How to know if you have agency (and how to build it)
Job postings keep asking for “high agency” people, and they almost never say what they mean by it. It’s one of those words like “hard worker” or “go-getter” that nobody will admit they lack, which makes it pretty useless as a signal on its own. On my quest for clarity on this topic, I found it in a pretty interesting place.
I read a lot of job descriptions for a side project, a remote PM job board. After a few hundred of them I noticed something. About a fifth now mention AI agents, and a growing number are hiring people specifically to build them. And here’s the part that stuck with me: when a company describes what it wants an AI agent to do, it gets specific - far more specific than it ever gets about the humans it’s trying to hire.
The clearest example I found is Hightouch, a self-described agentic marketing platform built on top of a customer data warehouse. They’re hiring a Lead Product Manager for their Agentic Ads Platform, and this is how they describe the thing they want to build:
> Best-in-class agentic creation experience. The interaction model for how marketers work with agents to go from objective to live campaign. This means the conversational interface, the review and approval workflows, the feedback loops that help agents learn what “good” looks like for each brand, and the progressive autonomy controls that let teams start with full human approval and graduate to agent-led execution as trust builds.
Now read that again with the word “agent” taken out. What’s left is a job description for a person:
- Take an ambiguous directive
- Ask questions until the requirements are clear
- Bring back deliverables for approval
- Learn from the feedback
- Execute, then run the loop again
And then the last line, which describes the success metric: “progressive autonomy controls that let teams start with full human approval and graduate to agent-led execution as trust builds.”
That description was written down, carefully, for a piece of marketing software. But I’ve never seen that type of description for the people doing the work, even though it describes them exactly. You don’t hand a new person the keys on day one. They earn them, slowly, by taking a fuzzy ask, clarifying it, doing the work, showing their manager, adjusting, and going around again, until one day the manager notices they’ve stopped checking because they no longer need to. The loop is the same whether the thing running it is made of code or not: context goes in, an action comes out, the feedback bends the next action, and trust compounds with every turn.
So here’s a definition we can actually use.
Agency is the ability to take an ambiguous goal and close the loop on it without being managed through every step, in a way that earns you more of those goals.
How to know if you have it
Forget how proactive you feel. Look at the actual loop over your last few months of work and answer honestly:
- When you got a vague directive, did you drive it forward, or did you wait for it to be made concrete for you?
- When something was clearly broken but technically “not your job,” did you pick it up, or did you assume someone else would?
- When you got feedback, did the next version actually change, or did you defend the first one?
- Has anyone stopped checking your work lately? That last one is the real tell. Trust graduating toward “agent-led execution” is the only outside proof the loop is working. If your manager is reviewing your work at the same resolution they were a year ago, you haven’t built agency yet, no matter how busy you’ve been.
The phrases for its absence are familiar. That’s not my job. Someone else will handle it. I wasn’t sure, so I waited. None of those are about what you’re capable of, but they’re about where you’ve decided your lane ends.
How to build it
Inside your job, stop treating your role as a lane. Find the thing that’s half-broken and that nobody owns, take it, get the people who care about it bought in, ship something, and take the feedback to heart. Doing more work isn’t the point. Running one full loop, start to finish, on something nobody handed you is the point, because that’s what earns you the next problem, which will be bigger and fuzzier than the last. And every turn teaches you a little more about how the business actually works, which is the thing that makes your next call sharper than your last.
Outside your job, build the same muscle on something nobody assigned you at all. There has never been a better time for it, because you have an infinitely patient teacher sitting in a browser tab. Pick something you’ve always wanted to make and go make it, even if it has nothing to do with your day job. The subject doesn’t matter and doesn’t have to transfer. What transfers is the rep: taking something ambiguous you have no template for and dragging it all the way to done.
Eighteen months ago I had never built a website, and I mostly used ChatGPT to ask it dumb questions. Today I have a job board that scrapes, enriches, and refreshes itself most of the way on its own, and I built it because I was curious, not because anyone asked. I can’t stop tinkering with it. The questions I ask myself are always loop questions. How do I automate more of this? How do I cut the time on that? How do I make it more useful for the one person I’m building it for? The more I treated the whole thing as mine, instead of staying in some imagined lane, the more agency I built, and the more it leaked back into everything else I do.
Curiosity points you at the problems nobody handed you. Closing the loop on them, over and over, is what turns those problems into trust. Do that enough times, at work and outside it, and “high agency” stops being a phrase you’re hoping a recruiter notices in you - it becomes the truest line on your resume.