Lenny's Podcast: Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era
What the video covers
Published May 3, 2026, on Lenny Rachitsky’s YouTube channel, this conversation features Max Schoening, head of product at Notion. Schoening’s career spans work as a PM at Google, leading design at Heroku, VP of Design at GitHub, and two founding roles before joining Notion. The episode draws on that range of experience to argue for a different way of thinking about professional development when the tools available to product teams change faster than any skill curriculum can track.
The central argument is that agency — the disposition to take initiative, experiment, and drive outcomes without waiting for a complete plan — matters more than the particular skills a PM has accumulated. This is not a case against learning but against the assumption that acquiring the right capabilities will, by itself, produce better results when so much of what was previously required is now handled by AI.
The episode uses Notion as a running example. Schoening describes how the team gets designers and PMs to prototype in the terminal and ship code, not as a technical upskilling exercise, but as a way of maintaining a direct relationship with what the product does. The phrase “drive it like it’s stolen” — Notion’s internal approach to shipping — captures something specific: treating the AI-era reality that the first 10% of every project is now nearly free as an invitation to start more things, get signal faster, and cut what does not work sooner.
Who it’s for
Product managers and product leaders thinking about how to develop themselves and their teams when capabilities change quickly and traditional role definitions are becoming less reliable as organizing principles. Also relevant for PMs who have found themselves accumulating courses and certifications without a corresponding improvement in output.
Key takeaways
1. Agency beats skill accumulation in rapidly changing environments. When the tools shift every few months, the ability to pick up new approaches and execute without a complete playbook is worth more than depth in any particular skill. Schoening’s point is that PMs who wait until they are fully prepared before using a new capability will consistently lag behind those who experiment first and learn through doing.
2. The “tiny core” theory identifies where product value actually lives. Each breakout product has a single interaction that made everything else possible — multitouch for the iPhone, pull requests for GitHub, blocks for Notion, the menu bar for Dropbox. Identifying that core early, before building surrounding features, is what lets teams concentrate resources on what actually matters and avoid shipping capabilities that do not connect to the moment of real value.
3. More software has been built but quality has not improved proportionally. Schoening’s critique of the current moment is that vibe coding increased volume without reliably increasing quality. The PM’s role in this environment is to maintain judgment about whether the right problem is being solved — a question that AI tools cannot yet answer on their own.
4. Prototyping in unfamiliar environments reduces specification error. Getting designers and PMs to work in the terminal or write code is not about making everyone an engineer. It reduces the distance between the person who decides what gets built and the system that builds it, which is where most specification errors and slow feedback cycles originate. The point is a shorter path from intent to artifact, not a blurring of roles.
Worth watching if
You are a PM or product leader asking whether building technical skills is a worthwhile investment right now, or trying to decide how to structure team practices when the ground is shifting quickly. Schoening’s answer is concrete and grounded in what is working at Notion specifically, rather than staying at the level of general advice.