What's the Company Culture Like at Notion?

Describe your company culture in one word.

Notion is collaborative, and this culture is evident when we work together to solve technical problems. For instance, when drafting technical specifications for new projects, I consistently receive feedback and input from other engineers, from the ideation phase to the review stage. I never feel like I’m working in isolation, and due to the collaboration I feel that we arrive at better solutions to technical problems.

How did your colleagues set you up for success and help you get acclimated once you came aboard?

When I joined Notion, I participated in engineering-wide onboarding sessions to learn about Notion’s data model and system architecture. My teammates helped me select an initial project that helped me gain familiarity with Notion’s coding style, technical stack and product development cycle. With the help of my onboarding buddy, I wrote and iterated on a technical specification for a new Public API endpoint, which prepared me to tackle larger and more challenging projects.

Describe Notion’s culture in one word. 

Craft. Something truly special about Notion is how it values craft in both its product and culture. Whether it’s finding ways to make Notion load faster, making features more intuitive or designing the physical space for Notion’s first community conference, everyone here has their own craft and is passionate about it. This passion is inspiring to work alongside and resonates through both the product and the broader community of Notion users. 

Recently, Notion hosted a professional development week where employees could sign up for different courses based on their interests. Beyond the expected workshops on time management and communication, there were unique sessions run by Notion employees. I had a ton of fun at the flower arrangement course led by our employer brand lead, Morgan, though I missed other fascinating ones, like Vim tricks and video editing. I loved how these workshops felt like passionate craftspeople sharing practical introductions to their interests. It was incredible to see Notion make space for this — it perfectly illustrates how craft is at the heart of Notion’s culture.

What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally? 

I work on Notion’s desktop app, and a feature I really enjoyed building recently was tab drag and drop. This feature lets users quickly create new Notion windows or reorder tabs between windows by dragging a tab out of the tab bar. While it seems simple at first, it was actually quite challenging to build. The browser enforces many restrictions that make dragging content into different windows difficult. Figuring out these restrictions, choosing the right libraries to simplify development and building a good user experience around these limitations pushed me to grow in new ways. I gained exposure to new challenges like consulting the HTML Standard and handling OS-specific quirks — things I’d never encountered while working on regular web front-end features.

After overcoming these technical challenges, there’s no better feeling than launching a feature and seeing positive feedback from users. As a Notion user myself, this was a product gap that really bothered me, so getting the opportunity to ship it was incredibly gratifying.

Describe Notion’s culture in one word. What made you pick that word? 

I always describe Notion as “thoughtful.” From product decisions to engineering processes, there’s an attention to detail that’s easy to take for granted. In particular, I find our company communications to be surprisingly transparent and responsible. Notion is a growing startup, so change comes in many forms, and I’ve been impressed with the way we handle evolving strategies and structure. 

For example, when a product area transferred ownership from my team to another, there was a multi-month collaborative effort to make sure the transition happened smoothly. Engineers hosted workshops, flew in for in-person pair programming and organized sprints to write more documentation and tests, which allowed the new team to gain knowledge with lots of guardrails in place before my team officially handed over ownership. There was plenty of emphasis from leadership that these knowledge transfers require time and care. Notion operates quickly, but I appreciate that we know when to slow down so that we can move fast over the long term.

How long have you been with Notion, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?

I’ve been at Notion for three years now. As a product, Notion can be complex, which means the bar for user empathy and cross-functional collaboration is noticeably higher here. Decisions in one product area can impact many others, and one of our greatest challenges is being able to offer this complexity to users in an intuitive way. Whether I’m leading a user interface change, improving product performance or proposing a joint project with another team, I’m continually developing strengths in uncovering hidden complexities and communicating decisions effectively to stakeholders. I find that no matter the project or engineering domain, investing in these skills has carried me far. I’m grateful that Notion’s culture encourages broad learning and provides plenty of opportunities to apply these skills in meaningful ways.