Notion’s CTO explains what’s next for the productivity behemoth

Fuzzy Khosrowshahi is Notion’s new chief technology officer, helping the once-tiny startup scale its engineering team now that it’s a $10 billion behemoth. He joined in December after three years at Slack and 15 at Google, where he helped launch Google Sheets. With the launch of Notion Calendar, Sites, and AI connectors, Notion’s engineering team has been quickly piling up new features both for creators and enterprise customers.

Khosrowshahi spoke with Fast Company about how Notion differs from Slack, Google, and other places he’s worked, what might be next for Notion, and the tools he uses himself. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What’s the hardest part of leading an engineering team at a company like Notion? 

I’m playing whack-a-mole the whole time, I start on Monday with problems brought to me. Tuesday, I start resolving them. Wednesday, I’m close to finished resolving them. Thursday and Friday are wonderful because everything’s resolved. Then I start again on Monday. I want happy users and a happy team. But I’ll settle for happy users, unhappy team, because then I can work to make the team happy.

What’s been the biggest surprise for you? 

I’m sometimes surprised at how fast decisions are made. We launched AI well before anyone else. The speed can be intimidating for some engineers, because it leads to changing fast and changing direction quickly sometimes.

There was a feature we were slated to launch later on and the CEO jumped in and said, “Hey, is there any way we could de-scope it and remove some functionality so we can launch it faster?” And that was the right call. And you can only do that because everything is so transparent. Everyone is aligned and moving quickly. 

What was it like helping bring Google Sheets to the world? 

Our company got bought to create Google Sheets, and I was the first tech lead for it, but then smarter engineers came in and did all the hard work. What we did with Sheets was basically copy what was already out there with existing spreadsheets and Word processing and replicate that and add real-time collaboration and put it in the cloud with one source of truth. And that was a huge aha moment.

But we didn’t change paradigms, right? What I think Notion has done that is really incredible is disrupting this space. They did what others have tried and not succeeded at, which is to bring text editing and sites, project management, and wikis all together in one seamless experience in a connected workspace.

What are you working on next?

To me it’s about making it easier for people to get their work done fast. For example, can we show calendars in different ways within Notion and show documents within calendars and make it easier for people to bring a time layer into Notion and allow people to schedule things easier and be able to know what their next meeting is without having to constantly switch context and switch windows.

Speaking of less context switching, what about letting people make presentations right within Notion?

I think it would be very easy for us to replicate slides functionality within Notion. The pieces are basically there. At the core of Notion, it’s all blocks that you can basically nest and combine with each other to create something grander.

But it’s all about priorities. We look for signals to help determine what we work on. And there’s a lot of enterprise signals, there are signals from our community, signals from consumers. The slides one hasn’t bubbled up to the top, but it’s something I would be passionate about myself. I can easily see slides being part of Notion. 

What other new elements of Notion are you working on? 

We’re doing more work on the AI front. We’re improving on the performance of the app and making sure it can scale. We want to keep improving our mobile apps. We’re going to continue integrating Calendar into Notion. (Editor’s note: Notion acquired Cron and recently re-launched it as Notion Calendar.) I don’t want to say too much more and get fired. 

You’ve worked at Google, Slack, and now Notion. What are a few differences and similarities you notice? 

I was at Slack when Notion launched AI a year ahead of any of its competitors. That was mind-blowing to me and I wanted to be a part of that. And Notion has fearlessness. I’ve been a part of other companies where the CEO’s message was we’ll never build a better email, or we’ll never build a better calendar. So why try? And that, to me, is just not as motivating. I love being part of Notion where the sky’s the limit. 

What tools do you yourself rely on? 

I use Notion, Gmail, Sheets, Drive. Perplexity. We use Figma for designs. Notion has reduced the number of apps I have. If I want to publish something or if I want to do project management, all of it is done in Notion, so I’m not constantly switching around and moving from one context to another and one app to another.

Call it boring, call it minimalist. I’m so focused on getting stuff done fast because I’m wearing so many different hats. Notion just makes me that much faster.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91150707/notions-cto-explains-whats-next-for-the-productivity-behemoth?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss