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Temporal Technologies · In progress
Temporal: Rebuilding a 500-Person Workspace
Temporal's Notion workspace was busy and heavily used, but it had outgrown its own structure. Three of seven departments are live so far; the rollout continues through December 2026.
My role
What I was responsible for on this engagement.
UX Researcher and Information Designer — Discovery & Design Sprint Lead. I audited the workspace, researched how five departments actually work, and began rebuilding it into one governed system. The rollout runs in groups: teams that already work closely together are grouped, each group gets a week, and each department gets a two-week window afterward to build what its research turned up.
The client
Who they are, and the scale of the problem.
Temporal builds the software that keeps other software from breaking — a durable execution platform that lets developers write programs which pick up exactly where they left off after a crash or a restart. Founded in 2019 out of the open-source Cadence project its co-founders built while working together at Uber, it is used in production by teams like Netflix. The company is now around 500 people across seven departments and about forty teams.
🚨
The scale of the problem — 3,295 databases, with 1,599 sharing a shape with another. 5,412 links pointing at pages that no longer exist. 40% of content shared page by page rather than through teamspaces — 112,000 items sitting outside any teamspace.
Client
Temporal Technologies
Industry
Developer infrastructure, open-source software
Role
UX Researcher and Information Designer — Discovery & Design Sprint Lead.
Timeline
Started April 2026; ongoing, rolling out through December 2026
Methods
Workspace audit, Survey, Semi-structured interviews with screen shares
How I researched it
Three passes at the same question: how does information actually move through Temporal, and where does it break?
🔍
Workspace audit — A programmatic export of the Notion workspace, run in early June and cross-checked against Notion’s own workspace analytics. It found the opposite of an adoption problem — 97% of members opened Notion every month and 86% edited something. The trouble was what happened afterward: only about 4% of pages were updated in any given month, and roughly two thirds had not been touched in over a year.
🔍
Survey — A short tool-usage survey sent to each department about a week before its rollout week, distributed by that department’s own lead rather than by us. Surveys buy breadth. It established that the real systems of record live outside Notion and will stay there — so the goal became simplifying what lives in Notion and linking out to the rest.
🔍
Semi-structured interviews with screen shares — Nine interviews across five departments, 30 to 45 minutes each, with department leads and the people who had personally built the systems their team relied on. Every session included a screen share, because the workarounds only show up when you watch someone work. The screen shares are where the audit’s blind spot opened up.
The design sprint
What it involves, and what comes out of it.
The engagement runs workspace audit → design sprint (survey, interviews, contextual inquiries) → phased rollout by department. Each week follows the same rhythm: a Monday team-leads call to confirm what is moving, a Wednesday team onboarding call that is recorded so nobody is blocked by a calendar conflict, Friday office hours open to anyone from any department, and interviews scheduled across the window rather than stacked into one day. Each department’s research ends in a blueprint that maps every process the team actually runs to one of three outcomes: it already fits an existing database, it needs an existing database extended, or it genuinely needs something new. Open questions are listed as open questions rather than quietly assumed.
Key findings and progress
The rollout is partway through — these are current results, not final ones.
💡
Key finding — Adoption was never the problem. The same structure kept getting rebuilt instead of shared, and people could not tell which copy was authoritative.
📈
Progress so far — One documents database replacing nested pages, a three-tier dashboard system, and a governed permissions model. Three departments onboarded and working in it, out of seven.
Let's work together
The fastest way to reach me is LinkedIn.
Connect on LinkedIn ↗
© 2026 Hasty Haghkhah
Designed in Figma
← All case studies
Temporal Technologies · In progress
Temporal: Rebuilding a 500-Person Workspace
Temporal's Notion workspace was busy and heavily used, but it had outgrown its own structure. Three of seven departments are live so far; the rollout continues through December 2026.
My role
What I was responsible for on this engagement.
UX Researcher and Information Designer — Discovery & Design Sprint Lead. I audited the workspace, researched how five departments actually work, and began rebuilding it into one governed system. The rollout runs in groups: teams that already work closely together are grouped, each group gets a week, and each department gets a two-week window afterward to build what its research turned up.
The client
Who they are, and the scale of the problem.
Temporal builds the software that keeps other software from breaking — a durable execution platform that lets developers write programs which pick up exactly where they left off after a crash or a restart. Founded in 2019 out of the open-source Cadence project its co-founders built while working together at Uber, it is used in production by teams like Netflix. The company is now around 500 people across seven departments and about forty teams.
🚨
The scale of the problem — 3,295 databases, with 1,599 sharing a shape with another. 5,412 links pointing at pages that no longer exist. 40% of content shared page by page rather than through teamspaces — 112,000 items sitting outside any teamspace.
Client
Temporal Technologies
Industry
Developer infrastructure, open-source software
Role
UX Researcher and Information Designer — Discovery & Design Sprint Lead.
Timeline
Started April 2026; ongoing, rolling out through December 2026
Methods
Workspace audit, Survey, Semi-structured interviews with screen shares
How I researched it
Three passes at the same question: how does information actually move through Temporal, and where does it break?
🔍
Workspace audit — A programmatic export of the Notion workspace, run in early June and cross-checked against Notion’s own workspace analytics. It found the opposite of an adoption problem — 97% of members opened Notion every month and 86% edited something. The trouble was what happened afterward: only about 4% of pages were updated in any given month, and roughly two thirds had not been touched in over a year.
🔍
Survey — A short tool-usage survey sent to each department about a week before its rollout week, distributed by that department’s own lead rather than by us. Surveys buy breadth. It established that the real systems of record live outside Notion and will stay there — so the goal became simplifying what lives in Notion and linking out to the rest.
🔍
Semi-structured interviews with screen shares — Nine interviews across five departments, 30 to 45 minutes each, with department leads and the people who had personally built the systems their team relied on. Every session included a screen share, because the workarounds only show up when you watch someone work. The screen shares are where the audit’s blind spot opened up.
The design sprint
What it involves, and what comes out of it.
The engagement runs workspace audit → design sprint (survey, interviews, contextual inquiries) → phased rollout by department. Each week follows the same rhythm: a Monday team-leads call to confirm what is moving, a Wednesday team onboarding call that is recorded so nobody is blocked by a calendar conflict, Friday office hours open to anyone from any department, and interviews scheduled across the window rather than stacked into one day. Each department’s research ends in a blueprint that maps every process the team actually runs to one of three outcomes: it already fits an existing database, it needs an existing database extended, or it genuinely needs something new. Open questions are listed as open questions rather than quietly assumed.
Key findings and progress
The rollout is partway through — these are current results, not final ones.
💡
Key finding — Adoption was never the problem. The same structure kept getting rebuilt instead of shared, and people could not tell which copy was authoritative.
📈
Progress so far — One documents database replacing nested pages, a three-tier dashboard system, and a governed permissions model. Three departments onboarded and working in it, out of seven.
Let's work together
The fastest way to reach me is LinkedIn.
Connect on LinkedIn ↗
© 2026 Hasty Haghkhah
Designed in Figma