Head of Product, Notion Ex-GitHub (Design + Engineering) · Heroku (Design) · Google PM · 2× Founder
MAY 1 2026
Agency
Drive It Like It's Stolen
"One day you wake up and you realize the world is made up by people no smarter than you."
The biggest through-line I've found is making
Tinker. A home-cooked meal is a form of tinkering
When you get better at making things, people pay attention
It awakens you to the idea that you can just change things
"Could you drive Notion like it's stolen?"
Drive Notion like it's stolen
You're not the founder, product-market fit was already there. But you can still contribute in a way where you feel agency, not stuck asking "what's my role?"
Product Vision
Software That Bends to You
Malleable software
Works for the people using it
You have ownership of your compute life
You can just make tools
Communal, not just individual
The app world today
Designed by "the ivory tower in Cupertino"
Every layer glued together
A little square on your phone
Change a little bit, usually not possible
"Software that works closer to the interest of the people that use it than the interest of the corporation that makes it."
The awakening
People are realising they can just make their own tools. But it has to sit on top of a platform that encourages this, otherwise everyone ends up with their own individual little tool and no communal software.
Craft
Know the Material
"The reason I like thinking in code is because it forces you to consider the medium."
"I actually don't care at all whether designers write code that lands in production"
Code is the material AI agents are made of, currently
Take the PM who gets agent loops over the one who tweaks CSS
Coding harnesses now resemble the operating systems of the '90s
The point isn't
Shipping to production. The point is
Becoming a master of the material, not a cog in the delivery mechanism for the idea.
Product DNA
Every Great Product Has One Tiny Thing
That tiny thing is irreducibly the soul of the product. If you lose it, you lose everything.
GitHubThe Pull Request
"This idea that anyone can suggest something to you and sort of you see it." The tiny core of the whole product.
Herokugit push heroku master
"A very simple one-liner that went from the thing on my computer, now I have a URL. That's so intoxicating that everything else sort of flows from there."
NotionBlocks + slash commands
"At Notion it's the blocks and the slash commands." That's the tiny core, everything else in the product orbits it.
DropboxMenu bar sync icon
"So good at syncing you could even use it as a symbol for 'do I have internet or not.'" Then they tried to increase the surface area, and it lost its way.
"All the great products have something tiny that is a superpower."
Craft
Taste Is Learnable
"Taste actually means you're able to run a virtual machine in your head where given an idea, you can predict for a certain ingroup whether they're going to like it or not."
You just have to do reps. It's almost like training a model
Decide what your in-group is, then get good at emulating them
Dieter Rams: design should be first useful, then beautiful
"You know it when you see it", nobody argued the first iPhone was obviously good
Obviously good
Notion has stickers that say just make "obviously good" stuff. The mistake is going into a cave for six months to get there. Iterate in the open, get really good at iterating.
AI Era
The First 10% Is Free Now
🎯Shots on goal
AI compresses the cost of starting. More starts = more chances to find the thing that works. Ship early, learn constantly, double down on what's real.
🔁Incremental correctness
Don't isolate for 6 months. The path to right is through wrong, done quickly. Iterate in the open. Every version teaches you something the previous version couldn't.
☁️SaaS is not dead
The "as a service" part still matters enormously. Hosting, reliability, collaboration, continuous updates, AI generates the code, but the service is the product. Don't eulogize too early.
🧠We already have UBI
Hot take: "We already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work." Sitting in an air-conditioned room typing into a computer for a lot of money, the safety net is the job.