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

3 May 2026 36 published claims 2 attributable people
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Speakers in the public record

Max SchoeningLenny Rachitsky

Claim mix

belief 13evaluation 6commitment 5uncertainty 5recommendation 2observation 2preference 2prediction 1

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Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.

Claim ledger

The useful parts, with receipts.

36 published records

01 / recommendation

Recommends Tools of Conviviality. Recommends Seeing Like a State.

“It depends on the person. I would say ... So Code by Charles Petzold, which is The Secret Language of Hardware and Software. It basically is like, "Do you know how computers actually work?" It is actually surprising to me how many professionally employed programmers don't know how computers work. That one, the funny thing is it does not have a line of code in it until chapter 27, so exceptionally good book. I have a weird one, which is Tools of Conviviality by Ivan Illich. It's the contrast between, you look at the history of technology and tools that let users exercise human ingenuity and autonomy versus tools that are more at industrial scale that almost have become destructive to human autonomy. And then the last one that I give mostly to executives that I think are creating a lot of systems is Seeing Like a State, which I think there is a famous stack overflow that popularized this, but it's the idea of, are you actually just designing a system so that you have legibility, but the way that you've created that legibility completely neglects the reality of the system on the ground. And so I think of it as, great, you're the executive and you have these status reports and you think you know exactly how your teams work. If you actually spend time with the teams, you would realize that none of that is actually true. And so I think executives love creating fake legibility for themselves because we don't like noise as humans, right? We want the signal, but there's often less signal in it than one might think.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

03 / belief

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

04 / belief

Just to be clear, not everybody has that luck, but I think that's the folks that I find discussing this the most are the ones that are in the bucket of luck.

“Just to be clear, not everybody has that luck, but I think that's the folks that I find discussing this the most are the ones that are in the bucket of luck.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

05 / commitment

People have always joked, we get paid so much just to sit in front of a computer and put the right sorts of words and letters into this thing and we get paid a lot of money to do it. And now it's like, oh shit, maybe I won't be paid this much in the future because AI is going to be taking over.

“People have always joked, we get paid so much just to sit in front of a computer and put the right sorts of words and letters into this thing and we get paid a lot of money to do it. And now it's like, oh shit, maybe I won't be paid this much in the future because AI is going to be taking over.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

09 / evaluation

I think Dropbox is such an interesting study where it was the little menu bar icon that was so good at syncing that you could even use it as a symbol for, do I have internet or not? Because it was better at figuring out whether you had an internet connection than your Mac itself.

“I think Dropbox is such an interesting study where it was the little menu bar icon that was so good at syncing that you could even use it as a symbol for, do I have internet or not? Because it was better at figuring out whether you had an internet connection than your Mac itself.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

10 / belief

I think the way I would describe it is, and I tell this to myself as well, which is like, okay, do you drive Notion like it's stolen, which is we're not the founders.

“I think the way I would describe it is, and I tell this to myself as well, which is like, okay, do you drive Notion like it's stolen, which is we're not the founders.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

11 / uncertainty

To be fair, I do understand why companies do that, which is I am surprised by how much work it takes to get people to identify the outer loop of their work and enlist an agent and build the ... I don't know.

“To be fair, I do understand why companies do that, which is I am surprised by how much work it takes to get people to identify the outer loop of their work and enlist an agent and build the ... I don't know.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

13 / commitment

I want to come back to this idea of malleable software from a perspective of SaaS and the SaaS apocalypse. There's all this talk about, we will not need SaaS tools any longer.

“I want to come back to this idea of malleable software from a perspective of SaaS and the SaaS apocalypse. There's all this talk about, we will not need SaaS tools any longer.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

14 / belief

Just coming back to your insight of when a product works, there's just this tiny core thing that is the thing that makes it amazing and what people want to come back to no matter how bad everything else is. I think that's a really interesting takeaway.

“Just coming back to your insight of when a product works, there's just this tiny core thing that is the thing that makes it amazing and what people want to come back to no matter how bad everything else is. I think that's a really interesting takeaway.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

16 / belief

I've never really been great at this, but there's no point in writing a PRD if you can just do the janky version and do the, "Here's the demo of what I think we should build.

“I've never really been great at this, but there's no point in writing a PRD if you can just do the janky version and do the, "Here's the demo of what I think we should build.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

18 / uncertainty

The TPPN guys have a really good way of describing this exact concept, which is they had like, I don't know, 8,000 listeners and a conversation.

“The TPPN guys have a really good way of describing this exact concept, which is they had like, I don't know, 8,000 listeners and a conversation.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

19 / commitment

The one thing I will say that I've noticed is specifically for designers, the designers that I think have, at least in software design, high taste are the ones that both have side projects that they build where they're responsible of the full thing and extent.

“The one thing I will say that I've noticed is specifically for designers, the designers that I think have, at least in software design, high taste are the ones that both have side projects that they build where they're responsible of the full thing and extent.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

20 / uncertainty

Look at Japan, like Japanese craftspeople, right? They've just been, I don't know, painting the bowl for however long and it just takes a while.

“Look at Japan, like Japanese craftspeople, right? They've just been, I don't know, painting the bowl for however long and it just takes a while.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

21 / belief

I think people think about just the, okay, I'll create something that's pretty cool and close and then they don't think about exactly as you described.

“I think people think about just the, okay, I'll create something that's pretty cool and close and then they don't think about exactly as you described.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

24 / belief

I think speaking of models, a good example is Anthropic, which was way behind, started after OpenAI, got less funding and now is just killing it and dominating.

“I think speaking of models, a good example is Anthropic, which was way behind, started after OpenAI, got less funding and now is just killing it and dominating.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

25 / belief

I think there's actually a subtle thing, which is you push your code publicly to or publicly within your organization or your team, and then a thing roasts your code and tells you how terrible of a developer you are.

“I think there's actually a subtle thing, which is you push your code publicly to or publicly within your organization or your team, and then a thing roasts your code and tells you how terrible of a developer you are.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

27 / observation

Agents don't really like walls of like, "Oh, I have to go through this narrow orifice to talk to this other data repository." And I think for the first time, it is obvious to people why a connected workspace is actually valuable because it's great.

“Agents don't really like walls of like, "Oh, I have to go through this narrow orifice to talk to this other data repository." And I think for the first time, it is obvious to people why a connected workspace is actually valuable because it's great.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

28 / observation

We're launching a new feature soon and we're working on this landing page to describe the feature. And I found that when people make landing pages, first of all, their writing skills just deteriorate immediately because they want to sound clever and marketing speak comes out of their mouth.

“We're launching a new feature soon and we're working on this landing page to describe the feature. And I found that when people make landing pages, first of all, their writing skills just deteriorate immediately because they want to sound clever and marketing speak comes out of their mouth.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

29 / recommendation

You should probably review more code than put more effort into reviewing code than you do, but at least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug. I think that's a good litmus test for how, I don't know, agent-filled you are.

“You should probably review more code than put more effort into reviewing code than you do, but at least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug. I think that's a good litmus test for how, I don't know, agent-filled you are.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

31 / preference

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

32 / evaluation

Now, you brought this up presumably because I think you may have not thought about malleable software too much before AI, but now you're making your own tools maybe for podcast recording, for prepping for shows or, I don't know, whatever.

“Now, you brought this up presumably because I think you may have not thought about malleable software too much before AI, but now you're making your own tools maybe for podcast recording, for prepping for shows or, I don't know, whatever.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

34 / prediction

I think before, it was very easy to always say, "Well, I will never be able to do this because insert skill issue." And I think we're realizing that even if you have the skills at your fingertips because now, I don't know, an AGI adjacent model helps you.

“I think before, it was very easy to always say, "Well, I will never be able to do this because insert skill issue." And I think we're realizing that even if you have the skills at your fingertips because now, I don't know, an AGI adjacent model helps you.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

36 / preference

I'm actually curious how you think about how it ties to malleable software because the main reason why I use that as a clip of reference is I'm very much in the camp of design should be first useful and then beautiful.

“I'm actually curious how you think about how it ties to malleable software because the main reason why I use that as a clip of reference is I'm very much in the camp of design should be first useful and then beautiful.”
Speaker
Max Schoening
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast
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