Speaker

Max Schoening

Max Schoening

Max Schoening is Head of Product at Notion. He has a design and product background spanning Google (PM), Heroku (design lead), and GitHub (head of design and product under Nat Friedman). He is also a twice-failed founder, having built a Notion-like tool in 2014 that was overtaken when Notion pivoted to the same idea simultaneously.

Key ideas

  • Malleable software: software that works closer to the interests of the people using it than the interests of the corporation that made it.
  • Agency as the scarce resource: with AI providing skill on demand, the bottleneck shifts to the person who knows what they want and acts decisively. “Do you drive Notion like it’s stolen?”
  • The first 10% is free: the cost of building the first version of almost anything has collapsed; the strategic challenge is now taste and judgment about what to build, not the ability to build it.
  • The tiny core superpower: every great product has one interaction so unexpectedly good it defines the product’s identity (GitHub PR, Heroku git push, Notion slash command, Figma live cursors, Dropbox menu bar icon).
  • Taste as a virtual machine: given an idea, you can predict whether a specific in-group will like it. Taste is calibrated domain prediction, not universal aesthetic preference.

Wiki appearances