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Max Schoening

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2026-05-03
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2026-05-03
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  1. “Yes, all agents are also like if you look at all the harnesses, whether it's the open source ones or the ones from the model companies, ours as well, they all resemble a coding agent now.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And so I think that's how it's going. And if you look at when the model companies say, Oh, we've made great progress in this other non-coding domain. I was like, you just applied coding principles to this domain, which is wonderful, but that's what it's getting better at, right? And so I think I just think software is eating the world is going to accelerate.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Now, I'm not that impressed with the progress in any other domain. It tends to be, like, I don't think they've gotten significantly better at writing. I still very much hate reading sort of AI slob writing. But the thing is, software, Andreessen, right, like software is eating the world. Well, if the cost of software and creating software and encoding business practices in code, like I just literally mean the old software 1.0 kind of code, then if that cost is very much going to zero, we will just have a lot more of it. And so I think then in that case, it's more that software engineering will go into all the other domains, not necessarily that there is sort of some sort of, yeah, like, I don't know, our folks in HR are automating a lot of things because now they don't have to bug an engineering team to write that code.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Okay, this is maybe a hot take, and I actually don't have enough, it's very likely that the labs are like, ha ha, look at this guy. It's very clear, at least empirically, that models are getting better at coding at some exponential rate, right? And I don't think that's changing”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yes. Yeah. And then I don't know. A conductor is another one. They're basically just mostly using developer tools. It's not that different from what developers use.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, I'm actually not positive that Figma is trending down. I think it's more that there is a, there's two camps. I could totally believe the Jevins paradox, which is Figma is actually going up. And then, of course, vibe coding is going up. Like, I don't want to create, in general, I really, really dislike the rivalry discourse that exists in Silicon Valley, which is for Anthropic to win OpenAI needs to lose and vice versa and that kind of thing. So I don't want to perpetuate that with sort of the Figma versus coding. I think the terminal is actually surprising, which is it's initially kind of scary for people and you could do so much, but now PMs are slowly. Once they're in cloud code or codecs, everything is fine, right? And I generally encourage them to not use the GUIs. I encourage them to use the twees because I just know that over time they're going to be curious and like pull at other threads. And one day they wake up and they're like, oh, I understand more of the substrate of how computers work.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “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.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Depends on the role. So, roles. Perhaps further away from engineering, actually, you don't have to convince them all that much because they're like, whoa, I have superpowers now. Look at this amazing thing I've just built because the capability gap of what they were able to do before versus after is so huge that it's intoxicating. And then you have to actually almost do the opposite, which is like, yes, but do you understand why we can't merge this PR? I think on the engineering side, something that Simon last talks about a lot is sort of any manual intervention in code is kind of bad. You probably did something wrong in the verifiability loop and in sort of the software factory. This excludes obviously reviewing code, right? Like I am still very much in camp. 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.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “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 sort of the, I don't know, the term right now is like factory, right? Like the software factory for the work that they do. It is surprising to me how much prodding you need to do to get people out of their the way they're used to working. And so if you're dealing with tens of thousands of people at the scale of meta, I have some sympathy for, okay, a good way to do this is just start a leaderboard and encourage people to do it. They will find good things and useful things to do with that as they learn, right? So it's, yeah.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, I think there's a real danger in sort of making the tokens spend the metric to like. Boast about, which is the same as when people boast about how many lines of code they've written in a day. Why do you have so many lines of code? You have, I don't know. The largest software projects in the world have Not that many millions of lines of code, like, why are we bragging about that? I don't actually care about how many tokens someone spends. It's not a metric that's useful.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That is just the i don't would assume they pale in comparison to the folks at open ai and anthropic just by the nature of the work they do and so on but it is definitely for an individual in the you know I don't even want to put numbers in, but like thousands for sure, but like maybe tens of thousands, I don't know, it depends, yeah.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Letting people explore. I do suspect in six to 12 months from now, a lot of companies are going to actually start asking questions around RRI. And I think that will be an uncomfortable conversation for a lot of folks.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Given me that I don't know what the policy is, I think it is unlimited. I mean, you can imagine at some point there would be. But right now, I think it's just the wrong thing to optimize for. It's like when something new comes along, it's worth.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I would assume this may not include our automatic security vulnerability scanning and like bug triaging is like when Human kicks off human jobs.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think in general, I'm actually very curious. The lab sort of operate, I feel like they operate under the assumption that people will always want the smartest model. Like you want the frontier model. And I think for certain domains that is probably true, I think if we're going to do cancer research and so on and if we're going to spend millions of dollars on something that's likely true. But that's not how we run companies either, right? Like we don't have a PhD for everything. And so I think for a lot of knowledge work tasks probably sometimes we'll get to good enough. And once you get to good enough, then you can optimize other things. Like they run locally, they're cheaper, they're faster. And I don't know why the absolute intelligence thing doesn't interest me very much. I think society is largely not capped by intelligence. I think Tyler Cowan says something similar. I don't want to put words in his mouth. And so I'm much more interested in the...”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “The analogy I like to give is a retina display, which is after I can't see the pixels, I can't see the pixels. I don't need you to make them smaller. Is it not the same for a lot of cognitive tasks, which is at some sort of level of intelligence? I don't need more and instead I want a different modality and faster. So I don't know. Those things I'm excited about.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “You very quickly run up a bill of like $300,000 a day, but The speed of inference really changes things. If the inference is slow, then you're queuing up a bunch of jobs and then you're walking around the building thinking about other things and then come back and review versus if it's nearly instant, are you still going to do this? Is this sort of multitasking the frenetic kind of thing that we currently have going on actually the thing that is sort of, you know, gives us flow state? Well, no. But if the inference becomes instant, get back to direct manipulation, right? Do you instantly sort of like mold the clay that is the code, right? I don't know. I think it depends on model capabilities, which is do people, is there a saturation on intelligence or not?”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Automation versus augmentation, fork. If I look at the really, really fast models like Spark and I forget what the Anthropic variant is where No, sorry, you still get a smart one. It's Opus, but like Opus Fast or something.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Very conflicted on this because, on one hand, I do want to, like, I believe the never bet against plain text, so a famous forum post at some point. Plain text, Markdown, like it's just such a durable thing. Code is such a durable thing. I think that expressing your thoughts in code is probably a really good thing. We can talk about why. But at the same time, I'm like, are we really going to just be chatting back and forth? And so what is the future of Figma, for example, is like a really interesting example to me because on one hand, I do see like sort of a drop in usage of Figma in some designers at Notion. And then others are like, nope, these are AI tools are wonderful. It's very hard for me to predict of like, is direct manipulation going away? Because the agent is doing the direct manipulation. The other thing that I'm curious about is this.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “In, yeah, here's the version of the product. And it's like, okay, what if we did it this other way? Oh, yeah, here's that version. And so I think that is just amazing. It sort of builds iteration into the product much earlier, right? Like Waterfall is sort of why bother”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yes. And if you look at a lot of the, it takes almost no effort to now build sort of the first version of a startup or like the first version 0.8. And then I think the last or maybe even if you're generous and say the first 90% are now done, the last 10% are still actually 90%. That's always the hardest. So I think it's cheaper to just explore a lot of paths. You can now afford to say, I'm going to send off 10 agents to explore 10 different things and then see if I was right. We used to say this at GitHub in our product reviews a lot, which is demos not memos. And then we would say, give me something to react to, which is, okay, if you're going to write a PRD, just write the change log or the blog post that a user would read. Now it's much easier to give people something to react to.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Think the first 10% of every project are now free. That's how I would describe it. So there is no point for most things to, for example, write a, I don't know. The thing has changed. I've never really been great at this, but like there's no point in writing a PRD if you can just do the janky version and sort of do the demo. What I think we should build.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Also love the Slack example because I mean, this is a, there's this graphic of what it takes to deliver a notification in Slack, the sort of decision flowchart. And that is just something that you only get to when you have real users, real scale, and decades of just, yep, we understand the customer.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I don't know. I think it's maybe even more unique in the US, but one of the great things about the US is actually specialization. It's that I get to spend dollars on something like Notion because it's not that expensive compared to me building it and then why would I waste my time? I want to do other things with my life, right? So I don't know. That's not going to go away.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Recently tweeted something along the lines of, oh, thanks to Notion AI, I finally understand and use Notion. I don't know what that says about Notion. And to me, this is a great example of Notion wasn't SAS in the traditional way. It's kind of hard to get started, but because of AI, now people can sort of, they have a tutor essentially and can build more things. And so I suspect that software will go more back into the 90s of general tools, word processor, spreadsheet. file maker pro, that kind of thing. But those will still be as a service. And then you'll still have specialized tools around security and so on of just people who go the extra mile to really solve a user problem. So I think to some degree, the SaaS apocalypse is greatly exaggerated. At the same time, are things going to stay the same? Of course not. Like, why would they?”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Rebuilding notion in a weekend for myself, just to push at the edges of frustration. I don't think people want that. I think for the most part, it's nice if you can just, people don't want to go hunting either. They just want to go to Costco and have the stake in a styrofoam packaging and pretend that it wasn't hunting or an animal in the first place. I think with software, it's like a Bret Taylor says this to software is like a garden you need to tend to it. And the thing you pay for in the as a service is the maintenance. And a bunch of specialists thinking really hard about a problem. And so I don't think that's going away. What I would probably say is that tools will become more general. I mean, I'm obviously biased. I work at Notion. I like Notion and I consider Notion to be fairly malleable. Not enough. I think it should become more malleable. We internally joked. Joanna Stern, a journalist.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “If you just think about what SaaS, the problem is the moment you have an acronym, it means a lot of very specific things. And if you're going to say, hey, is this type of SAS that we've built in the 2010s just as relevant as it was in the 2010s? The answer would be silly to say no, nothing's going to change. It'll be the same because I think you can sort of say a lot of SaaS in the 2010s was a very, very fancy form around a spreadsheet or something more generic. And the thing it did is it just guided people in the right direction to fill out that form. As in it is less malleable than a spreadsheet and that sort of is the value. As a service part is I think the thing that actually matters, which is I don't think most people actually want to maintain the full stack of software. And so whenever I see someone and I am someone here, say, oh, I just rebuilt this piece of software.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Orderly nor properly chaotic. I understand the connection now. The timeless way of building and Stuart Brand's sort of how buildings learn, I think idea is also that it's very likely that the best homes for you are not actually built by an architect. They are the thing that over a long time adapt to exactly how you would love to lead your life. And they learn over time versus immediately. And so then that is obviously a very costly version of malleability, right? If you have to rip out a wall or whatever. But I think the main thing that Peter Rams points out there is it should be a thing that's useful and a good way to figure out how something is useful is if you can change it and tweak it makes sense.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “There's many reasons. One is, I think maybe the only thing that I have in common with this very accomplished person is that we're both German. And so sometimes I joke that I also aspire to disapprovingly just point at things with my walking stick and say, this isn't good enough, this isn't good enough. The reason why is because I think if you speak German, this is one of the funniest clips that I've ever. I just die laughing every single time. 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. And I think a lot of the pieces there are predominantly things that you put in a museum for display. And if you try to sit on them, you'd be like, what is this nonsense?”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “But it has to be built on top of a platform or an operating system that encourages this because otherwise we're just doing individual, like everybody has their own individual little tool. And I don't know. I like working with people and I like communal tools. And I don't know, this is a thing that the folks at Inc and Switch are obviously as sort of at the forefront. I get to work with Jeffrey Litt every single day now that spend a lot of time thinking about how would we make software more malleable so that we feel more ownership over it without going back a long time and not having real-time collaboration and sort of the security aspects and so on.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Computing life. And I think increasingly we don't. Now, you brought this up, presumably, because I think you may have sort of not thought about malleable software too much before AI, but now you're like making your own tools maybe for podcast recording, for prepping for shows or, I don't know, whatever. There's a myriad examples. And people are awakening to this idea of like, oh, I can just make tools. And that is a form of malleable software.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Imagine you lived in an environment where you do not get to rearrange your living room and the kitchen has to be exactly set up the way that someone else decided. We would not take that, right? But that is kind of the world that we have in software right now where we have this world of apps and apps are like this very every layer is glued together of like the user interface, the data ownership and so on. And it's like this little square on your phone. The moment you're like, okay, this is a really great app, but I just want to change a little bit. That is usually not possible, right? The behavior. You have the flip side, which is you could run your own Linux distribution and go that way. And I think then what happens is you realize, oh, okay, I like the malleability, but I also have other things to do and I don't always want to start from scratch and figure out why the trackpad doesn't work. And so to me, it just comes back down to do you have ownership over you?”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Malleable software The idea that software works closer to the interest of the people that use it than the interest of the corporation that makes it. Maybe that's how I'd frame it. And in particular, I don't want to use software that is specifically just designed by the Ivory Tower in Cupertino. And I say this as a huge Apple fanboy.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Think if you tinker and if you make things, then you are now on this treadmill of just creating. And then you're like, oh, it's actually not that hard to learn how to make that chair in my office. Or let me tweak it a little bit. Or maybe, I don't know, it's like a home cooked meal is a form of tinkering, ironically, right? And I think the more you can do that in life, I think actually sort of making things is the innately human, like sort of tool making, creating art and so on. So just do that versus I think when a lot of people hear agency, they think of themselves as they're in this big machine and they're like, oh, okay, I'm going to circumvent my terrible boss or manager or whatever so that I get X, Y, and Z. It's like, no, no, just start by making things. And usually when you get better at making things, at some point, people pay attention. And it just really awakens you to the idea that”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Partially, the reason why I'm in software is the thing that I care most about is the Steve Jobs quote. One day you wake up and you realize the world is made up by people no smarter than you. And there are basically people who realize this by themselves or they have an amazing teacher early on in their life that encourages this. And the biggest through line I've found is making.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Most of the discourse in software, which is it's all about how many tokens can we spend and how many features can we ship? I'm like, okay, but where's the engineering part? And the engineering part is the you make sure that this thing works for 100 million people. And on the design side, I think there is the yes, anyone can now very quickly take a design system off the shelf, build a very usable user interface, get to the core of what's really important. But where is the delight in craft? And so I think we have to make sure that we in this sort of merging of roles don't lose the specialists on the edges. And yeah, I would say that's something we could potentially be sad if we lost it.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I think if we're not careful, we will lose specialists. And so the way I would describe this is I sometimes like to think about software in terms of physical metaphors, right? And physical metaphors somehow make it so much clearer what a prototype is versus what an engineered thing is. And if you and I were to build a hardware startup, well, we would make the first enclosures and prototypes with 3D printing and you would see all the layer lines. It would be very, very obvious to you that this is not a thing that you should just give to people to pay for. And then there's a long, windy road all the way to the end where at some point if you're very lucky you get to manufacture that product for, I don't know, 100 million people. And so then the engineering is actually the how do I optimize the factory so that we have enough yield and so that we have enough precision. And that to me, I think, is very absent right now from”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “If you started a startup, would you hire me? And I said, Well, not in the first 10. I don't need a product manager. And he's like, oh, okay, I'm going to work on the skills so that you would hire me in the first five. And that led to first spending more time in Figma instead of writing long PRDs. And now it's just, why do I have to do the Figma thing? Can't I just build the prototype and at least show you what I think and do the thinking in there, right? And so those are just sort of signs of high agency of I'm going to change the role to how I think it should be.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “There we go. Yeah, you should cut this one short and have him on. 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, you know, we're not the founders where, you know, coming in after there was already insane product market fit, but you can still contribute to the company in a way that you feel agency and you're not sort of just like, what's your role? And so Brian obviously already blurs engineering and design, but he also is probably our number one recruiter in terms of, hey, this is what the org needs. I'm going to go out and talk to people and find someone. And I think that is a thing that sort of just demonstrates it's out of the day-to-day and it demonstrates, you know, I want to just affect change. I don't care how it happens. Eric Lou is another one. The fact that he went from sort of writing a lot of strategy docs to, he asked me at some point, he's like, hey, look, at some point in the future,”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Yes, sorry. Once you're boiled frog, I would say one example would be someone like Brian Levin, who you should probably have on the podcast at some point.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Notinos are this was surprising to me, especially on the design team way above average agency compared to other places that I've worked at”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “And I think people who have true agency and they understand that the world around them is malleable will do great. And the folks who stick to, tell me really, what does it mean to be a PM? What does it mean to be a designer? And like, what's my job as an engineer? I think that will be much harder. And yeah, cultivate agency. I think that's the thing.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Suspect that this is also something that has always been the case, and we would just categorize this as founder versus not. And do you start a startup versus not, which is agency? 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. The thing that matters is agency. And I don't think agency is very evenly distributed in the world.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “It tends to be that once you awaken someone to a new material, that at some point they also blur the lines and then write production code. But I think it's really important not to forget that the reason why is to become a master of the material, not a sort of cog in the delivery mechanism for the idea.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Not because of the utility of shipping to production, but because it forces you to really interrogate the material that you're designing with.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “I actually don't care at all whether designers write code that lands in production. The reason I like thinking in code is Because it forces you to consider the medium, if then all of that gets thrown out, great. So for example, I think the two extremes would be if a PM or designer knows how to tweak with pick your favorite, they're all the same codecs, cloud code, whatever. If they know how to tweak small details of the UI, but they don't understand how an agent loop works, I would much rather take the designer RPM that deeply has an affinity for understanding how agent loops work and can design those than someone who can sort of write traditional software and tweak styles. And that's really hard because I think the only way that you can actually get to understanding agent loops is if you build them in the material that they're made of, which is currently code, and increasingly so if you look at all the coding harnesses, basically the operating systems of the 90s, right? And so I think that's why I care that people code.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “On the pushing to production, I think it's a spectrum, obviously small changes, styling tweaks, and so on. It's a given that you can just do that now. I do have a general sort of maybe issue with vibe coding in the sense of I don't feel like the quality of software has increased all that much in the last 12 months. I think maybe the amount of software has, but it's very, very hard to find software that is reliable. And so the way we see it is it's not so much about pushing to production and having designers deploy. It's about them thinking and designing in the medium that will actually end up being the real thing once engineering takes it over.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Mostly code and prototype in code. And then they are asked by other teams in marketing and so on to reverse engineer that in Figma because they use that to create assets for videos and so on. And so obviously that is kind of silly, right? That seems like busy work.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I feel so uncomfortable predicting the future in terms of where things are heading because, well, predicting exponentials is really hard. But I'll take the stab at it. It is very, very useful for designers to move from manipulating Figma documents into code. That has always been useful. I've always been camp designers should code in a previous life. I led design and product at GitHub. GitHub designers before LLMs contributed to GitHub, I think in the top contributors to GitHub itself, like 10% were designers. Right now, processes are sort of breaking. One is we have designers who now”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yes, and that was the first version. It sort of aligned with model capabilities at the time. We don't always use maybe EdNotion in sort of the main code base is not always the most agent friendly because iterations and a decade of patterns. And so we optimized for, okay, how can we make this the least scary and most one-shotable so that people would just have to overcome this sort of, oh, the fear of the terminal, but then it just becomes chatting. And we recreated a bunch of the patterns and UIs that exist in that playground. Now, the good news is that's just to get people on the treadmill because as model capabilities get better, now we have the same designers NPMs also just contributing to the production code base to a lesser degree, of course. But like you can see where the trend is headed as model capabilities get better, the amount of work that you can do.”

    2026-05-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source