TL; DR: AI Age Manager — Food for Agile Thought #565
Welcome to the 565th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,263 peers. This week, Camille Fournier calls middle management’s AI-era obituary premature, much as Gergely Orosz sees planning and tests outlasting handwritten code. The point that leaders confuse visibility with understanding fits AI transcripts, which Teresa Torres and Petra Wille fear can become weapons. Abundance misleads, too: more code isn’t more revenue for David Pereira and Rich Mironov, a refined backlog can mean the wrong product for Christopher Cummings, and Pavel Samsonov rejects synthetic users’ false certainty.
Next, Jillian Vordick and Stephanie Stamm find only 11% of businesses forecast AI spending accurately, and Kyle Poyar suggests how to make bills predictable. Clear plans are rare, too: Nick Graveline sees AI adoption stalling on storytelling, not tooling. Andrew Chen doubts agents inherently create network effects, yet as they do legwork, Andrej Karpathy sees human work shifting toward understanding, which anchors Alex Ewerlöf’s rejection of ‘coding is solved’: you can’t answer for code you don’t understand.
Lastly, Charity Majors ties psychological safety to uncomfortable learning, not comfort, and Maarten Dalmijn likewise raises the bar rather than designing for the least competent. Mark Levison blames situations instead: most ‘difficult’ colleagues are good people trapped by incentives or missing strategy. Jeff Gothelf sees this gap turning AI mandates into chaos and recommends spending one afternoon on goals and OKRs. Andi Roberts similarly reads matrix power beyond titles, mapping who can affect an outcome.
Disclaimer: I read Charniak/McDermott’s book on “Artificial Intelligence” decades ago; of course, I use AI for research, translations, proofreading, challenging story arcs and article structures, and summarization. It is a production tool, not a substitute for thinking.
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Sooner or later, a CFO will ask what your AI use actually returns. “It saves me time” will not survive that meeting.
The first wave of AI adoption rewarded practitioners who learned to prompt. That skill still matters, and this course still teaches it. The second wave rewards something rarer: people who can turn individual AI use into knowledge that survives departures, spend that can be explained and steered, and output that organizations can trust. That work is process design and change management. You have been doing both for years, on harder problems than this.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: AI Age Manager
: The Manager’s Path in the Age of AI
Camille Fournier suggests AI fuels cheap-code turf wars while leaders confuse visibility with understanding. Rather than cutting managers, she proposes spending productivity gains on more human conversations and design reviews. She also notes that declaring management dead looks premature: Meta recently rolled back some of its most aggressive manager reductions.
🎯 Product
and : 🎙️ Recorded Conversations
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille suggest AI transcripts reveal how unreliable memory is, but can turn into weapons. They propose permitting colleagues to evolve instead of litigating old statements.
and : 📺 10X Code ≠ 10X Revenue
David Pereira’s podcast with Rich Mironov explores why ten times more code does not mean ten times more revenue: when everyone can prototype, the hard question becomes what actually ships.
: The Successful Product Manager, 17 Years Later
Christopher Cummings revisits his 2009 product manager deck. Rejecting product narcissism holds up, but 'manages the backlog' gets cut, since a beautifully groomed backlog can still mean the wrong product.
: The fake double diamond is dead. The real double diamond is immortal.
Pavel Samsonov suggests AI cannot replace divergent thinking: synthetic users offer false certainty upfront, which never spares you from iteration. Teams need both upfront problem definition and real, hypothesis-driven experiments.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
(via The Wall Street Journal): Spending on AI Is Becoming Almost Impossible for Businesses to Budget
Jillian Vordick and Stephanie Stamm show why AI budgets break: cheaper models actually cost more in 32% of tested cases, and only 11% of surveyed businesses forecast AI spending accurately.
: The AI monetization debate shifts again
Kyle Poyar suggests that 'you only pay for what you use' sounds great until the first overage bill. He proposes changing pricing for customers, not investors, and making bills predictable first.
: Will agents have network effects?
Andrew Chen suggests agents don't inherently have network effects, since your agent talks to mine like Gmail to Outlook. The real question is where network effects live and whether horizontal agents can wall them in.
: We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks.
Andrej Karpathy suggests that as agents do more legwork, human work shifts to oversight and understanding, so he proposes asking LLMs for diagrams, HTML pages, and even disposable explainer videos.
(via Duarte): A Guide to AI Adoption: Change Communication that Works
Nick Graveline suggests AI adoption stalls less on tooling than on storytelling: only a quarter of workers say their company communicated a clear AI plan. He proposes treating resistance as feedback, not dissent to squash.
🖥 🇬🇧 The A3 Delegation System Pilot Workshop, December 3-17, 2026, Starting at $149
Your team already delegates work to AI: reports, research, customer feedback analysis, stakeholder communication, or parts of operational workflows.
But can you answer these questions without improvising?
- What may AI decide, and what must remain a human decision?
- What does “good enough” mean for this particular work?
- Who verifies the result before somebody acts on it?
- Who checks whether the delegation still works after the model or workflow changes?
If those answers live in one person’s head, or nowhere, your problem is no longer prompting. You have a delegation problem.
The A3 Delegation System gives you a practical way to decide what AI may do, hand over the work clearly, define acceptable results, and inspect the AI delegation over time. The class is in English. 🇬🇧
Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 The A3 Delegation System Pilot Workshop, December 3-17, 2026, Starting at $149.
➿ Agile & Leadership
: If your team is happy, are you doing a good job?
Charity Majors suggests managing to team happiness misses the point: psychological safety exists to enable learning, which often feels uncomfortable, not to spare anyone from ever feeling bad at work.
: Spoon-Feeding Competence Rot: Don’t Let Your Least Competent People Dictate How Everyone Works
Maarten Dalmijn suggests designing rules and processes around your least competent people caps everyone else: top performers lose freedom, innovation stalls, and nobody improves. He proposes raising the bar instead.
: Coding is NOT solved
Alex Ewerlöf challenges the 'coding is solved' narrative: code is a byproduct of thinking, AI cannot be held accountable, and you cannot be accountable for code you do not understand.
: Difficult Team Member? Change the Situation, Not the Person
Mark Levison suggests your 'difficult' colleague is usually a good person stuck in a difficult situation: incentives, pressure, fear, or missing strategy. Change the situation, and the difficult person disappears.
📯 How to Catch AI Delegation Drift Before Your Board Does
When AI-assisted output still looks fine, it is tempting to conclude the delegation is fine. In my October 6 webinar with Scrum.org on the AI Delegation Audit, I walked through a fictional case in which that belief held for months, then fell apart in a board meeting, and showed the check that would have caught it.
Thesis: The AI Delegation Audit is a 45- to 60-minute review in the A3 Delegation System, run like a Sprint Retrospective, that checks whether a team’s AI delegations still hold; the post explains its four checks with a fictional case and shares the Scrum.org webinar recording.
👉 Learn more: How to Catch AI Delegation Drift Before Your Board Does.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: The state of the tech industry in 2026
Gergely Orosz shows that engineers barely write code by hand anymore; code reviews have become theater, and quality is slipping. Yet teams, planning, and tests still matter, as do old practices.
: The Lean Strategy Canvas — A focusing tool for the AI era
Jeff Gothelf suggests piling AI mandates onto work disconnected from strategy adds chaos. His fix is to spend one afternoon agreeing on the goal, obstacles, where to play, how to win, and OKRs.
: Power Mapping in a Matrix Organisation: A Practical Guide
Andi Roberts suggests job titles only hint at matrix power. He proposes mapping who can affect a specific outcome, who adapts when the script fails, and who bridges disconnected groups.
📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
You can secure your seat for Scrum training classes, workshops, and meetups directly by following the corresponding link in the table below:
| Date | Class and Language | City | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 🇩🇪 November 3-4, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1189 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 🇬🇧 November 27, 2026 | GUARANTEED: AI4Agile Online Course v4 (AI4Agile Certificate; English; Online Course) | Online Course | $149 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 🇬🇧 December 3-17, 2026 | A3 Delegation System Pilot Workshop 2 (English; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | $149 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 🇩🇪 December 8-9, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1189 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 🇬🇧 December 15-16, 2026 | Professional Scrum Master – Advanced Training (PSM II; English; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1189 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 🇩🇪 February 16-17, 2027 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1189 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
See all upcoming classes here.
You can book your seat for the training directly by following the corresponding links to the ticket shop. If the procurement process of your organization requires a different purchasing process, please contact Berlin Product People GmbH directly.
📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product YouTube channel to improve learning, for example, about the AI Age Manager:
- Stop Writing Prompts. Let AI Do It for You — Hack #01, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- Socratic Prompting — Hack #10, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- Check Your AI’s Plan Before — Hack #7, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- From Product Requirements to Experiments to Learnings — Supported by Generative AI.
- Never Accept an LLM’s First Offer — Improve GenAI’s Usefulness w/ Feedback Loops and Challenges.
✋ Do Not Miss Out: Learn more about the AI Age Manager — Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack Community and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world.
If you would like to join, all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.
Help your team to learn about how AI Intensifies Work by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
