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

By Lenny's Podcast

Categories: Product, Startup, VC

Summary

Agency—not skills—is the competitive advantage in the AI era. Max Schoening from Notion reveals that AI has made the first 10% of every project nearly free, shifting focus from skill acquisition to building taste and conviction to ship products that resonate with users.

Key Takeaways

  1. The skill barrier has collapsed. AI tools have made prototyping the first version of a startup require almost no effort, eliminating traditional excuses about skill gaps and forcing focus to shift toward judgment and execution.
  2. Build taste through deliberate practice. Taste means running a mental simulation to predict whether a specific user group will love your idea—it's trainable like a model through repeated reps and feedback loops.
  3. One superpower core wins. The biggest product pitfall is adding features incrementally thinking 'one more thing' will make it great. Instead, identify one tiny core feature that is exceptionally good and defensible.
  4. Create LLM-friendly playgrounds for iteration. Notion built a separate isolated codebase optimized for AI tools (not production code) to lower the fear barrier and enable designers/PMs to ship code as model capabilities improve.
  5. Agency is unevenly distributed, but awakeable. Realizing 'the world is made up by people no smarter than you' triggers the conviction to change things—this mindset shift matters more than accumulating technical skills in the AI era.

Topics

Transcript Excerpt

Before 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. >> Do you have a piece of advice for someone that wants to develop this within themselves? >> I tell this to myself. Could you drive notion like it's stolen? One day you wake up and you realize the world is made up by people no sm...