The Age of Agency:
Roles Merge, AI Accelerates

Max Schoening

Head of Product, Notion
Design Leader, Engineer, Founder

MAY 1 2026

The Core

Agency Over Skills

"Even if you have the skills at your fingertips because an LLM helps you, the thing that matters is agency. Agency is not evenly distributed in the world."

Skills are now abundant (AI provides them instantly)
Agency is what separates people who ship from those who don't
The shift: from "I can't because [skill issue]" to "I will make it happen"
Making things builds agency, start there, everything else follows

The Shift

Designers Code, PMs Ship, Engineers Think

The playground: LLM-friendly codebase. Designers prototype AI interactions without prod complexity
Agent loops: Understanding how the material works (terminal, TUI, developer tools)
Production: As model capability improves, the same people contribute to real codebase
The key insight: Code is the material. You must work in the material to master it

Static vs. interactiveDesigning a chat in Figma is like drawing a dead fish. You must feel the interaction, the feedback loop, the agent behavior to truly design for AI.

The Playbook

Building Agency: From Tinkerer to Changemaker

Start making things: Tinkering is how agency awakens. A home-cooked meal, tweaking a chair, it's all making
Overcome the terminal fear: Encourage people to use TUI, not GUIs. They'll naturally pull at threads and learn the substrate
Do it like you own it: "Drive Notion like it's stolen", contribute outside your role description
Build for the material, not the checkbox: Your job is to master what you're building with, not to deliver features

Brian Levin example

Blurs engineering + design. Also recruited team members. Acts like an owner even without the title.

Eric Lou example

Went from writing PRDs to building prototypes in code to asking "why not just think in the medium itself?"

The Warning

Don't Lose the Specialists

As roles merge, engineering excellence could disappear
Remember: prototyping ≠ production software
Hardware teaches us: 3D-printed prototype with layer lines ≠ factory-optimized product for 100M people
On design side: design systems are everywhere, but where's the craft and delight?

The dualityCode is a tool for designers and PMs to think in the material. But specialists are still needed to ship at scale with quality.

Contrarian Takes

Max on AI, Software, and the Future

✗AI is getting better at everythingINSTEAD →✓ AI is only exponentially better at coding. Writing, creative work, not really. Software will eat more domains instead.

✗Different roles transform at different speedsINSTEAD →✓ As coding cost → zero, software engineering principles spread into marketing, HR, sales. Software eats the world faster.

✗We already have universal basic income UBIINSTEAD →✓ It's called knowledge work. If you can code, design, write, you have economic power without gatekeepers.

✗Products that win are feature-richINSTEAD →✓ Products that make you feel like a superhero win. Coding assistants > roasting bots because you own the work.

Based on Max Schoening's episode on Lenny's Podcast. All ideas on this page are from the episode.Watch on YouTube Follow @mschoening on X

GO DEEPER IN THE EPISODE

01:55 The origin story of designers coding at Notion 06:30 How much designers and PMs are shipping today 08:24 The balance between shipping code and strategic work 10:32 Why agency will help you thrive in the AI era 11:49 Examples of high agency at Notion 13:52 What we might lose as roles merge 15:56 Advice for developing agency 17:42 Malleable software explained 20:43 The Dieter Rams video and design philosophy 24:00 The SaaS apocalypse debate 28:25 How product building has changed in the past two years 30:27 What’s next in how we build products 34:16 Token spend and ROI conversations 37:39 Getting people to change how they work 39:04 Max’s AI stack 41:41 Which roles AI will transform next 44:26 When companies will start caring about ROI 48:38 Why Notion AI is so successful 51:47 How to ship more quickly while maintaining quality 56:40 Building taste through iterations 1:00:09 What matters most in building successful products 1:05:06 Using the jobs-to-be-done framework 1:07:28 Hot take on universal basic income 1:09:26 What Max would do with AGI 1:10:53 Contrarian corner 1:13:14 Failure corner 1:16:20 Advice for young people in Silicon Valley 1:19:20 Lightning round and final thoughts

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