AI Transformation
How Notion Rebuilt HR from First Principles
When Katy Shields joined Notion, she didn’t ask her team to improve what was already there. She asked them to throw it out.
In this episode, Katy Shields, Chief People Officer at Notion, joins host Joelle Emerson to talk about what it actually takes to rebuild a people function from a blank page: what she retired, what replaced it, and what she got wrong along the way. She also gets into why she calls headcount a vanity metric, how Notion rewrote its company values, and why she believes AI will make work more human rather than less.
Key Takeaways
Katy Shields is Chief People Officer at Notion, which she joined in May 2025 when the company was around 800 people. Over a 15-year career she helped scale DoorDash to nearly 20,000 employees, built culture at VSCO, and worked at Google X and Waymo.
Don’t iterate on the past. Throw it out. Katy spent her first month mapping guiding principles and asking her team to reimagine the function from a blank page. Running a people org iteratively, she argues, produces far less progress than starting from a beginner’s mindset.
Fail loudly, but only on the reversible decisions. The vast majority of people decisions are two-way doors. Compensation and performance are not. When Katy rolled a pilot to a fifth of the company too early in month two, she backtracked publicly rather than quietly, which she says taught her team more than any program could.
Headcount is a vanity metric. Katy left a 20,000-person company for an 800-person one, at a company that grows revenue faster than headcount. She treats hiring as a last resort, and when a leader chooses not to backfill a departure, they keep the budget to reinvest in the team they still have.
The annual engagement survey had to go. Notion’s ran 41 questions with free text under each one and took roughly three weeks to analyze, which Katy compares to deploying code once a year. She replaced it with an IC advisory board that co-creates programs before launch and lightweight pulses built directly into the product.
Never ask a question you aren’t willing to act on. Katy says this is the most common failure she sees, and that asking about something leadership has no intention of changing just reminds people they’re dissatisfied. She also trusts behavior over self-reported sentiment, noting that some of the highest performers she’s worked with are the least satisfied, because they care most.
The order of the words in a value matters. Notion changed “drivers of our mission” to “own the outcome” and flipped “kind and direct” to “direct and kind,” after Katy’s read that kindness had drifted into niceness and the real feedback was happening in the meeting after the meeting. A third value, “why not today,” was added new.
Bet on the barbell. Notion is doubling down on early career hiring while holding a high bar on craft and judgment, because Katy found the org had gotten heavy in the middle. One recent example: a BDR pilot posted on LinkedIn that asked applicants to build an agent making the case for themselves.
AI is an iceberg. Everything under the water is the mundane, repetitive, manual work AI can take. The tip is creativity, judgment, taste, communication, and leadership, which Katy believes get more valuable from here. Her team’s internal facilities agent saves around 30 hours a week, and they added headcount to that group rather than cutting it.
Chapters
[00:00] Introduction
[01:12] Meet Katy Shields
[02:04] Notion as customer zero
[03:27] Throw out the past, don’t iterate on it
[04:41] The pilot that went too big
[08:26] Why headcount is a vanity metric
[10:43] Getting into the weeds without micromanaging
[12:38] How the people team got a reputation for building
[14:28] Retiring the annual engagement survey
[20:18] High agency only works with taste and judgment
[21:54] The interview question she uses
[23:05] The barbell: early career and promoting from within
[28:17] Rewriting Notion’s values
[33:30] Lessons from the DoorDash years
[36:11] AI as an iceberg
[38:46] What the team does with efficiency gained from AI
[44:34] Lightning round
[46:29] Closing thoughts
Show Links
Watch on Youtube
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Learn more about Notion
Follow Katy Shields on LinkedIn
Connect with Joelle Emerson on LinkedIn
Follow Paradigm on LinkedIn
