A mid-sized podcast production company came to me with a problem: six tools, zero connection between them. Every department ran its own system. They wanted one central hub where a show sits at the center, and every team pulls their view from the same source.
Here’s exactly what I built and why.
A podcast company running multiple scripted and unscripted shows is complex. Acquisition, development, production, marketing, sales, and distribution all have their own workflows. Each team did good work. But every time a show moved between departments, something broke.
Someone in production would update a recording date in ClickUp. Marketing wouldn’t see it. Sales would ask on Slack. Finance would check a different spreadsheet. The show moved forward, but the information didn’t travel with it.
What Was Broken
Their stack: ClickUp for production tasks. Airtable for show records. Google Sheets for sales schedules and ad breaks. Dropbox for files. Slack for everything that fell through the cracks. Email for external contact. And a basic Notion workspace someone had started and abandoned.
The result was predictable. People asked the same questions on Slack every week. A show’s air date lived in three places and disagreed with itself. Production loved ClickUp and didn’t want to let it go. Marketing wanted their own workflow. Sales wanted their Google Sheet. Finance just wanted the numbers.
The brief was clear: build a central hub, deliver it in stages so the team can take ownership, and figure out how to handle the ClickUp attachment without killing production’s workflow.
The Build
Here’s what I built and the reasoning behind each piece.
Show as the atom
Everything in this workspace is built around one idea: a show is the building block. Not a department, not a project, not a task. Every other database connects back to it through relations.
I structured it as a tree: Show, then Projects, then Tasks, then Resources. When someone creates a new project, they pick the show it belongs to. When they add a task, it inherits the show. When they upload a resource, same thing. A show’s page pulls everything connected to it automatically: tasks, projects, resources, ad breaks, air dates. No manual tagging. No linking. It’s just there.
I used a show template that auto-generates the full homepage when a new show is created. Top-level info at the top, then projects, tasks, resources, a master ad break grid, and the show brief. The team doesn’t build this manually. It just appears.
The “My Mode” trick for team dashboards
Not everyone on the production team had a Notion account. Some people would view the workspace without logging in. That’s a problem for personal dashboards, because Notion filters “assigned to me” based on who is logged in.
My fix: each team member gets their own dashboard page inside the team directory. The dashboard filters by their name as a selected person, not by “current user.” When they open their page, they see only their tasks, projects, and resources, regardless of who is logged in. Not the most elegant solution, but it works well for teams that aren’t fully onboarded to Notion yet.
Six-stage production pipeline
The production team had muscle memory from ClickUp. They knew their six stages: Planned, Recorded, Editing, Under Review, Approved. Rebuilding that with a different structure would have killed adoption.
So I rebuilt it exactly. Board view for anyone who wants to see cards move through stages. Timeline view for the project manager who thinks in dates. Table view for a full overview. Each project calculates its own progress from completed tasks divided by total tasks. The progress bar updates itself.
The one ClickUp feature they’d lose was deep automations. I addressed that honestly in a separate Loom, explaining what Notion can and can’t do. No point pretending otherwise. What Notion does do is connect the production pipeline to the rest of the business. ClickUp never could.
Sales section rebuilt from their Google Sheet
The sales team had a Google Sheet with production schedules, a master ad break grid, and per-show overrides (show A has mid-rolls at different spots than show B). I imported the production list and rebuilt the master grid as a Notion database with per-show exceptions handled through relations.
Now when sales needs ad inventory for a specific show, they open that show’s page and see only the relevant ad breaks. When they need the full network view, the master grid shows everything. Same data, two views.
Admin dashboard and OKRs
The admin section is where leadership lives. Pending tasks across the whole organization. Today’s tasks by project. OKRs with objectives and key results tied to quarterly progress. Set a target, log the current result, and the progress bar calculates itself.
This replaced pulling reports from three different tools. Now it’s one page.
Financials that actually update themselves
The financial section has a transaction database tagged by month and category. Log an expense or income, and it auto-links to the current month’s record. The monthly summary page pulls totals, calculates profit or loss, and shows whether the month is on track, through a formula, not a manual check.
Financial goals work the same way. Set a target, and related transactions feed into the progress calculation automatically. No separate tracker needed.
The Result
The company went from six disconnected tools to one workspace. When production updates a recording date, marketing sees it on the same record. When sales logs an ad break, it appears on the show’s page. When finance runs numbers, they pull from the same database the team uses for everything else.
The workspace was delivered in stages, each with a walkthrough Loom. The team took over piece by piece instead of inheriting one massive system overnight.
What I Learned
The biggest unlock on this project was not the architecture. It was the order of operations. Starting with the team that resists change the most (production) and matching their existing workflow exactly is what made adoption stick. If I had redesigned their pipeline to be “better,” they would have abandoned the workspace within a week.
The second lesson: when a company uses six tools, the problem is rarely the tools. It’s that nothing is the source of truth. The fix isn’t replacing everything at once. It’s picking one thing (here, the show record) and making everything else orbit around it.