Notion: Rebuilding the Editor from Scratch — The Big Rewrite
How Notion threw away their entire codebase and rewrote it from scratch — and why it was the right decision.
The challenge
By 2018, Notion had a product that users loved but engineers dreaded. The codebase was a mess of technical debt accumulated from years of rapid feature development. Performance was terrible — page loads took 10+ seconds. The editor had fundamental architectural limitations that made new features nearly impossible to build correctly. User growth was stalling because the product was too slow.
The strategy
Notion made the controversial decision to completely rewrite their core editor from scratch. The conventional wisdom in software engineering is 'never do a big rewrite' — it takes longer than expected, introduces new bugs, and delays new features. Notion's team believed their situation was the exception where a rewrite was genuinely necessary.
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Try the full case free →Key lessons (preview)
- Sometimes the right engineering decision is the one conventional wisdom says to avoid.
- Technical debt has a compounding cost — slow pages and slow development both compound over time.
- A period of no visible progress can be the most valuable investment a product team makes.