Max Schoening
Head of Product, Notion. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveengineerfounderoperatorinvestor@mschoening ↗LinkedIn ↗max.dev ↗
Max Schoening is the Head of Product at Notion, focusing on AI-first product development and malleable software. He previously founded CloudApp and held leadership roles at GitHub and Heroku.
1shows
1appearances
40statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Max Schoening said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Schoening: The SaaSpocalypse is greatly exaggerated
“So I think to some degree, the SaaSpocalypse is greatly exaggerated.”
Schoening: Human intervention in writing code should feel like a bug
“At least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug.”
Schoening: Software Quality Has Not Improved In Last 12 Months
“I do have a general sort of 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 the, maybe the amount of software has, but it's very, very hard to find software that…”
Schoening: Understanding AI Agent Loops Requires Building in Code
“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.”
Schoening: Workers with agency will thrive while rigid role adherents struggle
“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 what, tell me really, what does it mean to be a PM? What does it mean to be a designer? And like, what's my job as an engi…”
Schoening: True software engineering means scaling reliably, not shipping AI prototypes
“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? I'm like, okay, but where's the engineering part? And the engineering part is the,…”
Schoening: Software will shift back toward 1990s-style general tools as a service
“I suspect that software will go more back into the nineties of general tools, word processor, 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”
Schoening: AI for Knowledge Work Will Reach 'Good Enough' Intelligence
“I think for a lot of knowledge work tasks, probably sometime we'll get to good enough. And once you get to good enough, then you can optimize other things. Like they run locally, they're cheaper, they're faster.”
Schoening: AI improves exponentially at code, but shows little writing progress
“My take, it's very clear, at least empirically that models are getting better at coding at some exponential rate, right? And I don't think that's changing. Now I'm not that impressed with the progress in any other domain. It tends to be like, I don't think the…”
Schoening: Kubernetes beat Heroku because enterprise buyers prioritize vendor choice over UX
“In my past life I worked at Heroku and like Kubernetes was much more successful than Heroku. Even though I think from a user experience perspective, it was much worse, but the Delta was Heroku was saying, Hey, we're going to replace your ops team. And Kubernet…”
Schoening: Truly great products succeed on one exceptionally good tiny core
“If I really look at the truly great products, they all have one tiny core that is so exceptionally good.”
Schoening: Dario Amodei proved his OpenAI success wasn't luck at Anthropic
“Dario is that she wasn't, oh, he wasn't just lucky once at OpenAI. He did the same thing twice and it was successful twice.”
Schoening: Modern knowledge work effectively functions as universal basic income
“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 about at what do we actually need to live and like to be content, it is a lot less than we've built this hierarchy. A…”
Schoening: The world is actually run by exclusive group chats of eight
“Inclusivity isn't always all that great. I think I very much believe in small group theory. Like I think the world is run by group chats of eight people or fewer. And so sometimes it's great to be exclusive.”
Schoening: AI role merging risks eliminating deep tech specialists
“I think if we're not careful, we will lose specialists.”
Max Schoening: Writing PRDs is pointless when AI enables rough demos
“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. I, the thing is, has changed. I've never really been great at this, but like, there's no point in …”
Schoening: Some Notion Designers Are Using Figma Less
“On one hand, I do see like sort of a drop in usage of Figma in some designers at Notion.”
Schoening: Companies will confront uncomfortable AI ROI questions within 6-12 months
“I do suspect in six to 12 months from now, a lot of companies are going to actually start asking questions around RRI, and I think that will be an uncomfortable conversation for a lot of folks.”
Schoening: Boasting about AI token spend is like counting code lines
“I think there's a real danger in sort of making the token spend the metric to like boast about, which is the same as when people boast about how many lines of code they've written in a day.”
Schoening: Notion PMs Encouraged to Use Terminal UIs Over GUIs
“And I generally encourage them to not use the GUIs. And I encourage them to use the tweets because I just know that over time they're going to be curious and like pull at other threads. And one day they wake up and they're like, Oh, I understand more of the su…”
Schoening: Cheaper code generation will push software engineering into all business domains
“If the cost of software and creating software and encoding business practices in code, and like, I just literally mean the old, like software, one point no 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…”
Schoening: All current AI agent architectures fundamentally resemble coding agents
“All agents are also like, 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.”
Schoening: AI Labs Suffer From Constant Regressions and Clunky TUIs
“I don't think the labs are exempt from this. Like I love their tools. It's great. Like I love, I live in the CLIs, but a regression like every two weeks. Of like a thing that was fixed like three weeks before, and they still can't render a TUI at, I don't know…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Max's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Head of Product, Notion | 1 | 40 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |