pages stay flat. The session shows how databases, views, and relations compose into a working system. The team's pages start carrying live state, not stale starters.
3. Staying Informed (Building Dashboards). A distributed team cannot ask each other what is happening day to day. The session builds the dashboards that make state, ownership, and progress readable from the database itself. The team gets situational awareness without a meeting.
4. Teamwork Essentials. Async work needs explicit rules about ownership and handoff. The session turns implicit team norms into written conventions about who closes what. The rules survive timezones in a way Slack threads do not.
5. Building Knowledge in Notion. What the team learns has to outlast the project it learned it from. The session designs the surfaces where lessons, decisions, and onboarding pages live, and the rules for how they get read. Institutional memory becomes something the team operates inside.
6. Notion API and Integrations (Scenarios for Productivity). Notion in isolation is half a system. The session wires it to the rest of the stack: pulling metrics in, pushing updates out, automating what nobody should do by hand. The workspace stops being a destination and becomes a hub.
7. Q&A. A closing session for the questions that only surface after the team has been working in the new conventions for six weeks.

The live team applied each week's conventions to in flight work between sessions. By the end of week one they had stopped adding speculative columns to their databases on their own. Adoption was effectively immediate.

• Team doubled, no scaling drag on onboarding. From around 25 to over 50 people. Every new hire went through the same curriculum, in the same order, with the same materials.
• Geography spread from three regions to over 20 countries. A recorded curriculum carries across timezones in a way a live senior never could.
• Senior time stayed off the onboarding path. HR runs the curriculum on its own. Senior team members engage with new hires once they are already operating, not while they are still figuring out which view to open.

The curriculum is what scaled.

Garden Research builds systems organizations own and operate. The Amma curriculum is the earliest shape of that approach. An asset that did the work after we left. The current AI deployment practice runs the same way. The artifact is a system the client owns and runs themselves, and the engagement ends when the system can carry the work without us.