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Max Schoening

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105
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2026-05-03
most recent
2026-05-03
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1
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podcast

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  1. “I wouldn't take credit for the designers at Notion and PMs at Notion Now code. I think that would have 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 there's this great talk by Brett Victor Stop Drawing Dead Fish. Which essentially is, I mean, the static image of a chat is basically the dead fish here. You have to feel the AI to some degree. And so two designers myself just put together the worst possible playground you could think of a small code base 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.”

    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

  2. “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.”

    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

  3. “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.”

    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

  4. “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.”

    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

  5. “Or 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.”

    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