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

**Max Schoening** (0:00)
Before, it was very easy to always say, well, I will never be able to do this because of the 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:14)
Do you have a piece of advice for someone that wants to develop this within themselves?

**Max Schoening** (0:18)
I tell this to myself, if you drive Notion like it's stolen, 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:28)
If you think about your job a couple years ago, what's most changed?

**Max Schoening** (0:32)
The first 10% of every project are now free. It takes almost no effort to now build the first version of a startup.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:39)
Taste comes up a lot now.

**Max Schoening** (0:40)
Taste actually means you're able to run a virtual machine in your head, where given an idea, you can predict for a certain in-group whether they're going to like it or not. You just have to do reps. It's almost like training a model.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:51)
What do you think matters to building a successful product?

**Max Schoening** (0:54)
All the great products have something tiny that is a superpower. One tiny core that is so exceptionally good. One of the biggest pitfalls is if you get into the loop of, if I just add one more thing to the product, it will be finally great. That never works.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:08)
You have this hot take on universal basic income.

**Max Schoening** (1:10)
We already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:15)
Today, my guest is Max Schoening. Max is a hard person to describe. He was a product manager at Google. He ran the design team at Heroku. He was a design leader and an engineer at GitHub under Nat Friedman. He's also a two-time founder and is now head of product at Notion. He is one of the most successful AI forward product leaders out there. And as you'll soon see, one of the deepest thinkers on how AI impacts how we build and how we use software. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for an insane set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Max Schoening.
Max, welcome to the podcast.

**Max Schoening** (1:57)
Thank you for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:58)
I am so excited to have you here. I feel like there's this quote I think about when I think about you, and you being on this podcast that comes from the Bible. And just paraphrasing, the quote is, I was made for such a time as this.
I feel like there's this, all this talk about roles merging, designers becoming PMs, engineers, everyone's the same, the Venn diagram is collapsing. You've been that for a long time. It's like hard to even describe what you are, what you've done, you've done all the things. So I feel like you have such a unique insight into where things are heading. I want to start with just kind of this broad question.
What have you seen about where things are going for product teams, for product building, as AI becomes more powerful, as we integrate it more into our workflows? And I ask you this because I've heard for so many people at Notion that you are the reason that designers are shipping code, PMs are shipping code. You're not just living in the future, you're like pushing the whole team and company to live in the future. And so, coming back to the question, just like, what are you seeing about where things are going? What will change? What will people realize in the next few months, years that you're already seeing?

**Max Schoening** (3:00)
Well, first of all, when you said a quote from the Bible, I was very curious where this was going to end.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:07)
It's the first time I've coded the Bible on this podcast, I think.

**Max Schoening** (3:10)
I wouldn't take credit for the designers at Notion and PMs at Notion now code. I think that would have probably happened anyways. But I can tell you the origin story of it, which is when I joined Notion, we were building a lot of chat interfaces and we were designing the chat interfaces in Figma.
And there's this great talk by Brett Victor, stop drawing dead fish, which essentially is, I mean, the static image of a chat is basically the dead fish here. You have to feel the AI to some degree. And so, two designers, myself, just put together the worst possible playground you could think of, of a small code base that is very LLM friendly, used the tools that LLMs are very good at using, and then we moved all of our prototyping for the, specifically the chat interfaces, to that.