Systems,
Not Just Screens
How I turned a growing design studio's process knowledge, scattered across spreadsheets, Dropbox, and people's heads, into a system every team could finally agree on, and that alignment into the system the whole company still runs on.
Context
A studio that outgrew its own systems
Comité de Proyectos is an interior design and furniture studio in Mexico City, founded in 2014, with 250+ residential and commercial projects behind them. Their work spans design, artisanal production, sales, and delivery, which means a single project crosses a lot of teams and handoffs. As the company grew, its internal systems hadn't grown with it: process knowledge lived scattered across spreadsheets, PDFs, Dropbox, and people's heads, and different teams had different, sometimes conflicting, understandings of how work actually moved through the company.
My Role
Mapping before building
I proposed a Notion wiki as the shared source of truth, and spent seven months as a Strategic Design Consultant building it out: around ten individual interviews to understand each team's perspective, five to six in-person group workshops to align everyone on the same flow, and two core, company-wide processes mapped end to end, catalog product sales and new product development, from lead to delivery. Once the wiki was built, I ran formal Notion training with a small group and left behind tutorials so the rest of the team could keep learning on their own. When the team later started evaluating Odoo, I joined those conversations too, so the new platform would be built around the processes we'd defined, not the other way around: the goal was never just organizing the mess, it was making sure they didn't digitize it.
The Work
Getting every team in the same room
The workshops did as much work as the wiki. Getting every team talking through the same flow out loud, in the same room, surfaced inconsistencies nobody had named before: who owned what, where handoffs broke down, what each team assumed the others already knew. At one point the team joked that I'd become their therapist, which is fair: a lot of the work was listening to friction between teams and turning it into decisions everyone could actually agree on.
Key Decisions
1
Mapped before choosing a tool
2
Separated what happens from what should happen
Notion wasn't the starting point, understanding the system was, the wiki came after.
Current-state and future-state got mapped as two different things, not one aspirational document pretending to describe reality.
3
Prioritized instead of mapping everything at once
We ranked the flows that mattered most and worked through them one at a time, rather than trying to boil the ocean.
Outcome
A foundation the next tool had to serve
The wiki was adopted company-wide, with every team maintaining its own space. Roadmap cadence was adopted across the company, and both core, company-wide flows, catalog sales and new product development, were mapped and documented end to end, from lead to client handoff. That same foundation became the reference point for their Odoo conversations, giving the company's next tool a process to serve instead of a blank slate to guess at.