YouSaid · the spoken record

Max Schoening

lines on the record: 105
first: 2026-05-03
most recent: 2026-05-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I am unfortunately on X or Twitter. I would like to be less addicted to that thing. Max.dev is, I don't even know if I link to X, but 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. Forest wherever you want to go. Actually, no, 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 six to nine months, you can, for most things around you, figure out how to make it from scratch. And therefore, you have much more agency than you think. And so just exercise that.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. Tuftla, which is like tinkerer. But to me, it sounds like it has a less tinker can sometimes be a little bit derogatory. And I think with the German equivalent, it's just not that harsh. And then the other one is Fabrauke, 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 and so then you think a lot more about the impermanence slash the wastefulness of products that you might build if you use that word.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is very hard to remind yourself of that day to day, but I try to, the universe has changed, and life is what you make it. I think we love to cling to certainty, and there is no certainty. I could walk out of this room and could be the end of my life and live in the moment kind of thing. And life is what you make as sort of, I think it's a Marcus Aurelius quote, I believe. 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.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is an open source keyboard called, I don't even know how to say it, Corney 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. This one's silly, but I like tools, I like physical tools. Maybe more expensive than what most people would spend on a pocket knife, but I think a good pocket knife is a good tool to have.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that list that I put together was for products that I think people should buy, I think, or that I thought I actually did the taste emulation. I'm like, oh, I think a lot of people are going to find this useful. I have weird ones now for you, which is. Okay, so there's not a proper, 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 Mitchell is doing. And then there is a new one for the phone called Moshi, M-O-S-H-I. That one's not free, but it looks very well done. I'm currently exploring it. I mostly code on the phone now because I don't have a real job.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, I don't know, a heavy show to watch in a good way.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have purposeful, terrible taste in movies, which is I want to watch movies that I never think about again after watching them. 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 movie recommendations. I did like Project Hail Mary a lot. I liked the book and I think the adaptation was really good. I think it also makes me super excited about any kind of future of humanity, which is I sometimes joke to our teams 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 five to eight people, like explore the galaxy somehow and everything will be organized for them in Notion. I don't know. I like this idea of sort of pushing into space. TV show.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I think there is a famous stack overflow that sort of 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'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. And so I think for 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 one might think.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on the person. I would say so code By Charles Petzold, which is the secret language of hardware and software. It basically is like, do you know how computers actually work? It is actually surprising to me how many professionally employed programmers don't know how computers work. That one, the funny thing is it does not have a line of code in it until like chapter 27. So exceptionally good book. Weird one, 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 have become destructive to human autonomy. And then the last one that I give mostly to executives that I think are creating a lot of systems is seeing like a state.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if it's Chris Rock, but there's a comedian that has this joke that is great to follow your passion. And then he has this pause. And if it pays. And so obviously there is a little bit to that. I'm not suggesting that 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...”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like that's the way to go, like, you should work a lot, right? And then later, you can work a little less, but it's more about the frenetic nature. Like, you're so worried that if you don't win, if you don't take that last train out, like you're going to 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 zoom out and not think about it that way. Read history, read computer science history, maybe.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I talk to young, it's so funny to say that, but 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 and life. And so I don't know except 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 from like 18 to 25 or whatever.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can tell. I think you could, yeah, I think it's the obviously good thing. I think you're like, yep, 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 that's 80%. But then the 20% is like relentlessly iterate until it actually clicks with the folks that you're working for.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? And it's just open up the core wasn't good.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 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. 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 all blocks. You couldn't even select between two blocks, but it turns out it didn't matter. So I think that is just working diligently on the wrong thing for way too long, huge fail.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Are big ones that annoy me? Culturally, I think sort of in running teams, I think a mistake that I made is at some point because hiring, now it's easy, but at the time hiring designers that can code was quite challenging. And so then if you loosen that requirement, 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. So I think that's one on organizational side. On product, oh my God, I mean, GitHub actions and the, I don't know, like very technical, but the fact that we also thought we didn't need good package management for the actions. 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 had a started a competitor to Notion in 2014.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because 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. Okay. I will have to caveat this with 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 job kind of thing, it's like, great, just work with and for the top of the class is sometimes a winning thing and just build a really, really good product for them, which by definition means you're going to exclude others.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's becoming so hard to have contrarian views because I think the algorithms just try and get contrarian views out of people sort of at like insane with an insane force. Depending on the era, like this may not be contrarian, but I think that inclusivity isn't always all that great. I think I very much believe in small group theory. Like, I think the world is run by group chats of eight people or fewer. 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 at 500 million.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After losing against, I think I don't know if it was alpha go 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 it's the human stuff. Keep going at it. And so I think I would do the same thing. I would tinker. I would build stuff. 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. But yeah, I don't know, something like that. I would do the same thing.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, ask this to almost everybody that we hire. Would be doing the exact same thing. I would probably spend less time 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 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 it would have playing chess and go. I'm very sad that Lisa Odel”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, 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. I don't know, like, yeah, just to be clear, not everybody has that luck, but I think that the folks that I find discussing this the most are the ones that are in the bucket of luck.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so please extend me some grace here because I both mean it as a joke and maybe somewhat real, just depends on which altitude of human nature you look at it. And I don't exclude my job from it. But if you really look 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. 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. Will it look the same? I don't know. But yeah, I don't know. We are so inventive and we come up with new reasons why we absolutely must be in that loop. And so I think that's my hard take.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 future. 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 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. Yeah, I don't know. I don't want to pick on individual recent things.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be that user for a second. Would you even buy the thing that you just made? And the answer often is like, oh, I hadn't thought about that, right? And so that's how I use it.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I bet that if I reread all of the Clayton Christians and 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 from a I'm a user. Is this a good experience? And they're more like I'm a 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 software. Of making the thing. That's why I like the framework. It's a good reminder. The user hires you for a thing.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that I find the most impressive about Don't know who to give credit, but like obviously you give the CEO a bunch of credit, but like Ario is that he wasn't, oh, he wasn't just lucky ones at OpenAI. He did the same thing twice and it was successful twice. And I think that's actually really cool.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to be right, not first. I don't know. Like, I think, I mean, there are probably elements of, like, if you talk about network effects and like perhaps now with 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 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 viral, right? How do I do the cluly thing? And I'm like, yep, I don't, durability matters, right? Like think of how would you build IKEA, like a generational company that is not concerning itself with whatever is trending on Twitter today.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dropbox is a great one, right? Like, I think Dropbox is 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 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, push it back. I don't want more. This is the only job I want from you, right? And so I think the tiny core is the thing that makes great products.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Git Push Rokomaster 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.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At Heroku for sure, I think it was the Git push Heroku Master of like 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. I have to explain it as it's the versatile. It's the first Versala.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the great products have something tiny that is a superpower, like that's sort of like versus, oh, yeah, if we have this suite of things and we add one more thing, it'll finally be useful. That never works.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 and then the market agreed. But I think it's what's the tiny core? I don't know, multi-touch on the phone GitHub is probably the pull request, right? Like this idea that anyone can suggest something to you and sort of you see it. I do think that at Notion it's the blocks and like the slash commands like Figma, it's sort of the seamless blend between real-time collaboration and not.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I think 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 a, I don't know, not important thing. And now I'm like, oh, it's the only thing. I don't think that there is a through line. One of the things that I've contributed to where I can pinpoint it, 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.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that you feel like the thing you're making is lacking. Like one of the things we do at Notion is all of our conference rooms are named after famous objects like the first typewriter, the Macintosh of Porsche 9-11, 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. I got to do better.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 stand. 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 in a tool. Do we really need this? exposure to other people's ideas. I think that is the, it's also really important to surround yourself with tasteful things.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at Japan, like Japanese craftspeople, right? They've just been, I don't know, painting the bowl for however long. And it just takes a while. And so I think the more reps, the increase the frequency of reps. That's what I would say.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How they will react to it. 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, the one thing that we have left is taste. I'm not so sure. Like if you think about the loop, input idea, how do people react? That seems very propagation. I don't know. Like it seems very much how we train models too.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I don't know if I have great taste. 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? 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 have never built consumer software. I would probably be terrible at it, but you decide what your in-group is. And then how good do you get at emulating?”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, we let a bunch 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 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 at Notion. As an industry too, like somebody was joking, like, why does Claude, the desktop app have three tabs of co-work code? And I don't know what the first chat or whatever. Why do we have six 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 of that same idea.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a very frustrating thing for people, but I actually can't show you because I'm using my laptop, but we have an 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 then 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 a 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 six automation primitives inside of Notion, right? Like if you include all the agents and so on. And I'm like,”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Struggling with is software quality. And I will also say I don't think the labs are exempt from this. I love their tools. It's great. Like I live in the CLIs, but a regression like every two weeks of a thing that was fixed like three weeks before. And they still can't render a TUE at, I don't know, a frame rate that's reasonable. And so I think, yeah, quality is a thing that's missing. Like this Apple-esque machined unibody aluminum kind of engineering. I would like us to figure out how to get back to that as an industry.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's obviously a balance. 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 we go back to, it's easier to experiment now, you're increasing the shots of goal on goal, right? So I think that has worked really well. Just shipping feature after feature doesn't we have been a little bit on a roll in terms of shipping new functionality, maybe in the last like, I don't know, six 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. 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”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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? And our users are going to be upset.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the same as Malleable software, right? Like, 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, yeah, I'm going to use this quote from the Bible. Thank you.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need context to operate in. Agents don't really like walls of like, oh, I have to go through this narrow orifice to talk to this other data repository. And 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 of Notion as an operating system more so. And 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. And so I think our enterprise search is sort of like this thing where we do a lot of automatic permission handling and so on that others don't. I don't know. You have to care.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would like it to be even better. So I'm like, on first critic, I guess I've spent most of my day thinking about where it falls short, not how great it is. But I agree with you that I'm actually surprised at how, it sounds so weird. I'm surprised how good it is, if that makes sense. 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 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. 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 I'm surprised how fast that happened for Notion. And I'll take almost no credit in this. I think what's good about it is age.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's actually a thing that the coding companies had to learn when they tried to move to like, why do 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 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 cloud code and codecs does is you're coding and then you publish the work of you plus claud and you get bragging rights of how good of a developer you are, right? And so I think the superhero stuff is definitely true.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other places in the world to do this, but that's sort of pretty good if that shoe 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 Cloud Wars, which is some point layers commoditize. businesses are not going to want to lock in into one single provider. I don't know. In the 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 replace your ops team. And Kubernetes, 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 choice. And so I don't know. It's really hard to predict because it depends.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, three competent labs that are all sort of duking it out at the end, who knows, maybe Meta now. So four, maybe we can make it six at some point. I think I would love a world where we have like a dozen sort of frontier models in the US versus having to always rely on.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I probably spend too much time than I should because I have literally zero impact on any of this as 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.”
2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source