Every culture has its customs, every country its constitution. We wrote down our operating values as the shared contract for how we work at Notion. We don’t want them to be empty posters on the wall (Enron had "integrity" as a value). They are how we act on our best days, and the habits we fall back on during the hard days.

Good company values evolve. This is our third iteration as AI is evolving every business. No one has the full answer about the future. That is exactly why values matter more now: they are how we navigate when the map is blank. Deeper customer obsession (#1), dialing up the agency (#2) and urgency (#3) from everyone on the team, and more direct conversation (#4) with each other without losing the kindness that makes Notion special.

If we operate that way, we become more than a tool company. We bring our belief in human teamwork into the world ("Think Together" video), and we have a real chance to be one of the defining companies of this era — and one day we can look back on this as the most fulfilling journey of our careers.

#1. Customer in every room

This value is at the heart of our mission: we are a tool company, and we exist to help our customers do their life’s work. Serving customers is our only quest. Anything else is secondary. This is especially true in a fast-changing time like today: we cannot go wrong by making our customers successful.

Some tips to help you build habits with this value:

• C•C•T•S. When we make decisions, always prioritize from left to right: Customer > Company > Team > Self.
• Leave the building! At Notion, our taste is a strength, but it can also get us stuck in our own heads. Go close to our customers so we actually see the problems they care about.
• :heartelmo: Customers in every room. We have Sesame Street characters in every conference room to represent the customer, and stickers on the door.

#2. Own the outcome

AI commoditized a lot of capabilities. What really matters is agency, the ability to come up with initiatives and own the outcome. Remember that everything at Notion was built by someone no smarter than you. So don’t wait for someone else. Agency is a muscle. Exercise it!

Some tips to help exercise your agency:

• 💪 You can just do things. Abundance mindset. No one needs permission to make Notion better! Every day, we leave our egos and org chart at the door, your lane is whatever it takes to deliver for our customers. And AI has 10x our market so there's white space everywhere. Wear your abundance mindset hat on!
• 👨‍🌾 Tend to the garden. Notion’s success is our collective responsibility. So, we pull weeds as we notice them, unprompted, and we leave things better than we find them.
• Nothing is sacred. Disrupting ourselves. We challenge every assumption, and we do not fear reinventing ourselves. Reinventing ourselves is in our DNA and we have done multiple times in the past (This is why our codebase is called notion-next. Full story here) We look up to the great artists who have done it again and again: Miles Davis, Picasso, Steve Jobs & Apple.
• 🚌 No passengers. Hire for agency. Another thing we like to say is Notion is a small bus. On this bus, we need everyone to step up and drive. We don’t want passive passengers.

#3. Why not today

The AI era is extremely competitive. In this environment, collective urgency and speed are the best thing to help a company survive and thrive. Instead of say “let’s do it next week”, we make a habit of asking “why not today?”

Some tips to help exercise your urgency and speed:

• 🏃‍♂️ Bias toward action. Most decisions are two-way doors (with few exceptions like security, customer trust.) Indecision costs more than a wrong call. So pick a decider, think through how you'd reverse it if needed, and go. If no one steps up to own it, that's your cue. Anyone can be the decider. Don't wait for permission.