Vercel’s AI-powered system for shipping 35% faster

At Vercel, shipping fast isn't just a goal—it's their identity. But as the company grew, a challenge emerged: how could they maintain their signature speed while ensuring quality and alignment?

While the company had adopted Notion early on, key planning processes and work across teams had started to become dispersed across disconnected docs and slide decks with critical context lost in disparate Slack threads and meeting notes. Specialized tools added additional complexity in tracking work across different platforms. This fragmentation risked slowing their rapid development culture with hours lost to search and context-switching across apps, but made it difficult for their teams to scale together effectively.

"As we expanded to twelve product groups, we needed a cohesive system that created some standardization without the bureaucratic red tape," explains Brian Emerick, Technical Program Manager at Vercel. With integrations to over 20 apps in their tool stack and strong organic adoption, Vercel saw an opportunity to create a solution in their Notion workspace that would work for everyone.

Today, 100% of Vercel employees are using Notion on a daily basis, keeping every team working efficiently together in the same space. At the heart of this space is now a simplified system for development processes that keeps everything connected. The result is 35% faster shipping, keeping teams' momentum high from initial concept through to final release.

A simple Product Areas is the nucleus. It’s where teams access everything they need from basic team info and meeting notes to roadmaps and project updates attached to PRDs. This hub creates three key parts of their system:

• Product Area Plans help teams stay aligned through a centralized roadmap that connects high-level strategy to actual work. Teams can easily adjust priorities as conditions change, with updates cascading through related materials automatically.

• The EPD Review process keeps projects moving through a simple form-based system that captures essential launch information and routes it for leadership feedback, while building an accessible knowledge base of past decisions and insights.

• A Product Launches Calendar streamlines releases by functioning as air traffic control, giving everyone clear visibility into launch statuses, confidence levels, and owners. Templates maintain quality standards, while system-wide connections and automated notifications ensure all teams stay in sync.

Notion AI automatically distills lengthy PRDs and RFCs into executive summaries, converts meeting discussions into actionable notes, and transforms technical documentation into customer-ready messaging drafts their GTM teams can leverage.

Enterprise Search lets teams instantly find answers across their Notion workspace and apps connected to or chat directly with leading AI models—all within Notion.

The real magic is how the AI proactively surfaces information teams might otherwise miss. Anything they’re working on can be enhanced with Notion AI that brings in the latest organizational knowledge such as related customer feedback from a new report or relevant context in a recent Slack discussion to help inform everyone’s work.

As a result, teams across Vercel save an average of 9 hours per week by letting AI handle these tasks, giving giving them more time to focus on building.

Vercel's teams embody their signature philosophy of "iterate to greatness" (ITG) through their work in Notion. This approach has driven significant improvements in their development process, with surveys showing that 89% of employees are now highly confident in launch quality.

With Notion as their foundation, Vercel demonstrates how to achieve continuous improvement while maintaining their trademark velocity. Their iterative mindset, combined with Notion's adaptability, allows them to refine processes without compromising the speed that gives them their competitive edge.