Our Obsession with Intelligence
The tech industry has a deep-seated reverence for intelligence. We fetishize IQ, celebrate cleverness, and design interview processes that feel more like academic exams than assessments of real-world capability. We've built a culture that venerates the brilliant mind.
But after years of building and leading product teams, I've come to a firm conclusion: intelligence is overrated. It's table stakes, a baseline requirement. But it is not the trait that separates a good team from a great one. The most powerful, and by far the scarcest, quality is something else entirely: agency.
Agency is the Engine, Intelligence is the Map
So what is agency? It's the innate capacity to take initiative, to own an outcome, and to proactively shape your environment. It's the quiet, internal engine of someone who doesn't wait for permission or for a perfectly defined path. They see a problem, and their default response is, "I'll figure it out."
- A person with high intelligence can analyze a complex problem and articulate an elegant solution.
- A person with high agency will identify that problem before being asked, drive the conversation toward a decision, and take ownership of implementing the solution, even in the face of ambiguity and obstacles.
Intelligence provides the map, but agency drives the car. In a high-growth environment, I will bet on the driver over the map-reader every single time. A team of brilliant people with low agency will analyze a problem to death, waiting for the perfect conditions to act. A team with high agency will make a good decision, act on it, learn, and iterate their way to a great outcome.
What High Agency Looks Like in Practice
Agency isn't a theoretical concept; it's a set of observable behaviors that are immediately recognizable in a product organization.
The High-Agency Product Manager: A low-agency PM receives a feature request from sales and translates it into a ticket for engineering. A high-agency PM receives the same request, immediately questions its premise, schedules three customer calls to diagnose the root problem, discovers a much larger underlying issue, and comes back with a proposal for a completely different—and far more valuable—solution. They don't just manage the backlog; they shape the business.
The High-Agency Engineer: A low-agency engineer takes a ticket, writes the code to the exact specification, and moves on. A high-agency engineer takes the same ticket, recognizes that the proposed implementation will create significant technical debt, and proactively designs a more scalable architecture. They don't just write code; they build a foundation.