Max Schoening on Malleable Software, Agency, and Building Products in the AI Era

Speaker:
Max Schoening
Source:
Max Schoening on Malleable Software, Agency, and Building Products in the AI Era · ~2024–2025
Episode:
Listen →
transcriptlennys-podcastproduct-managementai-toolsnotionmalleable-softwareagencyproduct-taste

Max Schoening on Malleable Software, Agency, and Building Products in the AI Era

Key ideas

  • Malleable software as the design north star. Schoening defines malleable software as software that works closer to the interests of the people who use it than the interests of the corporation that makes it. The canonical failure mode is software that is technically functional but locked into the mental model of its designers — the user adapts to the tool rather than the tool adapting to the user. AI changes this constraint: models can interpret intent without forcing users to learn a fixed vocabulary.
  • Agency is the scarce resource, not skill. With AI providing skill on demand — coding, design, writing — the bottleneck shifts to the person who knows what they want and moves decisively toward it. Schoening asks of Notion users: “Do you drive it like it’s stolen?” The question is whether you exploit the full latitude of the tool or remain in a cautious narrow lane. Agency is unevenly distributed; building products that expand it is the meaningful design challenge.
  • The first 10% is now free. The cost of building the first version of almost anything has collapsed to near zero. That changes what questions are worth asking. Teams used to front-load validation because building was expensive; now the first prototype is essentially a sketch. The strategic challenge shifts from “can we build this?” to “which of the countless things we could now build should we?” The taste and judgment required to answer that question have increased in value.
  • Every great product has one tiny core that is a superpower. GitHub’s pull request, Heroku’s git push, Notion’s slash command, Figma’s real-time collaboration cursor, Dropbox’s menu bar icon — in each case, the core is a single interaction that is so unexpectedly good it defines the product’s identity. Building for that interaction (not the surrounding surface area) is the design priority. Schoening frames this as a “playground” approach: find the one thing that is exceptional, make it as good as possible, and let other things be deliberately rough.
  • Taste as a virtual machine. Taste, for Schoening, is the ability to run a simulation: given an idea, predict whether a specific in-group will like it. It is not universal aesthetic preference but calibrated domain prediction. It is built through deliberate exposure — studying world-class work, attempting to replicate it, and examining the gap between the attempt and the original. Bret Victor’s “Stop Drawing Dead Fish” is a reference point for the kind of taste-driven constraint that generates wholly new product primitives.

Overview

Max Schoening is Head of Product at Notion. Before Notion he was a PM at Google, design lead at Heroku, and head of design and product at GitHub under Nat Friedman. He is also a twice-failed founder, having built a Notion-like tool in 2014 that was overtaken when Notion pivoted to the same idea at the same moment. The episode covers: the definition and implications of malleable software, why agency is now the scarce resource, the “first 10% is free” reframe, the playground prototyping method for AI-assisted product development, the UBI-as-knowledge-work provocation, Bret Victor’s influence, taste as a virtual machine, and how to identify the tiny core superpower in a product. Schoening also recommends three books that form his intellectual frame: Code by Charles Petzold, Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich, and Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.