Ep #13: Randy Hunt (Notion & SVA): Speed as a Quality Strategy, Killing the Handoff, and Teaching Design in the AI Era

Tom and Jonny sit down with Randy Hunt, Head of Design at Notion and chair of MFA Design at SVA. They dig into why speed and quality were never a trade-off, unpack the weekend build that turned into a two-week code review, and go behind the scenes of how a graduate design programme is rewriting itself around AI.

Chapters

• 0:04 — Two institutions, one calendar: how Randy keeps both plates spinning
• 3:00 — Agents that absorb the busy work so he can stay close to the craft
• 5:29 — Dogfooding vs. knowing the competition: you have to do the work twice
• 8:22 — One place for everything, or a walled garden? Jonny re-buys Notion
• 11:10 — Battle-tested vs. multi-model: why living in one suite stops working
• 13:22 — Good, fast, cheap: Randy refuses to pick two
• 15:17 — Quality isn't the screen being right, it's how many people hit it wrong
• 19:05 — The handoff is a telephone game: why passing the baton kills the work
• 22:52 — Designers were shipping production code before the coding agents arrived
• 25:42 — He built it in a weekend. The PR took two weeks to review
• 29:35 — Writing code got cheap. Writing good code didn't
• 30:46 — Emergent chat vs. written-down skills: making the system legible to everyone
• 33:07 — Working in the open so you can see how your colleagues actually prompt
• 35:42 — Build it yourself or wait for someone to sell it: micro tool making
• 39:04 — The barbell curriculum: what endures vs. what has to stay malleable
• 43:20 — Directing a photographer vs. directing a model: same skill, different studio
• 44:57 — Where's the punk rock student who refuses to use AI?
• 47:58 — He went home for the summer and built an ERP for his dad's warehouse
• 49:33 — Quick fire: AGI takes over, so what do you actually do with the time?
• 51:37 — Wrap up, and a promise to come back for the music conversation

Mentioned in the episode

Randy

• Randy J. Hunt — https://www.randyjhunt.com
• Randy on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/randyjhunt/
• Product Design for the Web (New Riders, 2013) — https://www.randyjhunt.com
• SVA MFA Design, where Randy is chair — https://design.sva.edu
• Randy speaking at Hatch Conference, Berlin, September — https://www.hatchconference.com/speakers/randy-hunt

Companies and past roles

• Notion — https://www.notion.com
• Notion Agents, his current favourite app — https://www.notion.com/product/agents
• Etsy — https://www.etsy.com
• Artsy — https://www.artsy.net
• Grab — https://www.grab.com
• Deliveroo — https://deliveroo.co.uk
• Uber Eats — https://www.ubereats.com

Tools and products discussed

• Claude — https://claude.ai
• Claude Code — https://claude.com/product/claude-code
• Claude Cowork — https://www.anthropic.com/product/claude-cowork
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) — https://modelcontextprotocol.io
• ChatGPT — https://chatgpt.com
• Google Gemini — https://gemini.google.com
• Google Workspace / Google Sheets — https://workspace.google.com
• Slack — https://slack.com
• Figma — https://www.figma.com
• Weavy, acquired by Figma and relaunched as Figma Weave — https://www.figma.com/blog/welcome-weavy-to-figma/
• Paper — https://paper.design
• Pencil — https://pen.dev

Events

• Hatch Conference, Berlin, September — https://www.hatchconference.com