Max Schoening, Head of Product at Notion and former VP of Design at GitHub, argues that agency separates the people who thrive in the AI era from those who fall behind. Not skills. Agency. His central claim: the first 10% of any project is now effectively free, and most teams are not operationally ready to act on that fact.
Schoening's framework for great products centers on a 'tiny core': one irreducible interaction that everything else is built around. iPhone multitouch, the GitHub pull request, Notion blocks, Dropbox's menu bar icon. He also pushes back directly on SaaSpocalypse predictions, while making a sharper point: software volume has exploded but quality has not, and that gap is where the next defensible products get built.
The original is worth reading for how Schoening actually moved designers and PMs at Notion to prototype in the terminal and ship code, not just spec it. The mechanics of that culture shift are specific and transferable. If you manage non-engineers in a team trying to move faster with AI, this is the operational playbook you are missing.
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