Max Schoening, head of product at Notion, has spent his career blurring the lines between design, engineering, and product management — long before AI made it trendy. He’s now one of the most thoughtful voices on how AI is reshaping how we build software, what skills matter, and why agency — the belief that you can change things — is becoming the defining trait for thriving in this new era.
How AI is changing product building at Notion
Designers and PMs now prototype in code, not just Figma. When Max joined Notion, he and two designers built a small, LLM-friendly playground codebase to prototype chat interfaces, because static Figma designs couldn’t capture how AI actually feels. That playground lowered the barrier to entry, and now designers and PMs at Notion regularly contribute to the production codebase — not as a goal in itself, but because working in the real medium forces deeper understanding of the material.
The first 10% of every project is now free. It takes almost no effort to build a version 0.8 of a product or startup. The last 10% — making it reliable, polished, and scalable for millions — is still 90% of the work. This means teams can explore many more paths cheaply before committing.
Demos over memos. The old pattern of writing long PRDs is giving way to “give me something to react to.” Teams ship rough prototypes faster, which builds iteration into the process much earlier.
Token spend is unlimited at Notion — for now. Max doesn’t track individual token usage and believes it’s the wrong thing to optimize for during an exploration phase. He predicts that in 6–12 months, companies will start having uncomfortable ROI conversations about AI spending.
Why agency matters more than skills
Agency is the key differentiator. Max believes the people who will thrive are those who understand the world around them is malleable — not those who cling to rigid job descriptions. Before AI, it was easy to say “I can’t do that” because of a skill gap. Now that skills are at your fingertips via AI, what separates people is whether they believe they can and should change things.
Agency is cultivated by making things. Max’s advice: just start building. Tinker with physical objects, cook meals, build side projects. The act of making awakens you to the realization that you can change your environment. People with high agency don’t wait for permission — they reshape their roles around what needs to happen.
Examples at Notion: Brian Leven recruits for the org even though it’s not his job. Eric Lou asked Max if he’d hire him as a first-five employee at a startup, got told “not as a PM,” and systematically rebuilt his skills — from writing strategy docs, to Figma, to building prototypes in code.
Malleable software
Software should serve the user, not just the maker. Max has long advocated for “malleable software” — the idea that users should be able to reshape their tools the way they’d rearrange their living room. Today’s apps are locked boxes: UI, data, and behavior all glued together. You can’t tweak one layer without rebuilding everything.
AI is making malleable software more accessible. People are building their own tools for podcast prep, personal workflows, and more. But Max argues this has to be built on top of a platform that encourages communal use — otherwise everyone is maintaining their own fragile, individual stack.
The SaaS apocalypse is exaggerated. Max doesn’t believe everyone will rebuild their own Salesforce or Slack. People pay for software-as-a-service because they don’t want to maintain a full stack. The value is in specialists tending the garden. What will change is that tools become more general-purpose (closer to the ’90s model of word processors and spreadsheets) while still being delivered as a service.
What makes great products
Every great product has one tiny core superpower. Max’s biggest pitfall warning: don’t fall into the loop of “if we just add one more feature, it’ll finally be great.” That never works. Instead, identify the one thing that is exceptionally good and build everything around it.
iPhone: multi-touch
GitHub: the pull request
Heroku:git push heroku master — one line from laptop to URL
Dropbox: the menu bar icon that just synced perfectly
Notion: blocks and slash commands
Snapchat: disappearing photos
Being first doesn’t matter; being right does. AirPods weren’t the first Bluetooth headphones. Anthropic started after OpenAI with less funding and is now dominating. Durability and execution beat novelty.
“Obviously good” as the quality bar. Max’s team uses a sticker that says “let’s just make obviously good stuff.” The bar: when you saw the first iPhone or ChatGPT, no one argued whether it was good. That’s the standard. But getting there requires relentless iteration — shipping many shots on goal, then doing the hard work of consolidating back to the core idea.
Building taste
Taste is a virtual machine in your head. It’s the ability to predict whether a specific in-group will like an idea. You build it through reps — shipping things, getting feedback, iterating — much like training a model through backpropagation.
Designers with high taste have side projects and tinker constantly. They’re always trying new apps and suggesting tools. They surround themselves with tasteful things (at Notion, conference rooms are named after iconic objects like the first typewriter and Porsche 911) so they feel the gap between what exists and what they’re making.
There’s no speedrun. Taste takes time. Japanese craftspeople painting bowls for decades is the analogy. The only shortcut is increasing the frequency of reps.
What roles AI will transform next
Software eating the world is accelerating, not shifting domains. Max’s hot take: models are getting exponentially better at coding but haven’t made comparable leaps in writing or other domains. What’s actually happening is that coding principles are being applied to other fields. So software engineering isn’t “moving into” marketing or HR — instead, people in those roles are now able to encode business practices in code themselves without depending on engineering teams.
All agents are coding agents. Every agent harness — open-source or from model companies — resembles a coding agent. OpenClaw builds its own skills. The future is agents that construct the tools they need.
What we risk losing as roles merge
Specialists and craft. As everyone can now build usable interfaces from design systems, the risk is losing delight and craft on the design side. As AI generates more code, the risk is losing the engineering discipline that makes things reliable at scale — the “Apple-esque machined unibody aluminum” quality. Max uses a hardware metaphor: 3D-printed prototypes with layer signs are obviously not final products. The long road to manufacturing for 100 million people is where real engineering lives, and that mindset is missing from current software discourse.
Max’s hot takes
Universal basic income already exists — it’s knowledge work. We already live in a society where people sit in air-conditioned rooms, type words into computers, and get paid far more than survival requires. We’ve constructed elaborate hierarchies of “necessary” jobs. Max doesn’t think this goes away — humans will invent new reasons to insert themselves into agent loops.
Inclusivity isn’t always good. Max believes in small group theory — the world is run by group chats of eight or fewer. Sometimes it’s better to build exclusively for the top of the class at something rather than trying to serve everyone. Notion could aim for 8 billion users, but doing so would alienate the power users who love it most.
On AGI and the future: If AGI meant he didn’t have to work, Max would do exactly what he does now — just with fewer meetings. He codes for the intellectual challenge, like playing chess or Go. He’d spend more time making the world more malleable, and is excited about possibilities like robotics that he hasn’t yet explored.
Advice for young people in Silicon Valley
Don’t let frenzy distract you from what you care about. Silicon Valley is uncharacteristically full of people who don’t actually love computers — they just want to catch the last train. This creates a hollow, anxious way of living. Work hard (especially from 18–25), but tie your work to genuine passion and agency rather than fear of missing out.
History repeats itself. Read computer science history. The feeling that “everything is about to change and I’ll be left behind” is not new. Tune down the amplitude of worry.
Failures and lessons
Polishing the wrong core. In 2014, Max started a competitor to Notion and spent enormous effort perfecting the markdown editing experience — folding, shortcuts, everything Obsidian later popularized. Notion’s editor at the time was terrible by comparison. But it didn’t matter. Notion won on blocks and collaboration, not editing. The lesson: no amount of feature additions fixes a weak core.
Hiring looseness is a slippery slope. When hiring designers who could code was hard, Max loosened the requirement. He didn’t anticipate how quickly that became a pattern. He’d rather have fewer, more polymathic designers.
GitHub Actions and package management. The team underestimated the need for good package management in GitHub Actions — a technical decision Max thinks the world would be better off if they’d gotten right.
Lightning round
Books he recommends:Code by Charles Petzold (how computers actually work — no code until chapter 27), Tools of Conviviality by Ivan Illich (tools that empower human ingenuity vs. industrial-scale tools that destroy autonomy), Seeing Like a State (how executives create fake legibility through status reports that don’t reflect ground truth).
Favorite recent movie:Project Hail Mary — both book and adaptation. Also The Handmaid’s Tale, which becomes even more unsettling if you replace “God” with “AI.”
Favorite recent products: Ghostty terminal emulator (most terminals are terrible; this one isn’t), Moshi (a coding app for the phone), Corne split open-source keyboard (you can download the schematics and manufacture it yourself), and a Civivi pocket knife.
Life motto: “The universe is change and life is what you make it” — attributed to Marcus Aurelius. Live in the moment; don’t cling to certainty.
Favorite German words:Tüfteln (to tinker, but warmer and less derogatory than the English equivalent) and Verbraucher (user/consumer — literally “one who uses up,” which makes you think about the wastefulness of the products you build).
