Lenny's Podcast

Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion)

with Max Schoening, Head of Product at Notion
3 May 2026 15 min read 1h 22m
TL;DR

Agency—the belief that you can change things and aren't limited by your current skillset—matters far more than any individual skill in the AI era. As AI handles the first 10% of projects for free, success depends on people who tinker, make things, and understand they work in a malleable world rather than those who stay rigidly within defined roles.

Key Moments
Max Schoening
“Before it was very easy to always say, well, I will never be able to do this because insert skill issue. We're realizing that even if you have the skills at your fingertips, the thing that matters is agency. I don't think agency is very evenly distributed in the world.”
Max explains why agency has become the differentiator in the AI era, replacing traditional skill-based excuses.
Max Schoening
“One day you wake up and you realize the world is made up by people no smarter than you. It just really awakens you to the idea that you can just change things.”
Max shares Steve Jobs' foundational insight about realizing the malleability of the world around you.
▶ 0:22
Max Schoening
“The first 10% of every project are now free. It takes almost no effort to now build the first version of a startup.”
Max describes how AI has fundamentally shifted the economics of early-stage product development.
▶ 28:47
Max Schoening
“Taste actually means you're able to run a virtual machine in your head where given an idea, you can predict for a certain group whether they're going to like it or not. You just have to do reps. It's almost like training a model.”
Max explains how taste in product design is developed through repetition and pattern recognition, similar to training ML models.
▶ 0:40
Max Schoening
“Malleable software is the idea that software works closer to the interest of the people that use it than the interest of the corporation that makes it.”
Max defines malleable software as he explains why he believes users should have more control over how they customize their tools.
▶ 18:18
About Max Schoening
›
Max Schoening is Head of Product at Notion and one of the most thoughtful AI-forward product leaders in tech. Previously, he was a product manager at Google, led design at Heroku, and served as design leader and engineer at GitHub under Nat Friedman. He's also a two-time founder with deep expertise in how AI is reshaping product development, design systems, and the future of software.
Takeaways
1
Agency beats skill in the AI era As AI commoditizes the ability to execute, the differentiator becomes whether you believe you can shape your world rather than accept constraints. Success goes to people who tinker, make things, and experiment—not those who stay within rigid role definitions. Develop agency by building things, even small ones, which awakens you to the fact that change is possible.
2
The first 10% is now free, the last 90% unchanged AI has drastically lowered the cost of getting ideas into prototype form—you can now explore multiple directions cheaply. However, shipping a production product at scale remains deeply hard: quality, reliability, and scale still require the deep engineering that decades of iteration provide. Focus exploration speed on the hard problems, not the easy ones AI solves.
3
Designer and PM code for understanding, not production shipping The value of designers and PMs learning to code isn't about replacing engineers—it's about thinking in the actual medium they design with (agent loops, state management, etc.) rather than static mockups. This forces deeper interrogation of how systems actually work, improving design and product decisions, even if engineers rebuild it later.