The Core of Great Products: Lessons from Notion’s Max Schoening, as shared by Lenny Rachitsky

In a recent LinkedIn post, Lenny Rachitsky shares key takeaways from a conversation with Max Schoening, Head of Product at Notion, offering profound insights into product development, design, and leadership in the modern tech landscape. Rachitsky highlights Schoening’s perspective on what truly makes a product successful, emphasizing the critical role of a singular, exceptionally executed core feature.

As Rachitsky relays Schoening’s observations:

“Great products have one tiny core that is exceptionally good. iPhone is multitouch. GitHub is the pull request. Figma is real-time collaboration. Notion is blocks and slash commands.”

Rachitsky elaborates on this point, noting Schoening’s experience with a failed startup where years were spent perfecting the editing experience, which ultimately did not lead to success. In contrast, Notion’s initial editor was reportedly poor, yet its strong core allowed it to thrive. This underscores a significant pitfall in product development: the temptation to believe that simply adding more features will achieve greatness.

Developing ‘Taste’ and the Value of Early Exploration

Lenny Rachitsky also delves into Schoening’s concept of ‘taste’ as a predictive tool for audience reaction. According to Rachitsky, Schoening describes taste as a “virtual machine in your head that predicts how your target audience will react.” Building this ‘taste’ requires extensive practice, particularly for designers. Schoening suggests that those with the highest taste engage in end-to-end side projects and constantly experiment with new applications, immersing themselves in a wide array of ideas.

Furthermore, Rachitsky highlights a shift in the early stages of project development. He quotes Schoening’s observation that:

“The first 10% of every project is now free. You can send ten agents to explore ten versions of an idea before committing to one. Exploration has become very cheap. But quality, reliability, and shipping great products hasn’t.”

This suggests that while the cost of ideation and initial exploration has decreased significantly due to technological advancements, the challenge and value of delivering high-quality, reliable final products remain substantial.

Agency Over Skills and Mastering the Medium

The Rise of Agency in a Skill-Agnostic World

Rachitsky points out that Schoening believes ‘agency’ is increasingly becoming the key differentiator, surpassing mere skills, especially as AI tools begin to level the playing field. Those who succeed are individuals who proactively shape their environment and drive change. Rachitsky uses the example of individuals within Notion, like Brian Lovin and Eric Liu, who moved beyond their defined roles to build prototypes in code, driven by a desire to innovate rather than by explicit instructions.

Designing with the Medium in Mind

The discussion, as relayed by Rachitsky, also touches upon the evolution of design practices. Schoening emphasizes that the goal for designers isn’t just to ship code to production, but to deeply understand and master the materials they are designing with. He argues that designers should ‘think in code’ to fully grasp the medium’s constraints and possibilities. Rachitsky shares an example from Notion where chat interface prototyping moved from Figma to a more adaptable, LLM-friendly environment, because static images were insufficient to capture the dynamic nature of a chat interface. Schoening suggests that designing an agent requires tools beyond traditional static design software.

Being Right vs. Being First, and the Enduring Value of SaaS

Durability and Foundational Success

Lenny Rachitsky relays Schoening’s assertion that being first to market is less important than being ‘right.’ He provides examples like AirPods succeeding where earlier Bluetooth headphones faltered, and Anthropic’s strong position despite following OpenAI. The emphasis, according to Schoening, is on durability and long-term value, likening it to the generational success of IKEA, which operates independently of fleeting trends.

The Overstated ‘SaaSpocalypse’

Finally, Rachitsky addresses the notion of a ‘SaaSpocalypse,’ presenting Schoening’s view that the desire for self-maintenance of software is largely overstated. Rachitsky quotes Schoening:

“Software is like a garden. You need to tend to it. The thing you pay for in the as-a-service is the maintenance.”

This perspective suggests that the value proposition of Software-as-a-Service lies precisely in its managed maintenance, a burden most users are happy to offload, as evidenced even by companies like Anthropic running their operations on Slack.