(2026-05-03) Lenny Scheoning Why Cultivating Agency Matters More Than Cultivating Skills In The Ai Era

Lenny Rachitsky with Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion): why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era. Max Schoening is head of product at Notion, where he’s been especially effective at getting designers and PMs to ship code, prototype in the terminal, and launch extremely successful AI products. He was previously a PM at Google, ran design at Heroku, was VP of Design (and a part-time engineer) at GitHub, and is a two-time founder.*

We discuss:

• What’s most worked in getting designers and PMs to embrace AI
• Why agency—not skills—is the thing that separates people who thrive from those who fall behind
• How the first 10% of every project is now “free,” and what that means for product development
• Max’s “tiny core” theory of great products: iPhone multitouch, the GitHub pull request, Notion blocks, Dropbox’s menu bar icon
• Why the SaaSpocalypse is overstated
• Why the amount of software has exploded but the quality hasn’t, and why that gap creates opportunity

Recommended books:

• Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software: https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Software/dp/0137909101
• Tools for Conviviality: https://www.amazon.com/Tools-Conviviality-Ivan-Illich/dp/1842300113
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Like-State-Condition-Paperbacks/dp/0300246757*

My biggest takeaways from this conversation:

Great products have one tiny core that is exceptionally good. iPhone is multitouch. GitHub is the pull request. Notion is blocks and slash commands. Figma is real-time collaboration.

The first 10% of every project is now free. There’s no point writing a PRD when you can spin up 10 agents and explore 10 janky versions.

Agency is becoming the real differentiator, not skills. When AI closes skill gaps, the people who thrive are the ones who treat the world around them as malleable, and change things. Max points to Notinos like Brian Levin and Eric Liu, who moved from PRDs to Figma to building prototypes in code—not because their role told them to but because they wanted to.

The goal isn’t for designers or PMs to ship to production; it’s for them to master the material they’re designing with. Max doesn’t care if designers write code that lands in production. He cares that they think in code, because it forces them to consider the medium. If a designer can tweak UI styles but doesn’t understand how an agent loop works, Max would rather have the designer who deeply understands agent loops—even if they never ship a line.

Taste is a virtual machine in your head that predicts how your target audience will react. To build taste, you need reps.

Being first doesn’t matter—being right does. Bluetooth headphones were crappy until AirPods. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player. Anthropic started after OpenAI with less funding and is now killing it. Durability matters most.

The amount of software is exploding. The quality isn’t. Max: “I don’t feel like the quality of software has increased all that much in the last 12 months. The amount of software has, but it’s very, very hard to find software that is reliable.”

The SaaSpocalypse is overstated—people don’t actually want to maintain their own software. Max tried rebuilding Notion in a weekend and concluded that most people don’t want that. “Software is like a garden. You need to tend to it. The thing you pay for in the as-a-service is the maintenance.” Anthropic, of all companies, runs on Slack.com.

Coding is becoming a primitive that diffuses into every role. Models are improving exponentially at coding but not meaningfully at writing or other domains. When labs claim progress elsewhere, “you just applied coding principles to this domain.” At Notion, HR is already automating work without bugging engineering. The next wave isn’t “AI comes for marketing”; it’s that coding capability shows up inside every function.

We already have universal basic income—it’s called knowledge work. Max means this both as a joke and somewhat seriously. If you really look at what we need to live and be content, it’s a lot less than what we have. We’ve built this hierarchy and all these jobs (bullshit job) that are “absolutely necessary.” We’re so inventive at coming up with new reasons why we must be in the loop. Will it look the same with agents? Maybe not. But we’ll find new ways to insert ourselves into the conversation.