Max Schoening: belief

Transcript context

…He was on our sister podcast, How I AI. We'll link to that episode. 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." 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." 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. 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.…

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