Welcome Lena Waters, Notion’s new Chief Marketing Officer

Hi everyone. We’re in the final sprint to ship Notion Mail and much more. It’s been exciting watching our teams build!

At the same time, we’ve been looking for someone who can help us celebrate this work in the market—a builder at heart who understands the challenges we care most about and how we’re solving them for our customers. I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve found that leader in Lena Waters, Notion’s new Chief Marketing Officer.

I sat down with Lena to discuss her path to Notion and her vision for go-to-market as we enter this new phase of growth.

The opportunity to join Notion actually feels like coming full circle for me.

It’s rare for a company to have both the technical vision and the genuine user love that Notion enjoys. And the sheer volume of what this team shipped last year was remarkable—it created that coveted marketing challenge where it’s difficult to keep pace with all the amazing features being released!

Beyond the product itself, I was drawn to Notion’s mission. Throughout my career, I’ve gravitated toward companies building transformative tools that fundamentally change how people get work done. With Notion’s vision of building beautiful tools for your life’s work, there’s an opportunity to create a generational company at a global scale.

I’ve been lucky to have a panoramic view of marketing across different contexts—consumer and B2B, pre- and post-IPO, acquisition integration, and, most recently, the evolution of AI-driven marketing at Grammarly.

What I’m particularly eager to bring to Notion is my experience facing inflection points—moments when a company needs to scale rapidly while preserving what made people fall in love with it in the first place.

At Grammarly, we shifted to include AI in our brand promise, which required balancing automation with human agency. At Docusign, I helped guide our marketing through the IPO process, and evolved the company from single- to multi-product, both of which demanded clarity in communicating a company’s value.

So, the red thread throughout my career has been building systems that scale without sacrificing creativity, authenticity, and connection to users. Notion stands at precisely such an inflection point now, and I’m excited to support the team as we navigate together!

Marketing will have to be very agile and move at the pace of change. Notion AI can transform the way people work, think, and create. But for people to get the most out of it, we need to show them how. That means having a clear vision and roadmap to help builders build, articulating that vision clearly, educating people, and continually gathering feedback to refine our approach.

As we enter a period of hypergrowth we have a chance to make AI-native tools more intuitive, more personal, and more empowering for builders who are bringing their ideas to life.

My first priority is to listen, learn, and help this incredible team move faster. In practical terms, that means having a lot of coffee chats, immersing myself in our users’ experiences, and understanding the needs of both our individual and enterprise customers.

What a good question!

• During university, I had part-time jobs selling encyclopedias and vacuum cleaners door-to-door. The key lesson? Making a connection and getting in the door is the first step to making any sale—a principle that applies to marketing more broadly.

• I grew up riding horses in a 4-H club, competing in shows, trail riding, and even had an adventurous attempt at barrel racing in Texas. The patience, persistence, and partnership required in equestrian sports shaped how I think about teamwork.

• While I’m an avid reader, I also suffer from what the Japanese call “tsundoku”—the tendency to acquire books faster than I can read them—so my bookshelves are aspirational monuments to curiosity. 🤓