Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Notion)

Before, it was very easy to always say, well, I will never be able to do this because insert skill issue. We're realizing that even if you have the skills at your fingertips, the thing that matters is agency. I don't think agency is very evenly distributed in the world.

Do you have a piece of advice for someone that wants to develop this within themselves?

I tell this to myself. If you drive Notion like it's stolen, one day you wake up and you realize the world is made up by people no smarter than you. It just really awakens you to the idea that you can just change things.

If you think about your job a couple years ago, what's most changed?

The first 10% of every project are now free. It takes almost no effort to now build the first version of a startup.

Taste comes up a lot now.

Taste actually means you're able to run a virtual machine in your head where, given an idea, you can predict for a certain in-group whether they're going to like it or not. You just have to do reps. It's almost like training a model.

What do you think matters to building a successful product?

All the great products have something tiny that is a superpower, one tiny core that is so exceptionally good. One of the biggest pitfalls is if you get into the loop of if I just add one more thing to the product, it'll be finally great. That never works.

You have this hot take on universal basic income.

We already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work.

Today my guest is Max Schoening. Max is a hard person to describe. He was a product manager at Google. He ran the design team at Heroku. He was a design leader and an engineer at GitHub under Nat Friedman. He's also a two-time founder. And is now Head of Product at Notion. He is one of the most successful AI-forward product leaders out there. And as you'll soon see, one of the deepest thinkers on how AI impacts how we build and how we use software. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out LennysProductPass.com for an insane set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Max Schoening. Max, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

I am so excited to have you here. I feel like there's this quote I think about when I think about you, uh, and you being on this podcast. It comes from the Bible and just paraphrasing, the quote is, I was made for such a time as this. I feel like there's this, all this talk about roles merging, designers becoming PMs, engineers, everyone's the same, the Venn diagrams collapsing. You've been that for a long time. It's like hard to even describe what you are and what you've done. You've done all the things. So I feel like you have such a unique insight into where things are heading. I wanna start with just kind of this broad question. What have you seen about where things are going for product teams, for product building as AI becomes more powerful, as we integrate it more into our workflows? And I ask you this because I've heard for so many people at Notion that you are the reason that designers are shipping code, PMs are shipping code. You're not just living in the future, you're like pushing the whole team and company to live in the future. And so, so coming back to the question, just like, what are you seeing about where things are going? What will change? What will people realize in the next few months, years that you're already seeing?

Well, first of all, when you said a quote from the Bible, I was somewhat, I was very curious where this was gonna head.

It's the first time I've quoted the Bible on this podcast, I think.

I wouldn't take credit for the designers at Notion and PMs at Notion now code. I think that would've probably happened anyways, but I can tell you the origin story of it, which is when I joined Notion, we were building a lot of chat interfaces and we were designing the chat interfaces in Figma. And my, there's this great talk by Bret Victor, uh, Stop Drawing Dead Fish, which essentially is, I, I mean, the, the static image of a chat is basically the dead fish here. Uh, you have to feel. The, the AI to some degree. And so, uh, two designers, myself, just put together the worst possible playground you could think of, of a small codebase that is very LLM friendly, used the tools that LLMs are very good at using. And then we moved all of our prototyping for the, specifically the chat interfaces to that.

And just to understand this playground concept, uh, essentially this is an idea of people work within this separate kind of area with AI tools versus like their whole Notion codebase, making it really easy to get started and try stuff.

Yes. And that was the first version. It sort of aligned with model capabilities at the time. We don't always use, maybe at Notion, it's sort of the, the main codebase is not always the most agent, uh, friendly because, uh, iterations and a decade of, of, of patterns. And so we optimized for, okay, how can we make this the least scary and most one-shottable so that people would you just have to overcome this sort of, oh, I, the fear of the terminal, but then it just becomes chatting. And, uh, we recreated a bunch of the patterns and UIs that exist in that playground. Now the good news is that's just to get people on the treadmill because as model capabilities get better, now we have the same designers and PMs also just contributing to the production codebase to a lesser degree, of course, but like you can see where the trend is headed as model capabilities get better. The, the, the amount of work that you can do is, uh, obviously gonna increase exponentially.

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Maybe give us a sense of where things are today, like How much are designers shipping stuff, PMs, and then just what do you see about where things might be heading, seeing all this actually happening at a company like Notion?

I, I feel so uncomfortable predicting the future, uh, in terms of where things are heading because, well, predicting exponentials is really hard, but I'll take the stab at it is very, very useful for designers to move from manipulating Figma documents into code. That has always been useful. I've always been camp designers should code. Uh, in a previous life, I, I led design and product at GitHub and GitHub designers before LLMs contributed to, to GitHub, I think, and the top contributors to GitHub itself, like 10% were designers. Right now, processes are sort of breaking. Uh, one is we have designers who now mostly code and prototype in, in code. And then they are asked by other teams, uh, in marketing and so on to reverse engineer that in Figma because they use that to create assets for videos and so on. And so obviously that is kind of silly, right? That seems like busy work. On the pushing to production, I think it's a spectrum. Obviously small changes, styling tweaks and so on. It's a given that you can just do that now. I do have a general sort of maybe issue with vibe coding, uh, in the sense of I, I don't feel like the quality of software has increased all that much in the last 12 months. I think the, maybe the amount of software has, but it's very, very hard to find software that is, is reliable. And so the way we see it is it's not so much about pushing to production and having designers deploy. It's about them. Them thinking and designing in the medium that will actually end up being the real thing once engineering takes it over.

There's all this talk about designers should be shipping code, PMs should be shipping code. And then there's the flip side of because engineers can move so fast, there's so much more happening. Things are moving all the time. Designers and PMs are squeezed more and more because it's hard to stay on top of all these things that are constantly shipping. And so maybe it doesn't actually make sense for designers and PMs to be spending time coding and instead their time is better spent making sure things are moving in a direction that makes sense for the business. It's cohesive. What's your thoughts on just that balance?

I actually don't care at all whether designers write code that lands in production. The reason I like thinking in code is because it forces you to consider the medium. If then all of that gets thrown out, Great. So for example, I think the two extremes would be if a PM or designer knows how to tweak with, pick your favorite, they're all the same, Codex, Claude Code, whatever. If they know how to tweak small details of the UI, but they don't understand how an agent loop works, I would much rather take the designer or PM that deeply has an affinity for understanding how agent loops work and can design those than someone who can sort of write traditional software, uh, and, and tweak styles. And that's really hard because I think the only way that you can actually get to understanding agent loops is if you build them in the material that they're made of, which is currently code. And increasingly so if you look at all the coding harnesses, basically the operating systems of the '90s, right? Um, and so, uh, I think that's why I care that people code, not because of the utility of shipping to production. But because it forces you to really interrogate the material that you're designing with.

So it's more the prototyping use cases than we're just gonna be shipping more features because, because we can.

It tends to be that once you awaken someone to a new material, that at some point they also blur the lines and then write production code. But I think it's really important not to forget that the reason why is to un— to become a master of the material, not, uh, a sort of cog in the delivery mechanism for the idea.

That is really interesting. What do you find is key to people being successful in this new world? Like, you know, there's a lot of designers, a lot of PMs at Notion. What do you find is separating the ones that are thriving and will do well in this coming future versus ones that may fall behind?

I suspect that this is also something that has always been the case, and we would just categorize this as founder versus not. And do you start a startup versus not? Which is agency. I think before it was very easy to always say, well, I will never be able to do this because insert skill issue. And I think we're realizing that even if you have the skills at your fingertips, because now, I don't know, an AGI adjacent model helps you, uh, the thing that matters is agency. And I don't think agency is very evenly distributed in the world. And, uh, I think people who have true agency and they understand that the world around them is malleable will do great. And the folks who stick to what, tell me really, what does it mean to be a PM? What does it mean to be a designer? And like, what's my job as an engineer? I think that will be much harder. And yeah, cultivate agency. I think that's the, that's the thing.

Is there an example of someone? Using agencies, some, a good example at Notion of someone just leaning into that and doing, and maybe shipping something, changing the way something was happening at Notion, just to give us a like, oh wow, I see what you're talking about.

Notinos are, this was surprising to me, especially on the design team, way above average agency compared to other places that I've worked at.

And Notinos, by the way, are Notion employees.

Yes, sorry.

Okay, cool.

Once you're a boiled frog. I would say one example would be someone like Brian Levin, who you should probably have on the podcast at some point.

He was on our sister podcast, How I AI. We'll link to that episode.

Ah, there we go. Yeah, you should cut this one short and have him on. Um, I think the way I would describe it is, and I tell this to myself as well, which is like, okay, do you drive Notion like it's stolen? Which is, you know, we're not the founders. We're, you know, coming in after there was already insane product market fit. but you can still contribute to the company in a way that you feel agency and you're not sort of just like, it's what's your role. And so Brian obviously already blurs engineering and design, but he also is probably our number one recruiter, uh, in terms of, hey, this is what the org needs. I'm going to go out and talk to people and find someone. And I think that is a thing that sort of just demonstrates it's, it's out of the day-to-day and it demonstrates the, you know, I want to just affect change. I don't care how it happens. Right. Eric Liu is another one. The fact that he went from sort of writing a lot of strategy docs to, he asked me at some point, he's like, hey, look, at some point in the future, if you started a startup, would you hire me? And I said, well, not in the first 10. I don't need a product manager. He's like, oh, okay. I'm going to work on the skills so that you would hire me in the first 5. And that led to first spending more time in Figma instead of, you know, writing long PRDs. And now it's just, why do I have to do the Figma thing? Can't I just build the prototype and at least show you what I think and do the thinking in there. Right. And so that, those are just sort of signs of high agency of I'm going to change the role to, to, to how I think it should be.

Something you mentioned earlier, which I love this idea of just rethinking what is, what is this role of engineering? What might it, what should it be if we didn't have this kind of meme already for it? I wonder what we lose as these roles start to merge. We used to have this clear engineer, product manager, designer. And as people start to, you know, as you talk about malleable software, we'll come back to this, but like malleable roles almost, there's something we lose, like clear career paths and design consistency, things like that.

I think if we're not careful, we will lose specialists. And so the way I would describe this is I sometimes like to think about software in terms of physical metaphors, right? And physical metaphors somehow make it so much clearer what a prototype is versus what an engineered thing is. And if you and I were to build a hardware startup, well, we would make the first enclosures and prototypes with 3D printing, and you would see all the layer lines. It would be very, very obvious to you that this is not a thing that you should just give to, to, to people to pay for. And then there's a long windy road all the way to the end where at some point, if you're very lucky, you get to manufacture that product for, I don't know, 100 million people. And so then the engineering is actually the How do I optimize the factory so that we have enough yield and so that we have enough precision? And that to me, I think is very absent right now from most of the discourse in software, which is it's all about how many tokens can we spend and how many features can we ship. I'm like, okay, but where's the engineering part? And the engineering part is the, you make sure that this thing works for 100 million people, for a billion people. And on the design side, I think there is the, Yes, anyone can now very quickly take a design system off the shelf, build a very usable user interface, get to the core of what's really important, but where is the delight in craft? And so I think we have to make sure that we, in this sort of merging of roles, don't lose the specialists on the, on the edges. And yeah, I would say that's something we could, it would potentially be, be, be sad if we lost it.

I want to come back to this agency piece because I feel like people hear this word a lot on this podcast. Yes, agency. For someone that wants to build this within themselves or even just understand, do I have agency? I don't know. I think I do. I imagine everyone listening is like, yes, I am a huge, I have huge agency. I'm such an agent. I can do, and I'll do what needs to be done. Do you have a piece of advice for someone that wants to develop this within themselves?

Partially the reason why I'm in software is the thing that I care most about is the Steve Jobs quote. Uh, one day you wake up and you realize the world is made up by people no smarter than you. And there are basically people who realize this by themselves, or they have an amazing teacher early on in their life that encourages this. And the, the biggest through line I've found is making. I think if you tinker and if you make things, then you are now on this treadmill of just, um, creating. And then you're like, oh, it's actually not that hard to learn how to make that chair in my office, or let me tweak it a little bit, or maybe, I don't know, it's like a home-cooked meal is a form of tinkering, ironically, right? And I think the more you can do that in life, I think actually sort of making things is the innately human, like sort of toolmaking, creating art and so on. So just do that versus, I think when a lot of people hear agency, they think of themselves as they're in this big machine and they're like, oh, okay, I'm going to circumvent my terrible boss or manager or whatever. So that I get X, Y, and Z. It's like, no, no, just start by making things. And usually when you get better at making things, at some point people pay attention and it just really awakens you to the idea that you can just change things. I love this.

Uh, there's this meme on Twitter. You could just do things. Uh, like there's all, I, I love this version of it. You could just change things. Um, which is a, is a good segue to something you've been a big, I don't know, advocate of and, uh, proponent of this idea of malleable software. Something you mentioned earlier. It feels like something that wasn't actually possible and now is like, okay, I could see exactly what you're talking about now. Like you've been on this from before the AI revolution. Talk about just this idea, malleable software, why you think it's so important, what you think people need to be thinking about here.

Malleable software is the idea that software works closer to the interest of the people that use it than the interest of the corporation that makes it, maybe. That's how I'd frame it. And in particular, like, I don't want to use software that is specifically just designed by the ivory tower in Cupertino. And I say this as a huge Apple fanboy, but imagine you lived in an environment where you do not get to rearrange your living room and the kitchen has to be exactly set up the way that someone else decided. We would not take that, right? But that is kind of the world that we have in software right now, where we have this world of apps and apps are like this very, every layer is glued together of like the user interface, the data ownership and so on. And it's like this little square on your phone and the moment you're like, okay, this is a really great app, but I just want to change a little bit. That is usually not possible, right? The behavior. Uh, you have the flip side, which is you could run your own Linux distribution and go that way. And I think then what happens is you realize, oh, okay, I like the malleability, but I also have other things to do. And I don't always want to start from scratch and, and figure out why the, the trackpad doesn't work. And so to me, it just comes back down to, do you have ownership over your computing life? And I think increasingly we don't. Now, you brought this up presumably because I think you may have sort of not thought about malleable software too much before AI, but now you're like making your own tools, maybe for podcast recording, for prepping for shows, or, or I don't know, whatever. There's a myriad of examples and people are awakening to this idea of like, oh, I can just make tools. And that is a form of malleable software, but it has to be built on top of a platform or an operating system that encourages this because otherwise we're just doing individual, like everybody has their own individual little tool. And, um, I don't know, I, I like working with people and I like communal tools. And I don't know, this is a thing that the folks at Ink Switch are, are obviously sort of at the forefront. I get to work with Jeffrey Litt every single day now that, uh, spend a lot of time thinking about how would we make software more malleable so that we feel more ownership over it without going back a long time and not having real-time collaboration and sort of the security aspects and so on.

I really love, and I just want to make sure we highlight this idea you're sharing. It's something that I learned also from Brian Chesky at Airbnb. This idea that just, you can change things, that the things around you are just made by other people that may not actually be smarter than you. And it's just this really empowering thing to always think about that things can change. This isn't the way things have to be forever. People— humans made this thing, like humans made this, uh, this phone. And, and you could— and there are better approaches that other humans that you can, that you can come up with, other people will come up with. What I think about as I think about this is there's a video that you, uh, pinned to your Twitter profile that we'll link to, which I think is Dieter Rams. Is that who that— who the person is? Okay. He's walking around, he's just criticizing all these designed chairs. Talk about what that video is trying to— why you pinned that to your profile.

There's many reasons. One is, I think maybe the only thing that I have in common with this very accomplished person is that we're both German. And so sometimes I joke that I also aspire to disapprovingly just point at things with my walking stick and say, this isn't good enough, this isn't good enough. The reason why is because I think if you speak German, this is one of the funniest clips that I've ever— I just die laughing every single time. I'm actually curious how you think about how it ties to Malleable Software, because the main reason why I use that as a clip of reference is I'm very much in the camp of design should be first useful and then beautiful. And I think a lot of the pieces there are predominantly things that you put in a museum. For display. And if you tried to sit on them, you'd be like, what is this nonsense?

What I felt there is just like, you see all, like, you would think it was Frank Gehry and like all these famous designers' pieces put up in a museum. And I think to most people it'd be like, oh wow, this is so incredible and beautiful. Like you see somebody that has a status and a reputation and you assume this is great. And I love that he breaks that veil of like, no, this is so stupid. What is this? What is this bunch of cabinets tied together? Doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

He said that's pro— that for that cabinet, I think he says something like it is neither orderly nor properly chaotic. I understand the connection now. The timeless way of building and Stewart Brand's sort of how buildings learn, I think idea is also that it's very likely that the best homes for you are not actually built by an architect. They are the thing that over a long time adapt to exactly how you would love to lead your life. And they learn over time versus, you know, immediately. And so then that is obviously a very costly version of malleability, right? If you have to rip out a wall or whatever. But, um, I think the main thing that Dieter Rams points out there is it should be a thing that's useful and a good way to figure out how something is useful is if you can change it and tweak it.

Makes sense. It all connects. It all connects. I get it now. There you go. I will link to it. It's really funny to watch. I wish I, I wish I understood the German. I want to come back to this idea of, uh, malleable software from a perspective of SaaS and the SaaSpocalypse. There's all this talk about we will not need SaaS tools any longer. We will build all our own tools. We don't need Salesforce. You know, imagine some people are like, we don't need Notion. I'm going to build my own Notion. You have a hot take there. Talk about what you think is going to happen.

If you just think about what SaaS— the problem is the moment you have an acronym, it means a lot of very specific things. And if you're going to say, hey, is this type of SaaS that we've built in the 2010s just as relevant as it was in the 2010s? The answer would be, it would be silly to say no, nothing's going to change. It'll be the same. Because I think you can sort of say a lot of SaaS in the 2010s was a very, very fancy form around a spreadsheet or something more generic. And the thing it did is it just guided people in the right direction to fill out that form. As in, it is less malleable than a spreadsheet and that sort of is the value. The as-a-service part is, I think, the thing that actually matters, which is I don't think most people actually want to maintain the full stack of software. And so whenever I see someone, and I am someone here, say, oh, I just rebuilt this piece of software. I've tried rebuilding Notion in a weekend for myself, just to, you know, push at the edges of frustration, frustrating things. I don't think people want that. I think for the most part, it's nice if you can just, people don't want to go hunting either. They just want to go to Costco and have the steak in a Styrofoam packaging and pretend that it wasn't hunting or, you know, an animal in the first place. I think with software, it's like, it's a, it's like a, um, Bret Taylor says this too, software is like a garden, you need to tend to it. And the, the, the thing you pay for in the as-a-service is the maintenance, right? And, uh, a bunch of specialists thinking really hard about a problem. And so I don't think that's going away. What I would probably say is that tools will become more general. I mean, I'm obviously biased. I work at Notion. I like Notion and I consider Notion to be fairly malleable, not enough. I'm, uh, I think it should become more malleable. Internally joked, uh, Joanna Stern, um, a journalist recently tweeted something along the lines of, oh, thanks to Notion AI, I finally understand and use Notion. I don't know what that says about Notion. And to me, this is a great example of Notion wasn't SaaS in the traditional way. It's kind of hard to get started, but because of AI, now people can sort of, they have a, a tutor essentially and can build more things. And so my, I suspect that software will go more back into the '90s of general tools, word processor, spreadsheet, FileMaker Pro, uh, that kind of thing. But those will still be as a service, and then you will still have specialized tools around security and, and so on of just people who go the extra mile to really solve a user problem. So I think to some degree, the SaaSpocalypse is greatly exaggerated. At the same time, are things going to stay the same? Of course not. Like, why would they?

I completely agree. I think people think about just the, okay, I'll create something that's pretty cool and close. And then they don't think about exactly as described, like I have to maintain this thing forever and I have to keep adding features, taking people's feedback. One of the funniest things that I see again and again, uh, uh, I just had the head of product for Cloud Code on the podcast, Kat Wu, and she talks about how Slack is basically the OS for Anthropic. Everything runs through Slack and you think of all companies that would just like, we don't, we'll just build our own. What are we doing with Slack? Like, no, they're just, they're, they're using Slack like crazy. And I think that's just one example of like, nobody wants to rebuild a tool like Slack and Workday, I think is another example.

I don't know. I think it's maybe even more unique in the US, but one of the great things about the US is actually specialization. It's that I get to spend dollars on something like Notion because it's not that expensive compared to me building it. And then, uh, why would I waste my time? I, I want to do other things with my life, right? So I don't know. That's not going to go away.

Yeah. Uh, I agree. People at Anthropic, their time is better spent building AGI than trying to build better Slack.

I also love the Slack example because, uh, I mean, this is a, uh, there's this graphic of what it takes to deliver a notification in Slack. The sort of decision flowchart. And that is just something that you only get to when you have real users, real scale, and decades of just, yep, we understand the customer.

I want to come back to how product building is changing and how it's different. I know you've done a lot of different jobs, but like your job, I don't know, a couple of years ago, what's most changed? Like what part is most not something you don't do anymore? Or you do a lot more of now with AI emerging as a big part of your process?

I think the first 10% of every project are now free. That's how I would describe it. So there is no point for most things to, for example, write a, I don't know, I, the thing is, has changed. I've never really been great at this, uh, but like there's no point in writing a PRD if you can just do the janky version and, and sort of, you know, do the, Here's the demo of like what I think we should build.

So the first 10%, that's so interesting. Just that, that's such an interesting way to frame it. Idea there is just like the thinking through of it. You can go a lot further really quickly.

Uh, yes. And if you look at a lot of the, the, it takes almost no effort to now build sort of the first version of a startup, right? Or like the first zero version 0.8. And then I think the last, or, or maybe maybe even if you're generous and say the first 90% are now done, the last 10% are still actually 90%. That's always the hardest. So I think, uh, it's cheaper to just explore a lot of paths. You can now afford to say, I'm going to send off 10 agents to explore 10 different things and then see if I was right. We used to say this at GitHub in, in, uh, in our product reviews a lot, which is demos, not memos. And then we would say, give me something to react to, which is, okay, if you're going to write a PRD, just write the changelog or the blog post that a user would have, would read. Now it's much easier to give people something to react to, as in, yeah, here's the version of the product. And it's like, okay, what if we did it this other way? Oh yeah, here's that version. And so I think that is just amazing. It, it sort of builds in iteration, uh, into the product much earlier, right? Like Waterfall is sort of. Why, why bother?

What do you think is the next kind of leap or shift in how we build? What do you, what are you seeing as like, okay, this is now the new thing that's emerging that is gonna change how we operate?

I'm very conflicted on this because on one hand I do wanna, like, I believe the never bet against plaintext. It's a, a famous, uh, uh, forum post at some point. Plain text markdown, like it's just such a durable thing. Code is such a durable thing. I, think that expressing your thoughts in code is probably a really good thing. We can talk about why. Uh, but at the same time, I'm like, are we really going to just be chatting back and forth? And so what is the future of Figma, for example, is like a really interesting example to me because, uh, on one hand, I do see like sort of a drop in usage of, of Figma in some designers, uh, at Notion. And then others are like, nope, these AI tools are wonderful. I, it's very hard for me to predict of like, is direct manipulation going away because the agent is doing the direct manipulation? Um, the other thing that I'm curious about is there is this automation versus augmentation fork. If I look at the really, really fast models like Spark, and I forget what the Anthropic variant is, where—

Haiku?

Uh, no, sorry. It's, it's, you still get a smart one. It's Opus, but like, Opus Fast or something where you very quickly run up a bill of like $3,000 a day. But the speed of inference really changes things. If the inference is slow, then you're queuing up a bunch of jobs and then you're walking around the building thinking about other things and then come back and review versus if it's nearly instant, are you still going to do this? Is this sort of multitasking, the frenetic kind of thing that we currently have going on? Actually the thing that is sort of, you know, gives us flow state. Well, no, but if the inference becomes instant, do we get back to direct manipulation, right? Do you, do you instantly sort of like mold the clay that is the code, right? Um, I, I, I don't know. I think it depends on model capabilities, which is, do people, is there a saturation on intelligence or not? Uh, the analogy I like to give is a retina display. Which is after I can't see the pixels, I can't see the pixels. I don't need you to make them smaller. Is it not the same for a lot of cognitive tasks, which is at some sort of level of intelligence? I don't need more. And I instead, I want a different modality and faster. So I don't know those things I'm excited about.

Interesting. So the last point you're making is it's like smarter models will not significantly impact how teams operate because they've gotten so good and it's other blockers now, like, like UX, essentially.

Yeah, I think in general, I'm actually very curious. Uh, the labs sort of operate, I feel like they operate, uh, under the assumption that people will always want the smartest model, like you want the frontier model. And I think for certain domains, that is probably true. I think if we're going to do cancer research and so on, and if we're going to spend millions of dollars on something, that's likely true. But that's not how we run companies either, right? Like we don't have a PhD for everything. And so I think for a lot of knowledge work tasks, probably sometime we'll get to good enough. And once you get to good enough, then you can optimize other things like they run locally, they're cheaper, they're faster. And I don't know why the absolute intelligence thing doesn't interest me very much. I think society is largely not capped by intelligence. Uh, I think Tyler Cowen says something similar. I don't want to put words in his mouth. Um, and so I'm much more interested in the exoskeleton versus the, I have a god in a box in some data center somewhere and we're all sort of, you know, twiddling our thumbs.

I have a bunch of questions along these lines. So interesting. You talked about how this one PM is the highest token spender. This is across all of Notion.

Uh, I would assume this may not include our automatic security, uh, vulnerability scanning and like bug triaging is like when human kicks off hidden jobs.

Yeah. Yeah. What's your policy on token spend? Is it spend as much you want? Here's a limit, everyone. Do you keep track?

Given that I don't know what the policy is, I think it is unlimited. Uh, I mean, you can imagine at some point there would be, but, uh, right now I think it's just the wrong thing to optimize for. It's like when something new comes along, it's worth letting people explore. I do suspect in 6 to 12 months from now, a lot of companies are going to actually start asking questions around ROI. And I think that will be an uncomfortable conversation for a lot of folks.

In terms of span, what are the, like, the numbers for, say, Eric, or broadly, in terms of—

I am the wrong person to ask.

Okay. It's just a lot. And then—

That is just the— I don't— I would assume they pale in comparison to the folks at OpenAI and Anthropic, just by the nature of the work they do and so on. But it is definitely for an individual in the, you know, I don't even want to put numbers in, but like thousands for sure, but like maybe tens of thousands. I don't know. It depends. Yeah.

I think just the fact that you're as head of product are not on top of that means that it's just, let's not worry about this. Let's just see what we can do. And then we'll, we'll, you know, in 6 months, as you said, we'll figure out if this is ROI positive. Yes.

I have the luxury to. Right now not care.

Yeah. And I'm sure, you know, someone's looking at it. It's not going to be out of control. Correct. I think there's like this big, I don't know, milestone of when does token spend exceed someone's salary. That's something people talk about now more and more, just like, should that be higher than your salary? Should it be lower? How does that all connect?

Yeah, I think there's a real danger in sort of making the token spend the metric to like boast about, which is the same as when people boast about how many lines of code they've written in a day.

Yeah.

And like, I, why do you have so many lines of code? Uh, you have, I don't know, the largest software projects in the world have, uh, not that many millions of lines of code. Like, why are we, why are we bragging about that? I, I don't actually care about how many tokens someone spends. Um, yeah, it's not a metric that's useful.

Yeah, such a good point. Uh, I know Meta got in Got some flak for this recently where they're trying to create a leaderboard of who's doing the most.

To be fair, I do understand why companies do that, which is I am surprised by how much work it takes to get people to identify the outer loop of their work and enlist an agent and build sort of the, I don't know, the, the term right now is like factory, right? Like the software factory for the work that they do. Uh, it is. Surprising to me how much prodding you need to do to get people out of their, the way they're used to working. And so if you're dealing with tens of thousands of people at the scale of Meta, I have some sympathy for, okay, a good way to do this is just start a leaderboard and encourage people to do it. They will find good things and useful things to do with that as they, as they learn, right? So it's, uh, yeah.

It's such a good point. Like you have to over, over-index to change people's default easy behavior. I'm just gonna do the thing. I'm just gonna write these PRDs the way I've always done it.

I'm gonna run the meetings the same, the same way I've done it.

I think that makes a lot of sense. What have you seen actually work within Notion to get people to significantly change the way they work?

Depends on the role. So roles that are perhaps further away from engineering, actually you don't have to convince them all that much because they're like, whoa, I have superpowers now. Look at this amazing thing I've just built because the capability gap of what they were able to do before versus after is so huge that it's intoxicating. And then you have to actually almost do the opposite, which is like, yes, but do you understand why we can't merge this PR? I think on the engineering side, something that, uh, Simon Last talks about a lot is sort of any manual intervention. In code is kind of bad, you probably did something wrong in the verifiability loop and in sort of the software factory. Uh, this excludes obviously reviewing code, right? Like I am still very much in camp, you should probably review more code than— put more effort into reviewing code than you do. Um, but at least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug. I think that's a good litmus test for, uh, how, I don't know, agent-filled you are.

I want to come back to the tools that you use. You mentioned, um, Figma is kind of trending down within the design org, which is really interesting. Is there anything that's trending up? Anything else that's trending down in terms of tools in the tool stack of your team?

So I'm actually not positive that Figma is trending down. I think it's more that there is a, there's two camps. I could totally believe the Jevons paradox, which is Figma is actually going up. And then of course, Vibe Coding is going up. Like, I don't want to create— in general, I really, really dislike the rivalry discourse that exists in Silicon Valley, which is for Anthropic to win, OpenAI needs to lose, and vice versa, and like, that kind of thing. So I don't want to perpetuate that with sort of the Figma versus versus coding. I think the terminal is actually surprising, which is, it's initially kind of scary for people and you could do so much, but now PMs are slowly, the, once they're in Cloud Code or Codex, everything is fine, right? And I generally encourage them to not use the GUIs. I encourage them to use the, the, the Twis because I just know that over time they're going to be curious and like pull at other threads. And one day they wake up and they're like, oh, I understand more of the substrate of what how computers work.

That is so interesting. So the designers are using the terminal.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's so cool. And then, um, I don't know, Conductor is another one. They're basically just mostly using developer tools. It's not that different from what developers use.

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AI has completely transformed the work of a software engineer. Like, 2 years ago versus today is completely different. Like, almost all your code is now AI.

It—

and we've been talking about it, like, when will 50% of engineers in the world be writing 100% AI code? It's probably like in a year, which is insane how much that job has changed. Which role do you think AI transforms next? Is it marketing? Is it growth? Is it sales? Is it design? Do you have a sense of like where things are starting to really change other than engineering?

Okay, this is maybe a hot take and I actually don't have enough, um, I, I, I, it's very likely that the labs are like, haha, look at this guy. Um, my take, it's very clear, at least empirically, that models are getting better at coding at some exponential rate. Right. And I don't think that's changing. Now, I'm not that impressed with the progress in any other domain. It tends to be like, I don't think they've gotten significantly better at writing. I still very much hate reading, uh, sort of AI slop writing. But the thing is software, we, uh, uh, Andreessen, right? Like software is eating the world. Well, if the cost of software and creating software and encoding business practices in code, and like, I just literally mean the old, like software 1.0 kind of code, then if that cost is very much going to zero, we will just have a lot more of it. And so I think then in that case, it's more that software engineering will go into all the other domains, not necessarily that there is sort of some sort of, yeah, like, um, I don't know, our folks in HR are automating a lot of things because now they don't have to bug an engineering team to write that code. Uh, and so I think that's how it's, it's going. And like, if you look at when the model companies say, oh, we've made great progress in this other non-coding domain, I was like, mm, you just applied coding principles to this domain, which is wonderful, but that's what it's getting better at. Right. And so I think, um, I, I just think software is eating the world is going to accelerate.

That is a really interesting take. So it's basically software, just the acceleration of software eating the world. Versus it's like, it's going to now do a different kind of job. This makes me think about the, um, head of product for Codex said the same thing, that every agent— there's all these different kinds of agents, and his take is every agent that will win is going to be a coding agent that builds the thing it needs versus like it's come— it has like certain number of capabilities. OpenClass, such a good example. It's just like, I will build a skill for myself and now I know how to do this thing.

Yes, all agents are also like— if you look at all the harnesses, whether it's the open source ones or the ones from the model companies, ours as well. Uh, they all resemble a coding agent now.

I'm going to come back to the ROI piece. I think this is really interesting. As you said, there's just like, okay, we're going to spend, spend, spend, just see what happens, learn, accelerate, lean into all this stuff. You're, uh, saying that in maybe 6 months, something like that, you think a lot of companies are going to start really looking at the cost here. What do you, I know you said you don't like to predict things, but what do you predict is going to start happening?

I probably spend too much time than I should because I have literally zero impact on any of this, uh, sort of how it plays out. But you can imagine a world where the labs, the delta between the labs and open weight models and so on widens. That is a world that I very much don't like because I hate centralization of power. But in that world, I think the labs just kind of get to decide what the world looks like. I think if that gap doesn't widen, then you will just see a diffusion and people will get very comfortable running their own models, RLing their own models, right? Like you see this with Cursor, you see this with Intercom, Notion is dabbling in it as well. I use dabbling right now, but obviously at some point we might become more serious about it. And then you have like, it's not front— it may not be the frontier, but for a lot of tasks, it'll be good enough. And so I think In that case, that is just an ROI calculation, right? That is the, is it cheaper for me to send this task to a smaller model that is cheaper to run where I remove the lab sort of profit margin kind of thing? I think that may happen, but it only happens if there isn't a fast sort of like, you know, oh yeah, the gap is now so big. The other one is that's interesting is right now I think we're actually in a, one of the luckiest possible timelines, which is we have at least in the US, 3 competent labs that are all sort of duking it out at the, and like, who knows, maybe Meta now. So 4, maybe we can make it 6 at some point. I think like I would love a world where we have like a dozen sort of frontier models in the US versus having to always rely on, on, on, um, uh, other places in the world to do this. Uh, but like, that's sort of pretty good. If that shoes stopped, I would be somewhat worried. And then it's hard to predict, right? Like what would happen. But if that doesn't, then I think it's going to look similar to the cloud wars, which is at some point layers commoditize, businesses are not going to want to lock in into one single provider. I don't know, in a past life I worked at Heroku and like Kubernetes was much more successful than Heroku, even though I think from a user experience perspective, it was much worse, but the delta was Heroku was saying, hey, we're going to, uh, uh, replace your ops team. And Kubernetes was, we're going to make your ops team superheroes. And also we're not going to lock you into a cloud. You can choose. And obviously that's what businesses want, right? Like businesses want, uh, choice. And so I don't know, it's really hard to predict because it depends. So it's so asymmetric in terms of model progress.

When you say the products that win often are the ones that make you feel like superheroes, I always think about Kathy Sierra. Do you remember that at all?

That's the thing.

Uh, it rings a bell.

Okay. That's just like, it's like from, from the olden days at this point shows how old I am. She was just something that really stuck with me and I think it's informed a lot of how people think about product, at least in the past is just her whole pitch was, uh, instead of making, talking about your product and how amazing it is, it's about, we will make you a superhero. Like it's like Mario getting the little flower and having superpowers now versus look at our incredible product.

Uh, I think it's actually a thing that, uh, the coding companies had to learn when they tried to move to like, why do code code review tools, automatic code review tools not work that well. I think there's actually a subtle thing, which is you push your code publicly to, or publicly within the organization or your team, and then a thing roasts your code and tells you how terrible of a developer you are. Versus if you think about what Claude Code and Codex does is you're coding and then you publish the work of you plus Claude and you get bragging rights of how good of a developer you are, right? And so I think the superhero stuff is is definitely true.

Speaking of superhero, I wasn't planning to talk about this, but I've been hearing a lot about how much people love your agent, the Notion AI agent that you all released. Just like, it's just coming up a lot of just like, wow, this is actually really useful. And with like a lot of different people. It'd be interesting to hear what you think made it so successful. I know it was like a long time before you guys launched it, just like, what do you think is helping it be this useful and successful as a product out in the world?

I would like it to be even better. So I, I'm like my sort of own worst critic, I guess. Uh, I've spent most of my day thinking about where it falls short, not how great it is. But I agree with you that, um, I'm actually surprised at how— this sounds so weird. I'm surprised how good it is, if that makes sense. Um, Notion has always been fairly at the forefront of AI. Like, I think the first Notion assistant was actually launched before ChatGPT. And so it's not that, like, I think both Ivan and, uh, Simon had the intuition of, hey, this is going to change a lot of things. And so that's a huge sort of reason why, but there, every company wants to become AI native now, whatever that means. I, it's kind of like cloud native. I'm like, if you have to say it, then are you really? Do you have a chance? But, uh, I'm surprised how fast that happened for Notion. And I, I'll take almost no credit in this. Um, I think what's good about it is agents need context to operate in. Agents don't really like walls of like, oh, I, I have to go through this narrow orifice to talk to this other data repository. And, um, I think for the first time, it is kind of obvious to people why a connected workspace is actually valuable because it's great. I can have agents roam around and do that. And it touches on malleable software. I think, uh, I think of Notion as an operating system more so. And, uh, then in that case, it resembles the environment that coding agents are in with Unix much more than one might maybe intuitively think. So I think those all contribute. And then sometimes it's just, we're just dumb enough to try hard things. Uh, and so I think our enterprise search is sort of like this, this thing where we do a lot of automatic permission handling and so on that others don't. Uh, I don't know. It's, it's. You have to care.

I'm gonna come back to my quote from the Bible. I feel like that actually is an answer to this question that, uh, it was made for such a time as this. The fact that Notion basically has all the things about everything in your company is the perfect source of context for using AI and helping you work. So it's just like just being around long enough for a while. Okay, this is exactly what we've been meant to be. It's nice job. Nice job, Chris.

It's the same as, uh, malleable software, right? Like, I, I love that people are waking up to malleable software now, but it's been around for a long time. It was just always slightly too hard and slightly too, like, why would I do this? And so I think, uh, yeah, I like, I'm going to use this quote from the Bible. Thank you.

There it is. It's like shorter. The original quote is, for such a time as this, and the interpretation is this, you're like destined to do this thing. It's a very Bible-heavy episode. Oh man. Um, going back to the way your team operates, cause I think this is something that a lot of people are thinking about right now. There's all this talk of productivity, pace, getting things out, like Anthropics launching a, a massive product every day, basically. Your job is head of product, help people ship consistently, regularly, often ship great stuff. What has worked in allowing you guys to ship more quickly, if you are, and, and stuff that you're proud of, stuff that works.

I think this answer is so specific to companies, like internal culture, where if you, I've been in this situation sort of twice in my career. One is when I joined GitHub, which is obviously, I think, I don't know, insane product market fit. It just so happened that at the time that I had joined, there was a little bit of a, I don't know, identity crisis or like, oh, what's our next act? What do we do? And like lots of debates about what to ship because it's such a tough act to follow if your first act was just incredible, right? And I don't know, I would put Notion in the same bucket. And so a lot in this case, it's just like reminding people that, hey, you can just do stuff. We don't have to be that precious. I think there's this preciousness that develops over time. It's like, oh, what do we do when our users are going to be upset? Well, our users are going to be upset if we don't innovate more so than if we accidentally break a thing. So it's obviously a balance. Um, but I think just reminding people that the same group of people that was able to do the first act is very likely going to be able to do the second one, but you have to try. Shots on goal is a thing that we say internally a lot, which is like, great, how do you increase shots on goal? Which of course, if you, if we go back to, it's easier to experiment now, you're increasing the shots of goal on goal, right? Um, so I think that has worked really well, just shipping feature after feature. Doesn't— I, we have been a little bit on a roll in terms of shipping new functionality, maybe in the last, like, I don't know, 6 months or so. But at the end of the day, feature count is the same silly metric as lines of code or tokens consumed or whatever. Um, I would rather have fewer features that are really, really good and where the combinatorics let you do everything. And so I think something that I'm still very much, uh, struggling with is software quality. And I will also say, I don't think the labs are exempt from this. Uh, like I love their tools. It's great. Like I love, I live in the CLIs, but a regression, like every 2 weeks of like a thing that was fixed like 3 weeks before, and they still can't render a Tui at, I don't know, a frame rate that's reasonable. Uh, and so I think. Yeah, quality is a thing that's missing, like this Apple-esque machined unibody aluminum kind of engineering. I, I, I would like us to, to figure out how to get back to that, uh, as an industry.

Is there something you've done to help improve that? So there's code quality and then there's actual software quality. If you're shipping, you know, shots on goal, there's always this balance of, okay, but wait for it to be awesome. I know this is just like very hard question to answer, but just how do you, What's your kind of communication to the team of here's how we're gonna, here's where we're gonna find that balance?

And this is a very frustrating thing for people, but, uh, I actually, I can't show you because I'm using my laptop, but we have, uh, Obviously Good stickers, which is let's just only make obviously good stuff. The origin, which is like, okay, wait, what does that mean? And I'm like, ah, you know it when you see it. Like, I don't think anyone argued when they saw the first iPhone that it's obviously good. I don't think anyone argued that when ChatGPT first came out that it's obviously good. And so I think that's the bar, like just make obviously good stuff. I think the mistake that maybe a lot of companies then make is great, we're going to be in this cave in isolation until we have it sort of be obviously good. One of my core values is incremental correctness, which is sort of iterate, get really, really good at iterating. And so I don't know, it's probably a union of, okay, increase shots on goal. Like here's a great example. We get roasted from our customers all the time, which I love about We have like 6 automation primitives inside of Notion, right? Like if you include all the agents and so on. And I'm like, yep, we let like a bunch of sort of different ideas sort of grow. We look at how they work, but then you do have to do the hard work at consolidating it back into like the naked robotic core of that idea. And that's hard, right? Because it, you have to sort of be okay with perhaps then shipping the next thing slightly delayed as you reconcile. I don't know. I think we have work to do there, like at Notion, but, um, as an industry too, like somebody was joking, like, why does Claude, the desktop app, have 3 tabs of co-work, code, and I don't know what the first chat or whatever. Um, why do we have 6 automation primitives? Well, because someone has to sit down and reconcile them and like figure out what's actually the core simple thing that should outlive the other. Sort of evolutionary branches, uh, of that same idea.

This idea of knowing when things are obviously good, there's an element of having taste. And this is where taste that comes up a lot now. And this is like what we will need more and more because AI is building the thing. Now our job is taste. Is this great?

Is this good?

I feel like you're someone that has really great taste.

A question people always ask: how do I build taste?

Do I have taste? Do you have any advice for someone that's like, I want to develop my taste?

I, first of all, I don't know if I have great taste. Like, I, I, I look at others and I look at how they exercise taste. And I think that the common thing I think is iterations with feedback. So it takes a really long time to build up taste in a specific domain. Then you maybe often can extrapolate into other domains with that taste. But if I had to describe what taste actually means, it's you're able to run, this is such a nerdy way of describing it. You're able to run a virtual machine in your head where given an idea, you can predict for a certain in-group whether they're going to like it or not. Right. Um, the extremes are, is if you are the only person on the planet that thinks something is good, is it good? No, but maybe you also don't need to build a product for 8 billion people. I've never built consumer software. I, I, I would probably be terrible at it, but you decide what your in-group is and then how good do you get at emulating, uh, how they will react to it. And to do that, you just have to do reps. It's almost like training a model, which is also why I'm not super, you know, the whole, um, ooh, the one thing that we have left is, is taste. I'm not so sure. Like I, I, if you think about the loop, it's input idea, how do people react? That seems very, uh, backpropagation. I don't know, like it seems very much how we train models too.

So I, what I love, basically you build taste by just doing the thing, getting feedback, iterating.

Look at Japan, like Japanese craftspeople, right? They've just been, I don't know, painting the bowl for however long. Uh, and it just takes a while. And so I think the more reps, they increase the frequency of reps. That's, that's what I would say.

It's so funny. That's exactly how, um, you know, agents learn and develop how, how, as you said, models learn just like doing the thing, seeing, was this good? Was this correct? No? Okay.

Learn.

So it's just, yeah, it's just doing the thing, learning, getting feedback. And there's no way to speedrun this. This is why often people with the best taste have been doing this for a long time.

The one thing I will say that I've noticed is specifically for designers, the designers that I think have, at least in software design, high taste are the ones that both have side projects that they build where they're responsible of the full thing end to end. And they're also always tinkering with some new app. Like they're the annoying person that is like, hey, what if we tried this in our team? I'm like, really? This is the 49th time that you suggested a new tool. Do we really need this? It's exposure to other people's ideas. I think that is the, um, it's also really important to surround yourself with tasteful things. So that you feel like the thing you're making is lacking, right? Like one of the things we do at Notion is, uh, all of our conference rooms are named after, uh, famous objects like the first typewriter, the Macintosh, a Porsche 911, and so on. And so inevitably when I'm sitting in one of the rooms and I pay attention to the room, like nothing I'm doing amounts to this, like, uh, I gotta do better.

You've built so many successful, great, loved products. What do you think matters in the end to building a successful product if you had to just kind of boil it down?

Yeah. Yes. Here's the one trick that, uh, I'll sell a course next week.

Um, please, I'll sign up.

First of all, I think I would actually say that I have contributed to some really great products, not built them, because I think, uh, I did not, I think I did not used to believe this early on in my career, but like the longer I'm in this, the more I care about What's the team that's building the thing? I used to think that was such like a, I don't know, not important thing. Uh, and now I'm like, oh, it's the only thing. Um, I don't think that there is a through line out of the things that I've contributed to where I can pinpoint it. Um, I think that you can't say that the best design always wins. I think there's many products where just design doesn't matter. And like, I think then as a designer, you can have this identity crisis of like, why am I doing this? I think you can't even say that the way it's built always, like the best engineering always wins. I think one of the biggest pitfalls is if you get into the loop of, if I just add one more thing to the product, it'll be finally great. Like if I really look at the truly great products, they all have one tiny core that is so exceptionally good. And that is both a combination of you stumbled upon it by luck, uh, and then the market agreed. But I think it's the, what's the tiny core? I don't know. Multitouch on the phone. Uh, GitHub is probably the pull request, right? Like this idea that anyone can suggest something to you and, and sort of you see it. Um, I do think that at Notion it's the blocks and like the slash commands, like, uh, Figma, it's sort of the seamless blend between, uh, uh, real-time collaboration and, and, and, and not. Like all the great products have something tiny that is a superpower. Like that's sort of like, uh, uh, versus, oh yeah, if we have this suite of things and like we add one more thing, it'll finally be useful. That never works.

And for GitHub, interesting, it was the PR. Um, other examples of that at other places you worked? Because this is really interesting, just like what's the tiny core that makes everything else work?

Um, at Heroku for sure, I think it was the, the git push heroku master. Of like, uh, at the time it was really hard to deploy apps, right? Like this is like nobody, it's sad because people don't remember Heroku. They've been like, I have to explain it as it's the first, it's the first Vercel.

Did it get bought by Salesforce?

Yes.

Yeah. Okay.

Um, yeah, git push Heroku master was just like this very simple one-liner that went from the thing on my computer. Now I have a URL and that's so intoxicating that everything else sort of flows from there. Dropbox is a great one, right? Like, I think Dropbox is like such an interesting study where it was the little menu bar icon that was so good at syncing that you could even use it as a symbol for, do I have internet or not? Because it was better at figuring out whether you had an internet connection than your Mac itself. And it was, it just, that's the job. Get out of the way and just all my files are always there. And then for years they tried to. Increase the surface area. And I kept thinking, no, no, no, push it back. I don't want more. Like, this is the only job I want from you, right? And so I think the tiny core, like, is, is, is the thing that makes great products.

And Snapchat, obviously, just like the disappearing photo concept, that's so interesting. I hear, I heard you've also talked about just like being first doesn't matter that much either.

You have to be right, not first. Uh, I don't know, like, I think, um, uh, I mean, there are probably there are elements of like, if you talk about network effects and like perhaps now with like training models, it does make sense if you have sort of a head start, but I think it's overrated. I don't know, like my favorite example is like Bluetooth headphones were kind of crappy and then you have the AirPods and like, oh, they connect and so on. And they weren't the first, like, I don't know, they weren't the first MP3 player. They weren't the first, like, you just got to do it right. I don't think being first is all that, that useful. I think we're currently, because it's so hard to keep people's attention, we try to say like, we're like, oh, how do I become, how do I go viral? Right? How do I do the Clueless thing? And I'm like, yep, I don't, durability matters, right? Like, uh, think of like, how would you build IKEA? Like a generational company that is not concerning itself with whatever is trending on Twitter today.

I think speaking of models, a good example is Anthropic, which was way behind. Started after OpenAI, got less funding, and now is just killing it and dominating.

And the thing that I find the most impressive about, uh, I don't know who to give credit, but like, obviously you give the CEO a bunch of credit, but like Dario is that he wasn't, oh, he wasn't just lucky once at OpenAI. He did the same thing twice and it was successful twice. And like, I think that's like, that's actually really cool.

I know you're also a believer in jobs to be done as a way of thinking about product, which is kind of this, It's been a long time controversial topic on this podcast, mostly because of Shriram, who's very anti-jobs to be done. Uh, what's your kind of framing of how you find this framework useful in thinking about product?

I bet that if I read, reread all of the Clayton Christensen stuff, I would also not identify super strongly with it. I use it mostly as, have you thought holistically? About what the user wants to hire your product for? And are you honest about what the user wants versus what you want the user to want? And then the other thing that I find happens very frequently in larger organizations is that people sort of turn off the brain when they're reviewing their own products, uh, from a, I'm a user, is this a good experience? And they're more like, I'm an employee of this company and I made a thing. And so I think jobs to be done might encourage people to zoom out and sort of not get lost in the sauce of like making the thing. That's why I like the framework. It's a good reminder of like, no, no, no, no. The user hires you for a thing. Be that user for a second. Would you even buy the thing that you just made? And the answer often is like, oh, uh, I hadn't thought about that, right? Like, and so that's, that's how I use it.

Is there an example of this from some of the products you worked on just to make this real for people other than like Milkshake example?

Obviously there's a very recent one, which is more about communication. We're launching a new feature soon and we're working on this landing page to describe the feature. And I found that when people make landing pages, first of all, their writing skills just like deteriorate immediately because they want to sound clever and like marketing speak comes out of their mouth. And I'm like, wait. That's not how you would explain it to a friend. And then if I'm communicating this product to you, just pretend you're standing in front of a whiteboard. What's the manic thing that you're drawing on the whiteboard to, to, to, to communicate this versus, okay, now go back to the thing you just designed.

Look at it.

Are you telling me that those are the same thing? Are you telling me that you understand what this thing does? And like that zoom out. So I don't know. Um, yeah, I don't know. I don't want to pick on, on individual, uh, uh, recent things.

Okay. Uh, as we close out this conversation, there's something I want to get your— you have this hot take on, on universal basic income. It's completely out of the blue, but I think it's interesting to hear. There's this idea that, you know, with AI emerging, we may not need to work. We'll all just get some UBI and enjoy our life. And you have this, uh, hot take that maybe we already have universal basic income. What's, what's going on?

Yeah. So please extend me some grace here because I both mean it as a joke and maybe somewhat real, like just depends on which altitude of human nature you look at. Um, my, my take is that we already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work. Uh, and I don't exclude my job from it, but if you really look about at what do we actually need to live and like to be content, it is a lot less. And we've built this hierarchy and this sort of all these jobs and all these things that are absolutely necessary. Uh, and so to me, it's like, yeah, we already have it. It's UBI, and we'll come up with other ways in which we as humans, because we're the most important species in the universe, insert ourselves into the conversation around agents. Um, will it look the same? I don't know. But, uh, yeah, I don't know. We are so inventive and we come up with new reasons of why we absolutely must be in that loop. Um, and so I think that's my, my hot take.

People have always joked like we get paid so much just to sit in front of a computer and put the right sorts of words and letters into the into this thing and we get paid a lot of money to do it. And now it's like, oh shit, maybe I won't be paid this much in the future because AI is going to be taken over. And so your take there is just like, this is a pretty sweet gig we already got. Enjoy, enjoy the CPI.

Yes, I think, I think all things considered, how lucky are we? Like, I don't know, I'm sitting in an air-conditioned room right now talking to you, having a good time. Uh, I don't know, like, yeah. I, just to be clear, not everybody has that luck, but I think that's the folks that I find discussing this the most are the ones that are in the bucket of luck.

Say we have AGI, you don't have to work, you could just do anything. What would you be spending your time doing?

I actually ask this to almost everybody that we hire. Um, I would be doing the exact same thing. Uh, I would, uh, probably spend less time, um, having meetings and managing. One of the sad things about my job is that I have yet to replace 80% of it with agentic loops. I envy our engineers and designers who get to do this. So hopefully at some point I won't, like, I won't have a job. But yeah, I would do the same thing. I think I am someone who, I don't code because of a utility, I code because it's also an intellectual challenge. So I think of it as playing chess and Go. Um, I'm very sad that Lee Sedol, uh, after losing against, I think, I don't know if it was AlphaGo or Zero, but one of the two, sort of like, it seems like he gave up on Go. And I'm like, who cares if some machine is better at it? Like, uh, it's the human stuff. Like, just, you know, keep going at it. And so I think I would do the same thing. I would tinker, I would build stuff, uh, I would try and make the world around me more malleable. I just got an email this morning from someone who asked me about, oh, you think a lot about malleable software. Have you ever thought about what robotics might do? And it just blew my mind because I had not, because it's so far from the skills that I have. Uh, but yeah, I don't know, something like that. Just, I would do the same thing.

Amazing. Okay. I'm going to take us to two recurring corners of the podcast to see what we find there. Uh, the first corner is Contrarian Corner. Is there something that you have a, you have a lot of these already. I'm curious if there's anything else. Is there something you have a contrarian opinion about? Something you believe that a lot of people don't?

It's becoming so hard to have contrarian views because I think the algorithms just, uh, try and get contrarian views out of people sort of, you know, at like an insane, uh, with an insane force. Um, depending on the era, uh, like this may not be contrarian, but I think that inclusivity isn't always all that great. Um, um, I think I, I very much believe in small group theory. Like I think the world is run by group chats of 8 people or fewer. Uh, and so sometimes it's great to be exclusive. And what I mean by that is I even think about this in terms of Notion. Notion could have the ambition to say we are going to have 8 billion users. So every single person on the planet uses Notion. And I think if we did that, we would very much upset the first, call it $500 million, because, uh, the top of the class wants different things than everybody and everybody is in the top of the class at something. And so I think being okay with being exclusive sometimes is, is okay. Um, I, I will have to caveat this with, if you are If you're McDonald's and you have exclusive hiring practices and it's the only job in a location, that is not what I'm talking about. But like going back to comfy air conditioned, like job kind of thing, it's like, great. Just work with and for the top of the class is sometimes a winning, winning thing and just build a really, really good product for them, which by definition means you're going to exclude others.

The TPPN guys have a really good way of describing this exact concept, which is You know, they had like, I don't know, 8,000 listeners an episode, like a conversation. They got acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars, just like what's going on there. And the way they pitch it is, you know, like if we have, if we have millions of people listening to this thing, this, we've done something wrong. This is specifically designed for like the people in power of tech to influence them, to teach them what's going on. Um, and it worked out, it worked out great for them. So it's exactly what you're describing. Okay, I'm gonna take us now to fail corner. So you people like you come on this podcast, they're like, okay, I'll get all these wonderful things he's done. He's just killing it all the time. Everything's working. In reality, I'm sure not everything has worked in your, the course of your career. What's one, one example where things didn't work out and what did you learn from that experience?

Oh my God. Like, this is a, it's such a weird, I don't think about win versus fail. I kind of feel like every day I fail a lot. Uh, what are big ones that annoy me? Culturally, I think like sort of in running teams, I think a mistake that I made is at some point, because hiring at this— now it's easy, but at the time hiring designers that can code was, was quite challenging. And so then if you loosen that requirement, uh, I did not sort of predict how quickly that becomes like a slippery slope. And I would rather have had fewer designers that are more polymath. Um, so I think that's one on organizational side. On product, oh my God, I mean, GitHub Actions and their, uh, the, um, uh, I don't know, like it's very technical, but the fact that we also thought we didn't need good package management for the actions, like, I don't know, I think the world would be better off if we had thought about that slightly harder. This is maybe like I, I had a, started a competitor to Notion. In 2014. And, uh, I didn't think of it as, in fact, it wasn't a competitor of Notion because the week that we were going to get a term sheet from True Ventures, Notion pivoted from website building to document collaboration. And so True Ventures was like, hey, sorry, we have a conflict. And we're like, yep, no, no worries. Um, and we spent so much time polishing the editing experience. We did markdown folding, all the stuff that you now have in Obsidian. Like we sort of did that back in 2014. And we thought that's the thing that really matters. And then Notion, by comparison, the first version of the Notion editor was terrible. Like there was like no, it was all blocks. You couldn't even select between two blocks, but it turns out it didn't matter. And so I think that is like just working diligently on the wrong thing for way too long.

Huge fail. That's so interesting. Just coming back to your insight of when a product works, there's just this tiny core thing that is the thing that makes it amazing and what people want to come back to no matter how bad everything else is. Uh, I think that's a really interesting takeaway.

We actually kept adding new features. At some point you go down to the death spiral. So we kept adding yet another feature of like, okay, is it good now? Is it good now? Uh, and it's just, nope, the core wasn't good.

That's so interesting. And in your experience, you can tell pretty quickly, okay, wow, this has really taken off. We found something really powerful here.

I think you can tell. I think you could. Yeah. I think it's the obviously good thing. I think you're like, yep, I, this is good. And then it may be good in a way that you give it to users and every single user study that you do or whatever, like just, it falls flat and they don't know how to use it. I think the important thing is actually to not give up on the core idea. And so it's, that's 80%, but then the 20% is like relentlessly iterate until it actually clicks with, with the folks that you're, that you're working for.

Max, is there anything else that you wanted to share with folks? Anything else you want to leave listeners with before? We get to our very exciting lightning round.

When I talk to like young, it's so funny to say that, but like when younger people in Silicon Valley, right now, I think that Silicon Valley is uncharacteristically full of people who don't actually love computers. What I mean by that is like, it's like sort of like, oh, I want to make money. And of course everybody does. I like making money too. I think. There is this idea of this is the last train or like, what are we supposed to like the permanent underclass kind of stuff. And it is so detrimental to thinking about how you want to spend your heartbeats in life. And so I don't know, except like the advice I would give is like, just don't let the rush or the frenzy. Sort of distract you from the things that you actually care about and are passionate in life, I think it'll find a way. And that is not to mean that you shouldn't work hard. I think you're actually way better off if you work incredibly hard by until from like 18 to 25 or whatever, like that's the way to go. Like you should work a lot, right? And then later you can work a little less, but, um, so it's more about the frenetic nature. Like you're so, so worried that if you, if you don't win, if you don't like take that last train out, like you're gonna be screwed. And I just, it doesn't seem right to me. And I think it seems like a very hollow way of leading life. So I would encourage people to, to zoom out and, and not think about it that way. Read history, read computer science history.

Maybe it's easy to hear that and feel like, okay, I'll be all right. I'm just gonna work on things that I'm excited about. And, and then like, okay, but how will I actually have a job in the future? I love the sentiment. Like, don't be so stressed about missing out on things and being in the permanent underclass. Anything there that you think is important for people to do while not being overly stressed and worried about missing that train?

I think— I don't think— I don't, I don't know if it's Chris Rock, but like, there's a comedian that has this joke that is like, it's great to follow your passion, and then he has this pause and like, if it pays. Um, and so obviously there is a little bit to that. I'm not suggesting that, um, you don't worry about this at all. I think it's more that just tune down the amplitude of how much worry there is, and then just sort of realizing that history repeats itself more so than it is completely novel and new. And then of course, yeah, if you tie it to agency and if you're not so stuck in, oh, I need certainty of how the world is going to unfold, you're probably going to be fine. And in the extreme, this is the other side of things, which is Often if I then talk to people who are like, yep, but you know, everything's going to change.

Like, okay, great.

So how is a move that you are going to make really going to shield you from it? And do you want to live in a society where all of this, like, I don't know, like it just seems so insular, that mindset.

With that, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got 5 questions for you. Are you ready?

Uh, sure.

What are 2 or 3 books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

It depends on the person. Uh, I would say, so Code, uh, by, uh, Charles Petzold, which is, uh, the secret language of hardware and software. It basically, it's like, do you know how computers actually work? Uh, it is actually surprising to me how many professionally employed programmers don't know how computers work. Um, that one, the funny thing is it does not have a line of code in it until like chapter 27. Uh, so exceptionally good book. Um, I have a weird one, uh, which is Tools of Conviviality by Ivan Illich. It's sort of the contrast between, like, you look at the history of technology and tools that let users exercise human ingenuity and autonomy. Versus tools that are more at industrial scale that almost, um, uh, have become destructive to, to human autonomy. Uh, and then the last one that I give mostly to executives, uh, that I think are creating a lot of systems, uh, is, uh, seeing like a state, uh, which I think there is a famous Stack Overflow that, uh, sort of, um, popularized this, but it's the idea of, are you actually just designing a system so that you have legibility, but the system, the way that you've created that legibility completely neglects the reality of the system on the ground. And so I think of it as, great, you, you're the executive and you have these status reports and you think you know exactly how your teams work. If you actually spend time with the teams, you would realize that none of that is actually true. Uh, and so I think for, for like executives love creating fake legibility for themselves. Because we don't like noise as humans, right? We want the signal, but there's often less signal in it than you— than one might think.

So favorite recent movie or TV show that you have recently enjoyed?

Uh, I have purposeful terrible taste in movies, which is I want to watch movies that I never think about again after watching them. Um, and I just want to be entertained and I mostly just want to see things that I couldn't remotely experience in real life. So you should not ask me for for movie recommendations. I did like, uh, uh, Project Hail Mary, uh, a lot. I liked the book and I think the adaptation was, was, was really good. I think it also makes me super excited about any kind of future of humanity, which is, I sometimes joke to, uh, our team internally, which is like, okay, if we're really, really good, at some point in a Notion OS will be the thing that empowers like 5 to, to, to 8 people, like explore the galaxy somehow and everything will be organized for them in Notion. I don't know, like it, I like this idea of, of of sort of pushing into space. Uh, TV show? I'm late to this. The Handmaid's Tale. If you replace the concept of God with AI in that TV show, and then you don't actually have to squint that far to replace ice with ice in that TV show right now, it becomes a very, um, uh, I don't know, a heavy show to watch in a good way.

Wow. I had not thought about that. Under His Eye. Was that one of the things? Yeah.

Under His Eye. Whoa.

No. Okay. I'm afraid. I used to watch it. I'm not more afraid to watch it now. Okay. Favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love. I know you put together a list of beautiful products that people buy. What's something recent?

Well, that list that I put together was for products that I think people are should buy, I think, or that I've thought, I actually did the taste emulation. I'm like, oh, I think a lot of people are going to find this useful. Uh, I have weird ones now for you, which is, uh, okay, so there's not a, you can just, it's a product. It's great. It's Ghosty terminal emulator. Like most people use terrible terminals. Don't do that to yourself. Just use Ghosty. Huge fan of the work that, uh, Mitchell is doing. Uh, and then there is a new one for the phone called Moshi, M-O-S-H-I. H-I. That one's not free, but it looks very well done. I'm like currently exploring it. I mostly code on the phone now, um, because I don't have a real job. Uh, there is an open source keyboard called, uh, I don't even know how to say it, Korne, C-O-R-N-E, which is a split keyboard. It looks very weird. The reason I like that one is I am trying to claw back as much agency in my compute life as possible. This one is very open source. If you really wanted to, you could like Download all the schematics, send them off to China, and you have the PCB back and like you can just build it from scratch. Um, and then this one's silly, but, uh, I like tools. I like physical tools. Uh, Civivi pocket knife, uh, which is pretty high quality, maybe more expensive than what most people would spend on a pocket knife, but I think a good pocket knife is, is, is a good tool to have.

These are awesome. Very, very legit products. Okay, we'll link to them all. Uh, 2 more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in work or in life?

It is very hard to remind yourself of that day to day, uh, but I try to— the universe is change and life is what you make it. Um, I think we love to cling to certainty, uh, and there is no certainty, you know, um, I could walk out of this room and it could be the end of my life and like, uh, live in the moment kind of thing. Um, and life is what you make it sort of, I think it's a Marcus Aurelius quote, I believe. But yeah, and then do you really want to know how it's going to end? Like, no spoilers, just like, you know, enjoy the ride.

Final question. You speak German. Do you have a favorite German word?

I do. Tüftler, which is like tinkerer, but it's, to me, it sounds like it has a less, tinkerer can sometimes be a little bit derogatory. And I think with the German equivalent, it's just not, uh, that harsh. And then the other one is, uh, Verbraucher, which is the word for user, but it puts so much more emphasis on using up a thing. Like, as in, if you think about user, it's like you're using it, but using it up, like you've, you've, you've, and so then like you think a lot more about the, um, impermanence slash the wastefulness of products that you might build. Uh, if you use that word.

I love it. I love that you had quick answers to this question. Max, this was amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they wanna ping you about anything? And how can listeners be useful to you?

I am unfortunately on X or Twitter. Um, I, I would like to be less addicted to that thing. Uh, max.dev, um, is, I don't even know if I linked to X, but I'll, I'll put it on there. For your listeners. How can listeners be helpful to me? Go for a walk in whatever city you're in or forest, wherever you want to go. Actually, no, it's, it's better if it's man-made or human-made. And just carefully look at how everything around you is made up by people that are no smarter than you and realize that probably in the span of 6 to 9 months, you can, for most things around you, figure out how to make it from scratch. And therefore, uh, you have much more agency than, than you think. And so just exercise that.

What a beautiful way to end it. Max, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Bye everyone.

Thank you so much for listening.

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