Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedMax Schoening: belief
3 May 2026 Lenny's Podcast Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion)
“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.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Max Schoening
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 3 May 2026
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…It's the first time I've quoted the Bible on this podcast, I think. 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. 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. 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.…
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