Losing Focus

I was listening to an episode of Lenny’s Podcast the other day where Lenny was talking to Max Schoening, Head of Product at Notion. It’s a great interview—one of the better ones on the podcast in recent memory for sure.

There’s a lot in there that resonates with me (including the concept of malleable software which I never had a label for, but which fits how I like to think about the products I work on to absolute perfection), but perhaps the thing that stood out the most was that in a time where I feel like many are just diving in the deep-end, head-first on all this AI stuff, Max was incredibly pragmatic about it. Notion certainly isn’t shying away from it, but Max hit on something that’s been bothering me as well.

I don’t think the quality of software has increased all that much in in the past 12 months. I think maybe the amount of software has, but it’s very, very hard to find software that’s reliable.

And then a little later he talked about the difference between simply building something and actually engineering it, with engineering being much more involved and, unfortunately, increasingly absent from today’s conversations:

..that to me I think is very absent right now from most of the discourse in software which is, it’s all about “how many tokens can we spend” and “how many features can we ship”. I’m like ok, but where’s the engineering part? And the engineering part is the “you make sure that this thing works for a 100 million people, for a billion people.

And on the design side I think there is the, yes, anyone can now very quickly take a design system off the shelf, build a very usable interface, get to the core of what’s really important, but where’s the delight and craft?

That distinction is so important. It’s not just about getting something built quickly, it’s about getting the right thing built in a way that works well and that solves actual problems.

I think it’s understandable that given the incredibly velocity around LLM’s and AI in the workplace that so much of the current discourse in tech revolves around how to use it and what to do with it (right now it seems everyone’s answer is “all the things” but that’s a discussion for another day). When something has this large of an impact on our work and lives, it’s natural that we’re gonna focus on that pretty intensely.

But we have to be careful that we don’t lose sight of what really matters. How we work matters, sure, but it’s not as important as why.

There’s a lot of chatter about building a “web for agents” but let’s not forget there’s still actual human beings involved here, even if they’re at the other end of that sometimes. And that’s what really matters at the end of the day. Not the machines in the middle, but the actual human beings on the other end of the machines trying to live their lives and do their jobs.

Quality still matters, and it still takes work. Part of the job of building on the web has always been to be our users last line of defense. We have to be more diligent than ever to not lose that focus.