Ivan Zhao: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, I got to follow this thread. What is it that you changed that allowed you to come back to your first principles? Was it like you step... Is it founder mode was the answer? Is it people, personnel shift? What allowed you to change the way things were going? I would say all of that above, but especially just release the sprint product through our community and customers. Then it's like what is this? It's like underpowered compared to other competitor products to doing product management and it doesn't work well with the rest of Notion like I said. And if you talk with engineers, they'll say, "Okay, there's this part of Notion you have to touch the code base. That's just weird. That's your hardcore too much into it. From all the dimension technical front, calling a customer. And when you use the thing it just doesn't feel right." So there's another saying that if you build in a Lego way inside Notion in the code base or product, the system work for you. If you're building non-Lego way, the system work against you. So in some sense, we're creating a tool that has emergent behavior, inter-channeling that emergent behavior to unlock more values. So I'm hearing as you launched it, it just didn't go well. Everyone's just like, "What is this? This isn't feeling good." And there's a moment of realization of I see. Here's what we did wrong here and we should come back to this original abstraction vision of what we're trying to build.…

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