Stefan Wolpers

Food for Agile Thought #514: State of AI Report 2025, Stakeholder Management, What Breaks Product Decisions, 25 Years of XP

by Stefan Wolpers | 2025-10-10 News

TL; DR: State of AI Report 2025 — Food for Agile Thought #514

Welcome to the 514th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,403 peers. This week, Nathan Benaich’s State of AI Report 2025 highlights advancements in reasoning, China’s momentum, massive compute, sharper geopolitics, and a pragmatic shift toward reliability and governance. Jenny Wanger offers a hands-on way to surface implicit strategy through learner-mode interviews, drafting, and iterative feedback, while John Cutler tackles product-centricity in non-digital firms, urging a networked operating model that links funding, intent, collaboration, architecture, and outcomes. Nino Paoli notes Citi’s prompt training push while warning that real impact needs ongoing upskilling and integration. Additionally, Maarten Dalmijn highlights trust as the actual bottleneck that must be addressed before AI can effectively amplify execution.

Next, Roman Pichler sharpens stakeholder management with a power-interest focus, trust building, early involvement, and NVC for real conflict resolution. David Pereira draws out Ryan Singer on keeping six-week bets lean through framing, alignment, and timely founder input, while David Shapiro challenges “AI pilot failure” myths, focusing on integration and governance issues. Then, Sangeet Paul Choudary shifts AI agent talk to coordination and standards, and Dave Rooney marks 25 years of XP, calling for TDD, pairing, CD, and lean flow.

Lastly, Casey Newton probes OpenAI’s platform push, weighing integrations against privacy, incentives, and trust. Teresa Torres urges teams to own interview synthesis, then use AI to spot cross-patterns without losing empathy or skill. Sean Goedecke demonstrates that staff engineers can influence politics by aligning momentum and delivering visible wins, and Shane Hastie and Marcos Arribas share culture-at-scale practices from autonomy to right-sized quality. Finally, Anton Zaides advocates ruthless meeting hygiene to protect deep engineering flow.

Food for Agile Thought #514: State of AI Report 2025, Stakeholder Management, What Breaks Product Decisions, XP at 25 — Age-of-Product.com

The Agile AI Manifesto

by Stefan Wolpers | 2025-10-05 Agile and ScrumAgile Transition

TL;DR: The Agile Manifesto Anticipated AI

The Agile world is splitting into two camps: Those convinced AI will automate practitioners out of existence, and those dismissing it as another crypto-level fad. Both are wrong. The evidence reveals something far more interesting and urgent: Principles written in 2001, before anyone imagined GPT-Whatever, align remarkably well with the most transformative technology of recent years. This is not a coincidence. I believe it is proof that human-centric values transcend technological disruption; it is the Agile AI Manifesto.

And coming back to the two camps, here is what both miss: The biggest threat is not that AI replaces agile practitioners. It is AI that reveals what many organizations have suspected. They never needed Agile practitioners. They needed someone to manage Jira.

If your value proposition is running ceremonies, I deliberately do not refer to them as “events,” maintaining Product Backlogs, and generating burndown charts, AI reveals you were doing work the organization could have automated a decade ago. The separation is between practitioners who do real Agile work and those who perform Agile theater. AI is an expertise detector.

The Agile AI Manifesto: The Agile Manifesto Predicted AI and AI Maximalists and AI Luddites Are Wrong — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #513: No AI-Disruption, Building Influence as a PM, 2025 Product Metrics, Against Generative AI

by Stefan Wolpers | 2025-10-03 News

TL; DR: No AI-Disruption — Food for Agile Thought #513

Welcome to the 513th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,441 peers. This week, Martha Gimbel, Molly Kinder, Joshua Kendall, and Maddie Lee report that there have been no economy-wide AI-disruption of the labor market since 2022 and call for better usage data. Maarten Dalmijn warns AI sped shipping bloats products and urges subtraction-minded PMs. Brian Balfour and Lauryn Motamedi rethink SaaS pricing by leveraging system-level levers and providing customer education. Also, Ethan Mollick shows near-expert AI agents shifting tasks under expert oversight, and Naval Ravikant advocates for iterative simplification and clear ownership.

Next, Chad McAllister interviews Rich Mironov on product leadership that speaks revenue, merchandises wins, cuts waste, and mentors for pragmatic team design. At the same time, Jana Paulech cautions against endless discovery and advocates simple, hypothesis-led research tied to business goals. Edward Zitron argues the generative AI boom is a fragile, Nvidia-dependent bubble. Leah Tharin spotlights 2025 benchmarks where activation speed drives retention, and OpenAI unveils GDPval, expert-graded tasks showing frontier models nearing expert quality.

Lastly, Jing Hu reports research showing that AIs favor AI-written content by 60 to 95 percent, urging audits of AI gatekeepers and strategic polishing without compromising human judgment. Seth Godin frames AI as infrastructure, shifting value to ambition, taste, and community. John Cutler, on the other hand, warns against comforting narratives, urging leaders to co-author cause-and-effect stories and surface risks early. Finally, Barry O’Reilly rejects maturity models, favoring outcome metrics, experiments, coaching, and DORA-like measures.

Food for Agile Thought #513: No AI-Disruption, Building Influence as a PM, 2025 Product Metrics, Against Generative AI — Age-of-Product.com

AI Risks: Why Product Professionals Are Sleepwalking Into Strategic Irrelevance

by Stefan Wolpers | 2025-09-28 Agile and ScrumAgile Transition

TL; DR: AI Risks — It’s A Trap!

AI is tremendously helpful in the hands of a skilled operator. It can accelerate research, generate insights, and support better decision-making. But here’s what the AI evangelists won’t tell you: it can be equally damaging when fundamental AI risks are ignored.

The main risk is a gradual transfer of product strategy from business leaders to technical systems—often without anyone deciding this should happen. Teams add “AI” and often report more output, not more learning. That pattern is consistent with long-standing human-factors findings: under time pressure, people over-trust automated cues and under-practice independent verification, which proves especially dangerous when the automation is probabilistic rather than deterministic (Parasuraman & Riley, 1997; see all sources listed below). That’s not a model failure first; it’s a system and decision-making failure that AI accelerates.

The article is an extension to the lessons on “AI Risks” of the Agile 4 Agile Online course; see below. The research of sources was supported by Gemini 2.5 Pro.

The AI Risks Trap: Why Product Professionals Are Sleepwalking Into Strategic Irrelevance — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #512: DORA 2025, Roadmap Illusion, Context Rot, Does Anyone Care About Product?

by Stefan Wolpers | 2025-09-26 News

TL; DR: DORA 2025 State of AI-Assisted Software Development — Food for Agile Thought #512

Welcome to the 512th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,467 peers. This week, Google Cloud’s DORA team debuts its DORA 2025 State of AI-Assisted Software Development, featuring seven capabilities, seven team profiles, and a case for value stream management. Rich Mironov urges product leaders to tell money stories, protect infrastructure, and translate bets for executives, and Stephanie Leue exposes roadmap fragility and argues for balanced allocations. Jing Hu critiques consumer-skewed AI usage and vanity adoption metrics, while John Cutler reframes the trade-offs between vertical and horizontal coupling.

Next, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille demystify AI evals from golden datasets to guardrails, Jenny Wanger argues strategy filters beat scoring frameworks, and Zvi Mowshowitz unpacks Nvidia’s rumored OpenAI stake, 10GW buildout, and Stargate implications. Kelly Hong, in conversation with Hamel Husain, explains the concept of context rot and urges the practice of disciplined context engineering. Also, Shane Hastie interviews Shannon Mason on why 100 percent utilization harms teams, advocating intentional slack, fewer context switches, and capacity planning aligned with strategy.

Lastly, James Reggio and Camilla Matias demonstrate how Brex’s AI platform automates step-by-step workflows, improving onboarding and communication, while IDEO defines people-first leadership through six learnable skills. Andy Cleff ties the Yes Habit to five thieves of time and advocates visible WIP and saying no. Moreover, Michael Bellato, Mårten Schultzberg, and Sebastian Ankargren share Spotify’s Experiments with Learning metric. Finally, Kevin Kelly proposes a periodic table of cognition, forecasting the emergence of many distinct AI minds.

Food for Agile Thought #512: DORA 2025, Roadmap Illusion, Context Rot, Does Anyone Care About Product? — Age-of-Product.com

AI Transformation Déjà Vu: Why Today’s Failures Look Uncannily Like Yesterday’s “Agile Transformations”

by Stefan Wolpers | 2025-09-21 Agile and ScrumAgile Transition

TL;DR: AI Transformation Failures

Organizations seem to fail their AI transformation using the same patterns that killed their Agile transformations: Performing demos instead of solving problems, buying tools before identifying needs, celebrating pilots that can’t scale, and measuring activity instead of outcomes.

These aren’t technology failures; they are organizational patterns of performing change instead of actually changing. Your advantage isn’t AI expertise; it’s pattern recognition from surviving Agile. Use it to spot theater, demand real problems before tools, insist on integration from day one, and measure actual value delivered.

AI Transformation Failure Déjà Vu: Why Today’s Failures Look Uncannily Like Yesterday’s “Agile Transformations” — Age-of-Product.com