Spot the Defects: A Shared Marketing Ops Workspace Gone Wrong
Objective: Given a description of a real-feeling shared Notion/tracker setup, tell apart the structural mistakes that break the system from the stylistic choices that are just personal preference.
You're auditing the shared workspace of Squarespace's 6-person lifecycle marketing team, which has grown organically for a year with no one person owning its structure.
Read the workspace description and separate the defects that will actively cause missed deadlines or duplicated work from the choices that are merely not how you'd have done it.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Free plan is enough to inspect and fix a database's property types
The process
Specimens to review
List every structural defect in this workspace that would cause missed deadlines, duplicated work, or broken filtering, with severity and why it matters. Then note anything described here that is a legitimate design choice, not a defect.
The team's single Notion page called 'Marketing Hub' contains: a database with columns Title, Status, Channel, and a long-text 'Brief' column where each row's full brief (goal, audience, outline) is typed directly into the cell. There is no calendar or board view, only the default table view. The 'Status' column has 11 different values typed freely by hand ('draft', 'Draft', 'in review', 'Needs Review', 'ready', 'live', etc.), so filtering by status misses rows. Two people maintain duplicate 'Brief' pages for the same campaign because neither could find the other's version in the long table. The team does keep a separate one-page 'Brand Voice Guide' linked from the hub's sidebar, updated quarterly by the same person each time. New hires are pointed to this hub on day one as their only onboarding document.Specimen: synthetic, realistic
Final deliverable
A written defect list, each with severity and a one-sentence fix, separated from a short list of things that are fine as-is.
See a reference example
Klaviyo workspace audit (excerpt) CRITICAL: Brief prose lives in a database cell, not a linked page. Fix: move each brief to its own sub-page. CRITICAL: Status typed freely, 11 near-duplicate values. Fix: convert to a fixed select property with 5 options. FINE: Separate Brand Voice Guide page, single named owner.
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Identifies the free-text Status property as the cause of broken filtering
- Correctly separates at least one genuine defect from at least one non-defect