Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion)
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For, 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. You have a piece of advice for someone that wants to develop this within themselves. I tell this to myself, "If you drive notion like it's stolen, one day you wake up and you realize the world is made up by people no smarter than you." It just really awakens you to the idea that you can just change things. If you think about your job a couple years ago, what's most changed? The first 10% of every project are now free. It takes almost no effort to now build the first version of a startup. Taste comes up a lot now. Taste actually means you're able to run a virtual machine in your head where given an idea, you can predict for a certain in-group whether they're going to like it or not. You just have to do reps, it's almost like training a model. What do you think matters to building a successful product? All the great products have something tiny that is a superpower. One tiny core that is so exceptionally good. One of the biggest pitfalls is if you get into the loop of if I just add one more thing to the product, it will be finally great. That never works. Give this hot take on universal basic income. We already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work. Today my guest is Max Showning. Max is a hard person to describe. He was a product manager at Google. He ran the design team at Heroku. He was a design leader and an engineer at GitHub, under Nat Friedman. He's also a two-time founder and is now head of product at Notion. He is one of the most successful AI forward product leaders out there and as you'll soon see one of the deepest thinkers on how AI impacts how we build and how we use software. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductcast.com for an insane set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Max Showning. I feel like there's this quote I think about when I think about you and you being on this podcast, it comes from the Bible. Just paraphrasing, the quote is, "I was made for such a time as this." I feel like there's this all this talk about roles merging, designers, becoming the M's engineers, everyone's the same, the Venn diagrams collapsing. You've been that for a long time. It's hard to even describe what you are and what you've done. You've done all the things. I feel like you have such a unique insight into where things are heading. I want to start with this broad question. What have you seen about where things are going for product teams for product building as AI becomes more powerful, as we integrate it more into our workflows? Ask you this because I've heard for so many people at Notion that you are the reason that designers are shipping code, PMs are shipping code. You're not just living in the future, you're pushing the whole team and company to live
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