Signal: Notion Might Have Created the New Blueprint for Modern Comms Teams
And Built World Companies Have a Rare Opportunity to Be Innovators
Welcome to Bloxspring Signal — our series exploring what’s new, trending, and occasionally strange across brand, communication and cultural relevance in the built world.
Earlier this month, Notion quietly announced something that caught our attention: the wholesale dismantling of its traditional communications team in favour of direct storytelling. The productivity software company is collapsing its comms, social media, and influencer teams into a single unit: The Storytelling Team. But there’s more. It’s being led by co-founder Akshay Kothari in a move that’s been met with widespread praise on Twitter.
Founder-led comms is nothing new. Internal teams have been trying to get their senior leaders to speak more for decades. McKinsey event built a compelling case for the CEO’s role as chief storyteller to not just “set the organisation’s tone” but in reference to getting people to tell more stories, “empowering others to do the same”.
The built world has hardly been known for its innovation in most areas, let alone storytelling. But if the Notion shift catches on, it could become the blueprint for how every modern company thinks about fostering deeper connections with its audiences.
For once, the built world has the opportunity to do something it doesn’t ordinarily do: get ahead.
The Rise of CEO Content
The shift didn’t begin with Notion. Over the past eighteen months, executive LinkedIn has transformed from a graveyard of corporate platitudes into something resembling actual human communication.
Take Brendan Wallace, Co-Founder & CIO at Fifth Wall. Two years ago you would see him on stage at a few industry conference. Perhaps the odd LinkedIn post. Now he’s on every social media feed in every possible format sharing portfolio company updates, industry news, or his general points of view on practically any given subject. It’s a move popularised by the venture giant a16z who recognised the power of storytelling in the age of new media, and has since launched a dedicated content team to support portfolio teams.
When Cotality’s CEO Patrick Dodd announced the company’s rebrand via his LinkedIn it generated 136 reposts. eXpRealty’s Leo Pareja has relentlessly posted once a day for months covering business advice, industry trends, and company updates (despite the levels of engagement being seemingly low).
This is a fundamental reassessment of how companies build relationships with customers, investors, and potential employees in an era when trust in institutions – including the media – continues to erode.
Why Traditional Comms Is Breaking Down
The traditional model relied on a simple premise: companies craft messages, public relations teams refine them, journalists filter them, and audiences eventually receive some diluted version of the original intent. The system worked when media outlets were scarce and attention was abundant.
Neither condition holds true anymore. LinkedIn has 930 million users. Company blogs reach audiences directly. Video platforms allow founders to speak for ten uninterrupted minutes about technical details that would never survive the editing process at a trade publication.
More importantly, audiences have developed sophisticated antibodies against corporate-speak. They can smell a PR-approved statement from across the internet. When a CEO writes in their own voice, complete with the occasional emoji or unconventional punctuation, it reads as authenticity rather than sloppiness.
Stripe recognised this early. The payments company’s founders, Patrick and John Collison, have cultivated distinct public voices that blend technical depth with cultural commentary. They write extensively about topics far removed from payment processing – immigration policy, scientific research funding, the economics of progress – which paradoxically makes them more credible when discussing their actual business. They’re not trying to be “thought leaders.” They’re simply thinking in public.
The Built World’s Opportunity
Construction, architecture, engineering, and real estate technology have traditionally communicated through a remarkably narrow set of channels: trade shows, industry awards, project announcements, and the occasional CEO interview in a specialist publication.
It is, to put it charitably, not a sector known for compelling storytelling.
Yet the opportunity for differentiation is enormous precisely because the baseline is so low. When every firm sounds identical – committed to sustainability, passionate about innovation, dedicated to client service, the one that sounds human stands out dramatically.
Consider what this might look like in practice. A construction tech CEO documenting the actual challenges of selling software to general contractors: the cultural resistance, the procurement nightmares, the moments of genuine breakthrough. An architecture firm principal explaining design decisions for a controversial project while it’s still under construction, not after it’s safely photographed for Instagram. A real estate developer writing honestly about the compromises required to make a project financially viable in a high-cost market.
Michael Green, the architect and mass timber advocate, has built a global profile by speaking and writing prolifically about why the industry should embrace engineered wood. His advocacy goes well beyond his own projects, so much so, that he’s become synonymous with the material itself. That’s a strategic communications achievement most companies can only dream of.
What This Requires
Dismantling the traditional communications function in favour of direct storytelling requires more than reassigning organisational charts. It demands that executives actually have something to say and the discipline to say it consistently.
Notion’s move works because Kothari and his cofounders have spent years building in public, sharing their thinking about product development, company culture, and the nature of productivity tools. They’ve earned the credibility required to bypass traditional media gatekeepers.
For companies in the built world, this means investing in executive communication as a core competency, not an occasional obligation. It means accepting that the CEO’s LinkedIn presence matters as much as their appearance at an industry conference. It means hiring communications people who can help executives refine their thinking and voice rather than sanitise it.
Most importantly, it means accepting some loss of control. When the CEO speaks directly to audiences, there’s no PR buffer to catch mistakes or soften controversial positions. But that vulnerability is precisely what makes the approach effective. Audiences have become remarkably good at distinguishing between corporate chat and genuine communication.
The Inevitable Convergence
The traditional distinction between internal communications, external communications, social media, and brand marketing is dissolving because audiences no longer recognise those boundaries. A CEO’s LinkedIn post reaches employees, customers, investors, and competitors simultaneously. A product announcement on X becomes recruiting material. A thoughtful essay about industry challenges is a powerful way to establish expertise.
Notion’s reorganisation simply acknowledges what’s already true: storytelling is the function, and the medium is increasingly whatever channel allows the most direct connection between the people building something and the people who might care about it.
For an industry built on physical permanence, this shift towards direct, unmediated communication might seem uncomfortably ephemeral. But the companies that figure out how to speak clearly about their work, will build advantages that persist long after the latest post has scrolled out of view.
The question is less about whether built world companies will adopt this model. It’s whether they’ll do so while there’s still competitive advantage in being early, or whether like most new innovations, they’ll wait until those to their left and right have already made the jump.