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

Or 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. Yep. A piece of advice for someone that wants to develop this within themselves. I tell this to myself, a dew 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. Changed. The first 10% of every project are now free. It takes almost no effort to now build the first version of a startup. Taste comes up a lot now. 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. What do you think matters to building a successful product? 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'll be finally great. That never works.

Today my guest is Max Shoney. Max is a hard person to describe. He was a product manager at Google, he ran the design team at Haroku, 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 Lenny'sProductCast.com for an insane set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Max Schoen. Max, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. I am so excited to have you here. I feel like there's this quote I think about when I think about you.

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