Kill the Org Chart: Building Skill-Based Design Teams at Notion

When growth accelerates, hierarchies slow you down. Randy Hunt shares how Notion’s design organization engineered itself around skills and behaviors rather than titles and functions, a shift he calls a return to the fundamentals of “making and building.” As adoption soared from personal users to global enterprises, this model helped the team stay fluid, creative, and connected to the craft of design. The talk reveals how a skill-based culture fosters adaptability, ownership, and speed when predictability disappears.
Takeaways:

• How to structure design teams around skills, not roles
• Preserving creative DNA through growth, unpredictability, and complexity.
• Why rediscovering fundamentals — curiosity, craft, and shared behaviors, enables sustainable scaling.