Max Schoenig

**Max Schoening** (00:00:00):
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:00:14):
Do you have a piece of advice for someone that wants to develop this within themselves?

**Max Schoening** (00:00:19):
I tell this to myself, "Hey, do 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't just change things.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:00:29):
If you think about your job a couple years ago, what's most changed?

**Max Schoening** (00:00:32):
The first 10% of every project are now free. It takes almost no effort to now build the first version of a startup.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:00:39):
Taste comes up a lot now.

**Max Schoening** (00:00:40):
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:00:51):
What do you think matters to building a successful product?

**Max Schoening** (00:00:54):
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:01:08):
Give this hot take on universal basic income.

**Max Schoening** (00:01:10):
We already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:01:15):
Today, my guest is Max 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's 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:01:57):
Thank you for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:01:58):
I am so excited to have you here. I feel like there's this quote I think about when I think about you 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."

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:02:12):
I feel like there's 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 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:02:28):
I want to start with just 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 from 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 pushing the whole team and company to live in the future.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:02:52):
And 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?

**Max Schoening** (00:03:00):
Well, first of all, when you said a quote from the Bible, I was very curious where this was going to head.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:03:07):
It's the first time I've quoted the Bible on this podcast, I think.

**Max Schoening** (00:03:10):
I wouldn't take credit for the designers at Notion and the 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 Bret Victor, Stop Drawing Dead Fish, which essentially is ... I mean, the static image of a chat is basically the dead fish here.

**Max Schoening** (00:03:45):
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 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 specifically the chat interfaces to that.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:04:09):
And just to understand this playground concept, essentially, this is an idea of people work within this separate area with AI tools versus their whole Notion code base, making it really easy to get started and try stuff.

**Max Schoening** (00:04:21):
Yes. And that was the first version. It aligned with model capabilities at the time. We don't always use ... maybe at Notion, the main code base is not always the most agent-friendly because iterations and a decade of patterns. And so we optimized for, okay, how can we make this the least scary and most one-shottable so that people would just have to overcome this oh, the fear of the terminal, but then it just becomes chatting. And we recreated a bunch of the patterns and UIs that exist in that playground.

**Max Schoening** (00:04:55):
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 code base to a lesser degree, of course. But like you can see where the trend is headed as model capabilities get better. The amount of work that you can do is obviously going to increase exponentially.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:05:21):
**Max Schoening** (00:06:42):
I feel so uncomfortable predicting the future 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. In a previous life, I led design and product at GitHub and GitHub designers before LLMs contributed to GitHub, I think and the top contributors to GitHub itself, like 10% were designers.

**Max Schoening** (00:07:19):
Right now, processes are breaking. One is we have designers who now mostly code and prototype in code, and then they are asked by other teams 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. That seems like busy work.

**Max Schoening** (00:07:42):
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 maybe issue with vibe coding in the sense of I don't feel like the quality of software has increased all that much in the last 12 months. I think maybe the amount of software has, but it's very, very hard to find software that 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 thinking and designing in the medium that will actually end up being the real thing once engineering takes it over.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:08:25):
There's all this talk about designers should be shipping code, PM 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 stand 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?

**Max Schoening** (00:08:53):
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 a designer knows how to tweak with, pick your favorite, they're all the same, Codex, Claude Code or 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 write traditional software and tweak styles.

**Max Schoening** (00:09:41):
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. And so, 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:10:07):
So it's more the prototyping use cases than we're just going to be shipping more features because we can.

**Max Schoening** (00:10:14):
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 become a master of the material, not a cog in the delivery mechanism for the idea.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:10:33):
That is really interesting. What do you find is key to people being successful in this new world? 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?

**Max Schoening** (00:10:50):
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. The thing that matters is agency, and I don't think agency is very evenly distributed in the world.

**Max Schoening** (00:11:27):
And 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, "Tell me really, what does it mean to be a PM? What does it mean to be a designer? And what's my job as an engineer?" I think that will be much harder and cultivate agency. I think that's the thing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:11:51):
Is there an example of someone using agency ... 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"?

**Max Schoening** (00:12:04):
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:12:13):
And Notinos, by the way, are Notion employees.

**Max Schoening** (00:12:15):
Yes, sorry.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:12:16):
Okay, cool.

**Max Schoening** (00:12:17):
[inaudible 00:12:17]. I would say one example would be someone like Brian Levin, who you should probably have on the podcast at some point.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:12:24):
He was on our sister podcast, How I AI. We'll link to that episode.

**Max Schoening** (00:12:28):
There we go. Yeah. You should cut this one short and have him on. 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 we're not the founders. We're 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 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 in terms of, "Hey, this is what the org needs. I'm going to go out and talk to people and find someone."

**Max Schoening** (00:13:05):
And I think that is a thing that just demonstrates it's out of the day-to-day and it demonstrates the, "No, I want to just affect change. I don't care how it happens." Eric Lou is another one, the fact that he went from 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." And he's like, "Oh, okay. I'm going to work on the skills so that you would hire me in the first five."

**Max Schoening** (00:13:34):
And that led to first spending more time in Figma instead of 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? And so those are just sort of signs of high agency of I'm going to change the role to how I think it should be.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:13:53):
Something you mentioned earlier, which I love, this idea of just rethinking what is this role of engineering, what should it be if we didn't have this 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 ... 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:14:22):
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 people to pay for.

**Max Schoening** (00:14:55):
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?

**Max Schoening** (00:15:13):
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? And I'm like, okay, but where's the engineering part? And the engineering part is the, you make sure that this thing works for a hundred million people, for a billion people.

**Max Schoening** (00:15:31):
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's 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 edges. And yeah, I would say that's something would potentially be sad if we lost it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:15:57):
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 huge. I have huge agency. I'm such an agent 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?

**Max Schoening** (00:16:23):
Partially the reason why I'm in software is the thing that I care most about is the Steve Jobs quote, "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 biggest through line I've found is making.

**Max Schoening** (00:16:49):
I think if you tinker and if you make things, then you are now on this treadmill of just 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. And I think the more you can do that in life, I think actually making things is the innately human toolmaking, creating art and so on.

**Max Schoening** (00:17:18):
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:17:44):
I love this. There's this meme on Twitter, you could just do things. I love this version of it. You could just change things, which is a good segue to something you've been a big, I don't know, advocate of and 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. You've been honest from before the AI revolution.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:18:10):
Talk about just this idea, malleable software, why you think it's so important, what you think people need to be thinking about here.

**Max Schoening** (00:18:15):
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, 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:19:08):
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, the behavior. 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 figure out why 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:19:42):
Now, you brought this up presumably because I think you may have not thought about malleable software too much before AI, but now you're making your own tools maybe for podcast recording, for prepping for shows or, I don't know, whatever. There's a myriad 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 ...

**Max Schoening** (00:20:15):
Everybody has their own individual little tool. And I don't know, 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 obviously are at the forefront. I get to work with Geoffrey Litt every single day now that 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 the security aspects and so on.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:20:45):
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 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. Humans made this thing, like humans made this phone and there are better approaches that other humans ... that you can come up with, other people will come up with.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:21:19):
What I think about as I think about this is there's a video that you pinned to your Twitter profile that we'll link to, which I think is Dieter Rams. Is that who the person is? Okay. He's walking around and he's just criticizing all these designed chairs. Talk about what that video's trying to ... Why you pin that to your profile?

**Max Schoening** (00:21:39):
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."

**Max Schoening** (00:21:57):
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 try to sit on them, you'd be like, "What is this nonsense?"

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:22:33):
What I felt there is just like you see all ... I would think it was Frank Gehry and all these famous designers' pieces put up in a museum. And I think to most people, it'd be like, "Wow, this is so incredible and beautiful." 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 does this bunch of cabinets tie together? Doesn't make any sense."

**Max Schoening** (00:22:59):
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 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 immediately.

**Max Schoening** (00:23:32):
And so then that is obviously a very costly version of malleability if you have to rip out a wall or whatever. But 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:23:53):
It all connects. It all connects. Okay.

**Max Schoening** (00:23:55):
I get it now.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:23:55):
There you go. And we'll link to it. It's really funny to watch. I wish I understood the German.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:24:01):
I want to come back to this idea of malleable software from a perspective of SaaS and the SaaS apocalypse. 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. 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:24:20):
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 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 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:25:09):
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 push at the edges of 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 an animal in the first place. I think with software, Bret Taylor says this too, software is like a garden, you need to tend to it. And the thing you pay for as a service is the maintenance and a bunch of specialists thinking really hard about a problem.

**Max Schoening** (00:25:51):
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 think it should become more malleable. We internally joked, Joanna Stern, 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 ... they have a tutor essentially and can build more things.

**Max Schoening** (00:26:32):
And so I suspect that software will go more back into the '90s of general tools, WordProcessor, spreadsheet, FileMaker Pro, that kind of thing, but those will still be as a service. And then you'll still have specialized tools around security and so on of just people who go the extra mile to really solve a user problem. So I think to some degree the SaaS apocalypse is greatly exaggerated. At the same time, are things going to stay the same? Of course not. Why would they?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:27:00):
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 you described. I have to maintain this thing forever and I have to keep adding features, taking people's feedback.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:27:13):
One of the funniest things that I see again and again, I just had the head of product for Claude Code on the podcast, Cat 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'll just build our own. What are we doing with Slack?" No, they're using Slack like crazy. And I think that's just one example of nobody wants to rebuild a tool like Slack and Workday, I think is another example.

**Max Schoening** (00:27:38):
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 why would I waste my time? I want to do other things with my life. So I don't know, that's not going to go away.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:27:59):
Yeah, I agree. No, people at Anthropic, their time is better spent on building AGI than trying to build better Slack.

**Max Schoening** (00:28:06):
I also love the Slack example because, I mean, there's this graphic of what it takes to deliver a notification in Slack, the decision flow chart. 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:28:26):
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 your job, I don't know, a couple years ago, what's most changed? 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?

**Max Schoening** (00:28:47):
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. The thing has changed. I've never really been great at this, but there's no point in writing a PRD if you can just do the janky version and do the, "Here's the demo of what I think we should build."

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:29:10):
So the first 10%, that's so interesting. That's such an interesting way to frame it. Idea, there's just the thinking through of it, you can go a lot further really quickly.

**Max Schoening** (00:29:19):
Yes. And if you look at a lot of the ... It takes almost no effort to now build the first version of a startup or the first version 0.8. And then I think the last, or 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:29:42):
So I think 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 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 change log or the blog post that a user would read.

**Max Schoening** (00:30:10):
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 sort of builds in iteration into the product much earlier. Waterfall is sort of, why bother?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:30:28):
What do you think is the next leap or shift in how we build? What are you seeing as like, okay, this is now the new thing that's emerging that is going to change how we operate?

**Max Schoening** (00:30:38):
I'm very conflicted on this because on one hand, I do want to ... I believe the never bet against plain text. So a famous forum post at some point. Plain text, markdown. 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. But at the same time, I'm like, are we really going to just be chatting back and forth?

**Max Schoening** (00:31:05):
And so what is the future of Figma, for example, is a really interesting example to me because on one hand, I do see a drop in usage of Figma in some designers at Notion. And then others are like, "Nope, these AI tools are wonderful." It's very hard for me to predict of like, is direct manipulation going away because the agent is doing the direct manipulation?

**Max Schoening** (00:31:29):
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-

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:31:44):
Haiku.

**Max Schoening** (00:31:45):
No. Sorry. You still get a smart one. It's Opus, but Opus Fast or something where you-

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:31:52):
[inaudible 00:31:52]

**Max Schoening** (00:31:52):
... very quickly run up a bill of $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 multitasking the frenetic thing that we currently have going on actually the thing that gives us flow state? Well, no. But if the inference becomes instant, do we get back to direct manipulation? Do you instantly mold the clay that is the code? I don't know. I think it depends on model capabilities, which is do people ... Is there a saturation on intelligence or not?

**Max Schoening** (00:32:41):
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 instead I want a different modality and faster. So I don't know. Those things I'm excited about.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:33:00):
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 UX essentially.

**Max Schoening** (00:33:12):
Yeah. I think in general, I'm actually very curious. The labs operate ... I feel like they operate under the assumption that people will always want the smartest model. 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. We don't have a PhD for everything. And so I think for a lot of knowledge work tasks probably we'll get to good enough. And once you get to good enough, then you can optimize other things.

**Max Schoening** (00:33:49):
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. I think Tyler Cowen says something similar. I don't want to put words in his mouth. And so I'm much more interested in the exoskeleton versus the I have a god and a box in some data center somewhere and we're all sort of twiddling our thumbs.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:34:18):
I have a bunch of questions along these lines. So interesting. You talked about how this 1PM is the highest token spender. This is across all of Notion?

**Max Schoening** (00:34:26):
I would assume this may not include our automatic security vulnerability scanning and bug triaging. It's like when human kicks off [inaudible 00:34:36] jobs. Yeah. Yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:34:36):
What's your policy on token spend? Is it spend as much you want? Here's a limit, everyone. Do you keep track of that report?

**Max Schoening** (00:34:43):
Given that I don't know what the policy is, I think it is unlimited. I mean, you can imagine at some point there would be, but 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:35:10):
In terms of spend, what are the numbers for say Eric or broadly in terms of spend?

**Max Schoening** (00:35:16):
I am the wrong person to ask.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:35:17):
Okay. It's just a lot. And then-

**Max Schoening** (00:35:18):
That is just the ... 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 ... I don't even want to put numbers in, but thousands for sure, but maybe tens of thousands. I don't know. It depends. Yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:35:38):
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 in six months, as you said, we'll figure out if this is ROI positive.

**Max Schoening** (00:35:50):
Yes. I have the luxury to right now not care.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:35:54):
Yeah. And I'm sure someone's looking at it. It's not going to be out of control.

**Max Schoening** (00:35:57):
Correct.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:35:57):
I think there's 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?

**Max Schoening** (00:36:08):
Yeah, I think there's a real danger in making the token spend the metric to boast about, which is the same as when people boast about how many lines of code they've written in a day. And I'm like, "Why do you have so many lines of code?" You have, I don't know.

**Max Schoening** (00:36:30):
The largest software projects in the world have not that many millions of lines of code. Why are we bragging about that? I don't actually care about how many tokens someone spends. Yeah. It's not a metric that's useful.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:36:46):
Yeah. Such a good point. I know Meta got some flak for this recently where they're trying to create a leaderboard of who's doing the most.

**Max Schoening** (00:36:52):
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 the ... I don't know. The term right now is like factory, like the software factory for the work that they do. It is surprising to me how much prodding you need to do to get people out of the way they're used to working.

**Max Schoening** (00:37:23):
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 learn. Yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:37:40):
It's such a good point. You have to over-index to change people's default easy behavior. I'm just going to write these periods the way I've always done it. I've gone in the meetings the same way I've done it. I think that makes a lot of sense.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:37:52):
What have you seen actually work with a Notion to get people to significantly change the way they work?

**Max Schoening** (00:37:57):
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?

**Max Schoening** (00:38:23):
I think on the engineering side, something that Simon last talks about a lot is any manual intervention in code is bad. You probably did something wrong in the verifiability loop and in the software factory. This excludes obviously reviewing code. I am still very much in camp. You should probably review more code than put more effort into reviewing code than you do, 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:39:00):
I think that's a good litmus test for how, I don't know, agent-filled you are.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:39:06):
I want to come back to the tools that you use. You mentioned Figma is 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?

**Max Schoening** (00:39:18):
So I'm actually not positive that Figma is trending down. I think it's more that 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. 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 that kind of thing. So I don't want to perpetuate that with the Figma versus coding.

**Max Schoening** (00:39:53):
I think the terminal is actually surprising, which is it's initially scary for people and you could do so much, but now PMs are slowly ... Once they're in Claude Code or Codex, everything is fine. And I generally encourage them to not use the GUIs. I encourage them to use the TUIs because I just know that over time they're going to be curious and pull at other threads. And one day they wake up and they're like, "Oh, I understand more of the substrate of how computers work."

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:40:21):
That is so interesting. So the designers are using the terminal?

**Max Schoening** (00:40:24):
Yes. Yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:40:25):
That's so cool.

**Max Schoening** (00:40:25):
And then, I don't know, a conductor is another one. They're basically just mostly using developer tools. It's not that different from what developers use.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:40:34):
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**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:41:43):
AI has completely transformed the work of a software engineer. Two years ago versus today is completely different. Almost all your code is now AI. And we've been talking about when will 50% of engineers in the world be writing 100% AI code? It's probably in a year, which is insane how much that job has changed.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:42:04):
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 where things are starting to really change other than engineering?

**Max Schoening** (00:42:15):
Okay. This is maybe a hot take and I actually don't have enough ... It's very likely that the labs are like, "Ha ha, look at this guy." My take, it's very clear at least empirically that models are getting better at coding at some exponential rate. And I don't think that's changing.

**Max Schoening** (00:42:34):
Now, I'm not that impressed with the progress in any other domain. It tends to be ... I don't think they've gotten significantly better at writing. I still very much hate reading AI slop writing. But the thing is software, Andreessen, software is eating the world. Well, if the cost of software and creating software and encoding business practices in code, and I just literally mean the old 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 some sort of ... Yeah, I don't know.

**Max Schoening** (00:43:21):
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. And so I think that's how it's going. And if you look at when the model companies say, "Oh, we've made great progress in this other non-coding domain," I was like, "You just applied coding principles to this domain, which is wonderful, but that's what it's getting better at." And so I just think software is eating the world is going to accelerate.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:43:50):
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 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 it's come, it has certain number of capabilities. OpenCloud's such a good example. It's just like, I will build a skill for myself and now I know how to do this thing.

**Max Schoening** (00:44:18):
Yes. All agents are also, if you look at all the harnesses, whether it's the open source ones or the ones from the model companies, ours as well, they all resemble a coding agent now.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:44:27):
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 saying that in maybe six months, something like that, you think a lot of companies are going to start really looking at the cost here. I know you said you don't like to predict things, but what do you predict is going to start happening?

**Max Schoening** (00:44:48):
I probably spend too much time than I should because I have literally zero impact on any of this as 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 get to decide what the world looks like.

**Max Schoening** (00:45:19):
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. Like you see this with Cursor, you see this with Intercom, Notion is dabbling in it as well. Use dabbling right now, but obviously at some point we might become more serious about it. And then you have, 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. That is the, is it cheaper for me to send this task to a smaller model that is cheaper to run where remove the lab profit margin kind of thing?

**Max Schoening** (00:45:57):
I think that may happen, but it only happens if there isn't a fast sort of like, oh yeah, the gap is now so big. The other one that's interesting is right now, I think we're actually in 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 ... and like 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 a dozen frontier models in the US versus having to always rely on other places in the world to do this, but that's pretty good.

**Max Schoening** (00:46:36):
If that stopped, I would be somewhat worried. And then it's hard to predict 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:46:57):
In the past life, I worked at Heroku and 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 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. Businesses want 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:47:29):
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 as a thing?

**Max Schoening** (00:47:37):
It rings a bell.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:47:39):
Okay. It's like from the open 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 instead of talking about your product and how amazing it is, it's about we'll make you a superhero. It's like Mario getting the little flower and having superpowers now versus look at her incredible product.

**Max Schoening** (00:48:01):
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 to or publicly within your organization or your team, and then a thing roasts your code and tells you how terrible of a developer you are.

**Max Schoening** (00:48:25):
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. And so I think the superhero stuff is definitely true.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:48:39):
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. It's just coming up a lot of just like, wow, this is actually really useful with a lot of different people. It'd be interesting to hear what you think made it so successful. I know it was 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?

**Max Schoening** (00:49:07):
I would like it to be even better. So I'm like my own 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 ... This sounds so weird. I'm surprised how good it is, if that makes sense.

**Max Schoening** (00:49:27):
Notion has always been fairly at the forefront of AI. I think the first Notion Assistant was actually launched before ChatGPT. And so it's not that ... 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 reason why, but 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:50:00):
I think what's good about it is agents 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 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:50:28):
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 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:50:54):
I'm going to come back to my quote from the Bible. I feel like that actually is an answer to this question that 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, wow, okay, this is exactly what we've been meant to be. It's a nice job. Nice job, [inaudible 00:51:19].

**Max Schoening** (00:51:19):
It's the same as malleable software. 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, why would I do this? And so I think, yeah, I'm going to use this quote from the Bible. Thank you.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:51:34):
There it is. It's like shorter. The original quote is for such a time as this and interpretation is this you're like destined to do this thing. It's very Bible every episode. Oh man.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:51:48):
Going back to the way your team operates, because 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 massive product every day, basically. Your job as head of product help people ship consistently, regularly, often ship great stuff.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:52:05):
What has worked in allowing you guys to ship more quickly, if you are, and stuff that you're proud of, stuff that works?

**Max Schoening** (00:52:13):
I think this answer is so specific to companies like internal culture where if you ... I've been in this situation 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 lots of debates about what to ship because it's such a tough act to follow if your first act was just incredible. And I don't know, I would put Notion in the same bucket.

**Max Schoening** (00:52:49):
And so in this case, it's just 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:53:06):
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 on goal. So I think that has worked really well.

**Max Schoening** (00:53:30):
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, 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 struggling with is software quality. And I will also say I don't think the labs are exempt from this.

**Max Schoening** (00:54:07):
I love their tools. It's great. I live in the CLIs, but a regression every two weeks of a thing that was fixed three weeks before, and they still can't render a TUI at, I don't know, a frame rate that's reasonable. And so I think quality is a thing that's missing. 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:54:35):
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 shots on goal, there's always this balance of, okay, I would wait for it to be awesome. I know this is just very hard question to answer, but just what's your communication to the team of, here's where we're going to find that balance?

**Max Schoening** (00:54:55):
And this is a very frustrating thing for people, but actually, I can't show you because I'm using my laptop, but we have 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."

**Max Schoening** (00:55:09):
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. 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 be obviously good.

**Max Schoening** (00:55:29):
One of my core values is incremental correctness, which is iterate, get really, really good at iterating. And so I don't know, it's probably a union of, okay, increase shots on goal. 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 if you include all the agents and so on. And I'm like, yep, we let a bunch of different ideas grow. We look at how they work, but then you do have to do the hard work at consolidating it back into the naked robotic core of that idea. And that's hard because you have to be okay with perhaps then shipping the next thing slightly delayed as you reconcile.

**Max Schoening** (00:56:11):
I don't know. I think we have work to do there at Notion, but as an industry too. Like somebody was joking like, why does Claude, the desktop 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?

**Max Schoening** (00:56:27):
Well, because someone has to sit down and reconcile them and figure out what's actually the core simple thing that should outlive the other evolutionary branches of that same idea.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:56:41):
This idea of knowing when things are obviously good, there's an element of having taste, and this is word taste that comes up a lot now, and this is like what we will need more and more because AI is building a thing now. Our job is taste. Is this great? Is this good?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:56:54):
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"?

**Max Schoening** (00:57:04):
First of all, I don't know if I have great taste. I look at others and I look at how they exercise tastes. 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.

**Max Schoening** (00:57:48):
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 eight billion people. I've 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 how they will react to it.

**Max Schoening** (00:58:11):
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, "Ooh, the one thing that we have left is taste." I'm not so sure. If you think about the loop, it's input idea, how do people react? That seems very back propagation. I don't know. It seems very much how we train models too.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:58:34):
So what I love, basically you build taste by just doing the thing, getting feedback, iterating.

**Max Schoening** (00:58:39):
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:58:52):
It's so funny. That's exactly how agents learn and develop 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 doing the thing, learning, getting feedback, and there's no way to speed around this. This is why often people with the best taste have been doing this for a long time.

**Max Schoening** (00:59:13):
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 and extent. And they're also always tinkering with some new app.

**Max Schoening** (00:59:33):
They're the annoying person that is like, "Hey, what if we tried this in our team?" And I'm like, "Really, this is the 49th time that you suggested in a tool. Do we really need this?" It's exposure to other people's ideas. I think that is the ... It's also really important to surround yourself with tasteful things so that you feel like the thing you are making is lacking.

**Max Schoening** (00:59:53):
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, 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, nothing I'm doing amounts to this. I got to do better.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:00:11):
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 boil it down?

**Max Schoening** (01:00:24):
Yes. Here's the one trick that I'll sell a course next week.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:00:28):
Please, I'll sign up.

**Max Schoening** (01:00:29):
First of all, I think I would actually say that I have contributed to some really great products, not built them because I think I did not use to believe this early on in my career, but 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.

**Max Schoening** (01:00:52):
I don't think that there is a through line out 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 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, the best engineering always wins.

**Max Schoening** (01:01:15):
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. 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 the, what's the tiny core? I don't know, multi-touch on the phone.

**Max Schoening** (01:01:43):
GitHub is probably the poll request. This idea that anyone can suggest something to you and you see it. I do think that at Notion, it's the blocks and the slash commands. Figma, it's the seamless blend between real-time collaboration and not. All the great products have something tiny that is a superpower that's 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:02:16):
And for GitHub, interesting, it was the PR. Are there 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?

**Max Schoening** (01:02:24):
At Heroku, for sure, I think it was the Git Push Heroku master of ... at the time it was really hard to deploy apps. It's sad because people don't remember Heroku. I have to explain it as it's the Vercel. It's the first Vercel.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:02:41):
Did it get bought by Salesforce? Who bought ...

**Max Schoening** (01:02:43):
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:02:45):
Okay.

**Max Schoening** (01:02:46):
Yeah. Git Push Heroku master was just 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 flows from there.

**Max Schoening** (01:02:57):
Dropbox is a great one. 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've tried to increase the surface area. And I kept thinking, "No, no, no, push it back. I don't want more. This is the only job I want from you. And so I think the tiny core is the thing that makes great products.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:03:34):
And Snapchat, obviously, just the disappearing photo concept is so interesting. I heard you've also talk about just being first doesn't matter that much either.

**Max Schoening** (01:03:44):
You have to be right, not first. I don't know. I mean, there are elements of, if you talk about network effects and perhaps now with training models, it doesn't make sense if you have a headstart, but I think it's overrated. I don't know.

**Max Schoening** (01:04:02):
My favorite example is like Bluetooth headphones were crappy and then you have the AirPods and like, oh, they connect and so on. And they weren't the first. I don't know. They weren't the first MP3 player. They weren't the first. You just got to do it right. I don't think being first is all that useful.

**Max Schoening** (01:04:17):
I think we're currently, because it's so hard to keep people's attention, we're like, "Oh, how do I go viral? How do I do the Cluely thing?" And I'm like, "Yep, durability matters." Think of like, how would you build Ikea like a generational company that is not concerning itself with whatever is trending on Twitter today?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:04:39):
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.

**Max Schoening** (01:04:48):
The thing that I find the most impressive about ... I don't know who to give credit, but 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 I think that's actually really cool.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:05:07):
I know you're also a believer in jobs to be done as a way of thinking about product, which it's been a long time controversial topic on this podcast mostly because of Sriram who's very anti-jobs to be done. What's your framing of how you find this framework useful in thinking about product?

**Max Schoening** (01:05:22):
I bet that if I 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?

**Max Schoening** (01:05:48):
And then the other thing that I find happens very frequently in larger organizations is that people 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 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 not get lost in the sauce of making the thing. That's why I like the framework. It's a good reminder of like, no, no, no, no.

**Max Schoening** (01:06:23):
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, I hadn't thought about that." And so that's how I use it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:06:36):
Is there an example of this from some of the products you worked on just to make this real for people other than Milkshake example, obviously?

**Max Schoening** (01:06:41):
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 deteriorate immediately because they want to sound clever and marketing speak comes out of their mouth. And I'm like, "Wait, that's not how you would explain it to a friend."

**Max Schoening** (01:07:02):
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 that zoom out? So I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I don't want to pick on individual recent things though.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:07:29):
Okay. As we close out this conversation, there's something I want to get here. You have this hot take on universal basic income. It's completely out of the blue, but I think it's interesting to hear. There's this idea that with AI emerging, we may not need to work. We'll just get some UBI and enjoy our life and you have this hot take that maybe we already have universal basic income. What's going on?

**Max Schoening** (01:07:51):
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. My take is that we already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work. 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.

**Max Schoening** (01:08:15):
And we've built this hierarchy and 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.

**Max Schoening** (01:08:35):
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 of why we absolutely must be in that loop. And so I think that's my hot take.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:08:46):
People have always joked, we get paid so much just to sit in front of a computer and put the right sorts of words and letters 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 taking over. And so your take there is just like, this is a pretty sweet gig we already got. Enjoy this UBI.

**Max Schoening** (01:09:06):
Yes. I think all things considered, how lucky are we? 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. Yeah.

**Max Schoening** (01:09:19):
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:09:27):
Say we have AGI, you don't have to work, you could just do anything. What would you be spending your time doing?

**Max Schoening** (01:09:31):
I actually ask this to almost everybody that we hire. I 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.

**Max Schoening** (01:10:04):
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. I'm very sad that Lee Sedol, after losing against, I think ... I don't know if it's AlphaGo or Zero, but one of the two. It seems like he gave up on Go. And I'm like, who cares if some machine is better at it? It's the human stuff. Just keep going at it. And so I think I would do the same thing.

**Max Schoening** (01:10:32):
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. Just I would do the same thing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:10:54):
Amazing. Okay. I'm going to take us to two recurring corners of the podcast to see what we find there. 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:11:07):
Is there something you have a contrarian opinion about, something you believe that a lot of people don't?

**Max Schoening** (01:11:11):
It's becoming so hard to have contrarian views because I think the algorithms just try and get contrarian views out of people with an insane force. Depending on the era, 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. 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.

**Max Schoening** (01:11:50):
Notion could have the ambition to say, "We are going to have eight 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 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.

**Max Schoening** (01:12:18):
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 going back to comfy, air-conditioned job kind of thing is 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:12:44):
The TPPN guys have a really good way of describing this exact concept, which is they had like, I don't know, 8,000 listeners and 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, if we have millions of people listening to this thing, we've done something wrong. This is specifically designed for the people in power of tech to influence them, to teach them what's going on, and it worked out. It worked out great for them. So it's exactly what you're describing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:13:16):
Okay, I'm going to take us now to fail corner. So people like you come on this podcast, they're like, "Okay, I'll get all these wonderful things." He's done and he's just killing it all the time. Everything's working. In reality, I'm sure not everything has worked in the course of your career. What's one example where things didn't work out and what did you learn from that experience?

**Max Schoening** (01:13:35):
Oh my God, it's such a weird ... I don't think about win versus fail. I feel like every day I fail a lot. What are big ones that annoy me?

**Max Schoening** (01:13:46):
Culturally, I think 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 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.

**Max Schoening** (01:14:14):
On product, oh my God, I mean GitHub Actions and they're the ... I don't know, it's 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 started a competitor to Notion in 2014 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 worries."

**Max Schoening** (01:14:55):
And we spent so much time polishing the editing experience. We did markdown folding, all the stuff that you now have in Obsidian, we 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. 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 just working diligently on the wrong thing for way too long, huge fail.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:15:25):
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. I think that's a really interesting takeaway.

**Max Schoening** (01:15:39):
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, nope, the core wasn't good.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:15:48):
That's interesting. And in your experience, you can tell pretty quickly, "Okay. Wow. This has really taken off. We found something really powerful here."

**Max Schoening** (01:15:55):
I think you can tell. 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, just it falls flat and they don't know how to use it.

**Max Schoening** (01:16:09):
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 relentlessly iterate until it actually clicks with the folks that you're working for.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:16:22):
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?

**Max Schoening** (01:16:31):
When I talk to young ... It's so funny to say that, but 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 it's like, "Oh, I want to make money." And of course everybody does. I like making money too.

**Max Schoening** (01:16:54):
I think there's this idea of this is the last train or what do we pose, 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 ... The advice I would give is just don't let the rush or the frenzy 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.

**Max Schoening** (01:17:28):
I think you're actually way better off if you work incredibly hard from 18 to 25 or whatever. That's the way to go. You should work a lot and then later, you can work a little less. So it's more about the frenetic nature. You're so worried that if you don't win, if you don't take that last train out, you're going to be screwed. And 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:18:01):
It's easy to hear that and feel like, "Okay, I'll be all right. I'm just going to work on things that I'm excited about." And then like, "Okay, but how will I actually have a job in the future?" I love the sentiment. Don't be so stressed about missing out on things and being in the permanent underclass.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:18:17):
Anything there that you think is important for people to do while not being overly stressed and worried about missing that train?

**Max Schoening** (01:18:25):
I don't know if it's Chris Rock, but 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 is like, "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 realizing that history repeats itself more so than it is completely novel and new.

**Max Schoening** (01:18:52):
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 everything's going to change." I'm 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 ..." I don't know, it just seems so insular, that mindset.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:19:22):
With that, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

**Max Schoening** (01:19:29):
Sure.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:19:30):
What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

**Max Schoening** (01:19:35):
It 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 chapter 27, so exceptionally good book.

**Max Schoening** (01:20:05):
I have a weird one, which is Tools of Conviviality by Ivan Illich. It's the contrast between, 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.

**Max Schoening** (01:20:31):
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, which I think there is a famous stack overflow that popularized this, but it's the idea of, are you actually just designing a system so that you have legibility, but the way that you've created that legibility completely neglects the reality of the system on the ground.

**Max Schoening** (01:21:00):
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 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:21:24):
Favorite recent movie or TV show that you have recently enjoyed?

**Max Schoening** (01:21:28):
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.

**Max Schoening** (01:21:45):
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 and Notion OS will be the thing that empowers five to eight people explore the galaxy somehow and everything will be organized for them in Notion. I don't know. I like this idea of pushing into space.

**Max Schoening** (01:22:16):
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 eyes with ICE in that TV show right now, it becomes a very, I don't know, the heavy show to watch in a good way.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:22:40):
Wow, I had not thought about that. Under His Eye, was that one of the things?

**Max Schoening** (01:22:45):
Yes. Under his AI.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:22:47):
Whoa. No. Okay. I'm not afraid. I used to watch it and I'm 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 product that people buy. What's something recent?

**Max Schoening** (01:23:05):
Well, that list that I put together was for products that I think people should buy 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 ...

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:23:19):
Yes.

**Max Schoening** (01:23:21):
Okay. So it's a product. It's great. It's Ghostty Terminal Emulator. Most people use terrible terminals. Don't do that to yourself. Just use Ghostty. 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.

**Max Schoening** (01:23:47):
There is an open source keyboard called ... I don't even know how to say it. Corne, C-O-R-N-E, which is a split keyboard. It looks very weird. The reason I like that one is I'm 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 download all the schematics, send them off to China and you have the PCV back and you can just build it from scratch.

**Max Schoening** (01:24:11):
And then this one's silly, but I like tools. I like physical tools. CIVIVI pocket knife, 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 a good tool to have.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:24:26):
These are awesome. Very, very legit products. Okay. We'll link to them all. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in work or in life?

**Max Schoening** (01:24:35):
It 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.

**Max Schoening** (01:24:48):
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. And then, do you really want to know how it's going to end? No spoilers, just enjoy the ride.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:25:07):
Final question. You speak German. Do you have a favorite German word?

**Max Schoening** (01:25:10):
I do. [foreign language 01:25:13], which is like tinker, 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 [foreign language 01:25:32], which is the word for user, but it puts so much more emphasize on using up a thing.

**Max Schoening** (01:25:40):
As in, if you think about user, it's like you're using it, but using it up. And so then you think a lot more about the impermanence/the wastefulness of products that you might build if you use that word.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:25:55):
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 want to ping you about anything? And how can listeners be useful to you?

**Max Schoening** (01:26:07):
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.

**Max Schoening** (01:26:20):
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 better if it's manmade 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:26:53):
What a beautiful way to end it. Max, thank you so much for being here.

**Max Schoening** (01:26:56):
Thank you for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:26:58):
Bye everyone.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:26:59):
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.