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.
The High-Agency Designer: A low-agency designer receives a brief and produces a set of beautiful mockups. A high-agency designer receives the same brief, identifies a critical flaw in the user flow that no one else saw, and builds a quick prototype to validate a better approach before any detailed design work begins. They don't just make things pretty; they solve the user's problem.
Are You Hiring for Agency?
The tragedy is that most companies are terrible at identifying and rewarding agency. Our interview processes are often designed to filter for intelligence and conformity, not initiative. We ask candidates to solve well-defined brain teasers instead of giving them an ambiguous, real-world problem and seeing if they take ownership of it.
As leaders, we must consciously shift our focus. Are you asking questions that reveal a candidate's internal locus of control? Are you looking for a history of proactive problem-solving, even on a small scale? Are you creating a culture where taking initiative is rewarded, even if it occasionally leads to failure?
Conclusion
The scarcity of agency is the single biggest bottleneck to a company's potential. You can hire a team of geniuses, but if they are all waiting to be told what to do, you will be outmaneuvered by a smaller, less pedigreed team that is relentlessly proactive.
We must build an organization where the default is not to wait, but to act. Because in the end, the companies that win are not the ones with the most intelligent people, but the ones who can most effectively translate that intelligence into action.