Evidence receipt / preference
Published · transcript-backedMax Schoening: preference
3 May 2026 Lenny's Podcast Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion)
“First of all, I think I would actually say that I have contributed to some really great products, not built them because I think I did not use to believe this early on in my career, but the longer I'm in this, the more I care about what's the team that's building the thing.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Max Schoening
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 3 May 2026
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Please, I'll sign up. First of all, I think I would actually say that I have contributed to some really great products, not built them because I think I did not use to believe this early on in my career, but the longer I'm in this, the more I care about what's the team that's building the thing. I used to think that was such a, I don't know, not important thing. And now I'm like, oh, it's the only thing. I don't think that there is a through line out of the things that I've contributed to where I can pinpoint it. I think that you can't say that the best design always wins. I think there's many products where just design doesn't matter. And I think then as a designer, you can have this identity crisis of like, why am I doing this? I think you can't even say that the way it's built always, the best engineering always wins. I think 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. If I really look at the truly great products, they all have one tiny core that is so exceptionally good. And that is both a combination of you stumbled upon it by luck and then the market agreed. But I think it's the, what's the tiny core? I don't know, multi-touch on the phone. GitHub is probably the poll request. This idea that anyone can suggest something to you and you see it. I do think that at Notion, it's the blocks and the slash commands. Figma, it's the seamless blend between real-time collaboration and not. All the great products have something tiny that is a superpower that's like versus, oh yeah, if we have this suite of things and we add one more thing, it'll finally be useful. That never works. And for GitHub, interesting, it was the PR. Are there examples of that at other places you worked? Because this is really interesting, just like what's the tiny core that makes everything else work?…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.