Notion! Notion is an infinitely customizable blank canvas of ultimate power. 

Notion's greatest advantage is also it's biggest weakness. That's where I come in.

As the GTM Lead @ Optemization, I specialize in helping companies in hyper growth mode scale effectively without letting their workspace become a "dumping ground" for scattered info, links, meetings notes, and outdated docs that no one can trust. 

Optemization is an Ops Design consultancy focused specifically on the adoption of Notion. 

That could mean large migrations onto Notion, improving current workflows, creating custom automations and integrations, or auditing what you're currently working with.

If you've made it this far and want to learn more, here's some resources that can help:

Notion's Eleven - A free online course exploring the fundamentals of building an effective Notion workspace for teams of all sizes:

https://optemizations.notion.site/Welcome-to-Notion-s-Eleven-317a0fd26bf24d0295504e4cab1eba83

AND, my last offer is if you ever want to about anything related to Notion, I'm your guy 😎 

Lastly the fun part. My Special Skills and Fun Facts include:

🏆 3x Cornhole Champion 🏆 
🏅 3x Dodgeball Champion 🏅 
👨‍🍳 Former Food Cart Owner 👨‍🍳 
🥩 Steak Off Champion 🥩 
🐔 Notoriously known as “The Chicken Man” 🐔

Skyler Birk-Stachon

Mama I made it! I'm officially a Notion consultant.

Haters are fuming right now.

What's the first thing I should build? 

**note that everyone on our team were already Notion consultants and I was just late to the party

Ask me how we optimize Notion workspaces for 150+ of the world’s top companies

I threw 10 Notion stickers at a camera to signify 10 harsh Notion truths.

#1 98.6% of companies use Notion wrong

#2 You can’t use Notion AI properly if your workspace is a dumping ground

#3 You need to stop letting your employees create random loose pages

#4 The reason you’re not getting the most out of Notion is that you haven’t properly invested into it

#5 I love Notion but 90% of Notion’s fancy features don’t actually matter to your employees

#6 You don’t have a Notion problem, you have an adoption problem

#7 Your company has a tool culture problem if you don’t have a unified way of working in Notion

#8 If your company didn’t architect Notion correctly from the start you probably hate it now

#9 If your company isn’t database driven you’re using Notion wrong

#10 No company should ever be on the plus plan. Business or Enterprise only

Fight me on them 👇

--

Psssst if you need help optimizing your Notion workspace we should talk

1000 podcast episodes produced. That's a lot of freaking episodes! Huge huge congrats to Jake Hurwitz and the Thursday Labs team on an epic accomplishment. Best in the business. And an even cooler person.

You'll be celebrating 5k in no time.

You're a legend. 

And also heard you have a pretty impressive Notion setup.... 

Wonder who built it 😉

Fun fact: We don't just help with Notion 😏

Notion has over 100 million users, over 4 millions paying customers, and over 35,000 companies using it but most of companies are still using it wrong. Here’s the reality if you want a successful rollout:

#1 You need an adoption plan - Don’t wing it. Be intentional.

#2 Define a unified way of working in Notion - How will you work in Notion at X company?

#3 Exec alignment - Why do you actually care about rolling out Notion? What bigger initiative is this a part of?

#4 Need to assign Notion champions - Internal owners who are in charge of each teamspace / the big databases

#5 Patience - Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your Notion workspace be.

Get these right and Notion becomes your company's greatest productivity asset. Get them wrong and it becomes just another abandoned tool.

I’m gonna let you in on a secret.

Your employees don't give a shit what software your org uses.

Notion. Confluence. Asana. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. They couldn't care less about your tech stack.

**unless you give them clear enablement and support

Here’s what this looks like in practice for Notion:

Most companies look like this: (wrong way)

→ “Hey we use Notion for knowledge management or product roadmapping or xyz use case”

**leads to uncertainty, negative sentiment overtime and people using it however they see fit (and an FAQ / youtube tutorial rabbit hole) 

Here’s what it should look like:

→ “Here’s how you use Notion in your day to day role and here’s how it enables you to get more done and become a better employee”

- Here’s how product uses Notion to do their roadmapping

- Here’s how marketing uses Notion to plan their content calendar and upcoming launches

- Here’s how eng uses Notion to find information across scattered tools in the snap of a finger

- Here’s how sales uses Notion to find commonly asked questions for enablement

**Much better what to do it ^^

To have a successful rollout you must define:

1. What is the pain point this tool solves for?
	- and why?

2. How do I use it my day to day role?
    - and how am I being set up for success?

3. What are my expectations around the tool? 
    - how do I use this tool for success not failure

Remember, You don’t have a Notion problem. You have an adoption problem.
The tool isn't the problem. The rollout is.

Stop debating the tool. Start investing in the rollout.
That's the difference between a tool people hate and one they can't live without.

-- 
Pssssst this is exactly what we help with at Optemization, let us know if you need Notion help :)

Just an average Optemization team meeting...

Creating custom agents designed to roast Tem ‎and building Notion sauce.

All a part of our great agentic bakeoff where everyone presented the craziest, funnest, and most useful custom Notion agents they've been working.

It's more fun to highlight the goofy + fun ones but I promise we're cooking up some ones that are going to change our clients' workspaces forever.

Stay tuned 👀

-- 

Want to be a part of our epic team culture? 

We're actively hiring for our next great Notion workspace developer 👀

Check out the full job description (link below) and send your resume + a 90-sec Loom to Natalie Pottie at hiring@optemization.com.

**expecting bangers only in that Loom

https://lnkd.in/evXuHNZi

Just fired off 100 of these cold emails to COOs who went to Villanova.

Think I'll get any takers??

"Skyler, don't hate this personally but we hate Notion" 

Said the Head of internal comms at a 1000-person fintech to me.

Now, normally a statement like that would piss me off. 

But in this case, I couldn't blame them. 

They had been using Notion for the last 3 years but:

1️⃣ They never set up the infrastructure correctly
2️⃣ They didn't have a unified way of working in Notion 
3️⃣ They had over 100,000 loose pages
4️⃣ They had random databases all over the place not tied to anything
5️⃣ They didn't have any Notion champions in charge of governance 

The result?

Their workspace was a "Dumping ground of meeting notes, scattered workflows, links, and out of date docs that no one can trust"

It doesn't matter how good Notion AI is if it's only helping you find outdated info 5x times as fast.

So we ran a workspace audit, created a health report, aligned on a solution and a gameplan moving forward.

And put our hardhats on and went to work.

The result? 

🤩 46,638 pages optimized 
🤩 64% teamspace consolidation
🤩 46% reduction of outdated content

And the best part?

They LOVE Notion again :)

YAY

If your workspace has become a dumping ground over time and it's time for a refresh, know you're not alone.

But also shoot me a note, we'll run an audit for you and create a let's fix it gameplan! 🙏

Junior Williams

Cybersecurity Influencer | Top 1% on TryHackMe

I’m an experienced Enterprise Architect specializing in cybersecurity strategy, risk management, and secure architecture across distinct Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) environments. Leveraging decades of experience in programming, IT operations, and practical cybersecurity implementation, I help organizations align security initiatives directly with their core business objectives.

Additionally, as an Independent AI Researcher, my theoretical work emphasizes ethical and responsible AI applications, algorithmic innovation, and the intersection between AI and cybersecurity. I remain deeply committed to continuous learning, open collaboration, and contributing insights through teaching, writing, and active mentorship/sponsorship.

Senior Solutions Architect (Cybersecurity and AI)

👨🏾‍💻 Junior Williams, CISSP

I feel less like an architect and more like an HR manager for my AI agents lately.

I just put them all on a performance improvement plan.

If you're "vibe coding" your security with polite system prompts like "never share API keys," your AI will eventually leak them. It's not a matter of if, but when. A prompt is just a suggestion that an LLM will eventually ignore to get the job done.

You don't need better policies. You need deterministic gates.

Like the one in this picture. The sign isn't a polite request; it's a rule enforced by a physical barrier. That is what your agentic workflows are missing.

I wrote a deep dive into why probabilistic rules fail and how to engineer real defenses.

A policy is not a gate. A gate is a gate. Read the full breakdown in today's article.

#AgenticAI #Cybersecurity #SecurityArchitecture

How deterministic hooks can prevent credential leakage in agentic AI workflows In brief. AI coding agents that execute shell commands can leak API key

Open article: Your AI Agent Remembers Every Secret It Sees by Junior Williams • 7 min read

Your AI Agent Remembers Every Secret It Sees

Palo Alto Networks’ Chief Security Intelligence Officer just called AI agents “2026’s biggest insider threat.”  

Not external attackers. Not ransomware gangs. The tools you deployed yourself.

Gartner projects that about 40% of enterprise applications will embed AI agents by the end of 2026, up from well under 5% in 2025. Think about what that means operationally.

You would never onboard a contractor with broad access to production systems, customer data, and financial records without an access review and monitoring plan. Yet that is effectively how many organizations introduced AI agents in 2025.

Broad credentials. Minimal access review. Little to no behavioral monitoring. No reliable kill switch.

We already have proof this is exploitable in the wild. CVE‑2025‑6514 abused Model Context Protocol infrastructure to achieve remote code execution through AI agent tooling. The weakness was not in the model weights. It was in the surrounding agent stack and how it executed trusted commands.

That is the pivot many security teams are still missing. The primary risk is not “hallucination.” The risk is that you gave an autonomous actor privileged access to systems and data, then labeled it a productivity feature.

If your AI governance policy does not cover access controls, behavioral baselines, and termination protocols for agents, you do not have an AI governance policy. You have a slide deck.

#Cybersecurity #AI #Governance #RiskManagement

AI can predict your next purchase.
Can it stop your identity from being the product?

In October 2025, Canadian Tire Corporation disclosed a breach impacting roughly 38 million accounts. Names, emails, phone numbers, physical addresses. For some records, dates of birth, partial card data, and passwords stored as PBKDF2 hashes.

Around the same time, the public story is the “True North” modernization push: AI platform, demand prediction, and Copilot rollout with training across the enterprise, including Microsoft partnerships. And to be clear, in any Microsoft cloud or Copilot scenario, “shared responsibility” is not a slogan. It’s the operating model.

Is the breach linked to that modernization? Maybe. Maybe not. We do not have the technical details yet, so anyone asserting causality is guessing. What we can say with confidence is that large-scale modernization increases system complexity and data movement, and shared-responsibility gaps are exactly where incidents tend to hide.

Both things can be true. That’s the point.

Personalization runs on data concentration. Data concentration increases blast radius. If your AI roadmap is moving faster than your security maturity, you are not modernizing. You are accelerating risk.

This is not anti-AI (obv.). It’s pro-order-of-operations.

Predictive analytics is great. AI literacy is even better. Security literacy is non-negotiable. Because customers don’t experience your modernization strategy. They experience whether their data stays private.

Binary question for the comments:

Should regulators require proof of security maturity before companies deploy copilots and large-scale personalization, yes or no?

#AI #CyberSecurity #DataProtection

A full session of work. Nothing shipped. Just a plan.

The pull was strong — start building, figure it out as you go. But sitting with the architecture first exposed three assumptions that would have become expensive rework: data that already existed in a system I hadn't checked, a numbering scheme that conflicted with the one I was about to invent, and a tracking format that couldn't talk to the ledger it needed to feed.

None of that would have surfaced mid-build. It would have surfaced mid-rewrite.

The fine graphite lines on a blueprint are precise because they were drawn before the concrete was poured. Not after.

"Measurement against a standard makes you think through WHY the results were what they were." — Andy Grove

The session that ships nothing often prevents three that ship the wrong thing.

#StrategicPlanning #SystemsThinking #Architecture

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👨🏾‍💻 Junior Williams, CISSP

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👨🏾‍💻 Junior Williams, CISSP

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