TL; DR: Reimagining Agile, AI Brain Fog — Food for Agile Thought #481
Welcome to the 481st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,718 peers. This week, Jim Highsmith, Jon Kern, Heidi Musser, and Sanjiv Augustine reflect on Reimagining Agile, advocating for a return to core values while pushing agility forward. David Pereira interviews Mike Cohn, emphasizing adaptability over rigid frameworks and AI’s growing role in product development. Meanwhile, Ravi Gupta warns that AI-native companies will disrupt industries, urging leaders to embrace AI-first thinking. M.G. Siegler analyzes the AI arms race, predicting a shift toward consumer-driven consolidation, with ChatGPT currently leading. Maarten Dalmijn critiques Institutionalized Competing Interests (ICI), where departmental silos obstruct collaboration, while John Cutler explores the hidden ego toll that prevents obvious improvements from taking root.
Next, Aakash Gupta interviews Marily Nika about excelling in AI product management, emphasizing key roles and essential skills, and avoiding hype-driven AI. Petra Wille underscores that successful product organizations thrive on disciplined habits rather than flashy frameworks, while Willem-Jan Ageling examines the evolving Product Owner role, warning against proxy POs and fragmented ownership. Meanwhile, Lewis C. Lin explores AI Brain Fog, where over-reliance on AI weakens critical thinking, offering the CLEAR framework to restore independent decision-making.
Lastly, Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, and Rikki Singh explore AI’s transformative impact on the software product development life cycle, from accelerating innovation to redefining roles. Zeno Rocha shares how Friction Logs at Resend help new hires rapidly spot and fix UX issues, reinforcing a culture of continuous improvement. Also, Simone Cicero critiques traditional design tools for failing to capture B2B ecosystem complexity, introducing new mapping techniques to align customer needs with strategic decision-making. Finally, Sebastian Raschka breaks down four key approaches to improving LLM reasoning models, offering insights from DeepSeek R1’s development and AI’s evolving landscape.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Reimagining Agile
, , and (via Agile Alliance): Reimagining Agile (an update): Back to the Basics, Forward to the Future
Jim Highsmith, Jon Kern, Heidi Musser, and Sanjiv Augustine reflect on Reimagining Agile, emphasizing a return to core Agile values while evolving agility for the future. They challenge the community to embrace change, share real stories, and push Agile forward.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
: AI or Die
Ravi Gupta urges companies to rethink their AI strategy, warning that industry leaders will shift as AI-native businesses emerge. He challenges leaders to embrace AI-first thinking or risk falling behind in the coming transformation.
: 🤔 Dear Lewis, my team has AI brain fog. How do I help them think for themselves again?
Lewis C. Lin explores AI Brain Fog, where over-reliance on AI erodes critical thinking and decision-making. He introduces the CLEAR framework to help teams use AI responsibly while fostering independent thinking and psychological safety.
: The One AI to Rule Them All
M.G. Siegler examines the evolving AI landscape, predicting a shift from a chaotic arms race to consumer-driven consolidation. With ChatGPT leading, competition intensifies as companies seek dominance through pricing, productization, and ecosystem leverage.
: Understanding Reasoning LLMs
Sebastian Raschka explores four key approaches to enhancing LLM reasoning models: inference-time scaling, reinforcement learning, supervised fine-tuning, and distillation. He provides insights into DeepSeek R1’s development and AI’s evolving landscape.
➿ Agile & Leadership
and : 📺 What Happened to Agile?
David Pereira interviews Mike Cohn on Agile’s evolution, emphasizing adaptability over dogma, AI’s transformative role, and the Agile Alliance-PMI partnership as an opportunity to expand Agile’s reach rather than a takeover.
: Institutionalized Competing Interests: Part II
Maarten Dalmijn explores how organizations fall into the trap of Institutionalized Competing Interests (ICI), where siloed expertise hinders collaboration. He advocates for hiring beyond specialization and prioritizing shared goals over departmental optimization.
: Who Pays the Ego Toll?
John Cutler explores the hidden costs of change, highlighting the ego toll—the loss of credibility, authority, or identity that blocks apparent improvements. He urges leaders to reframe narratives, reduce perceived threats, and shift status to enable progress.
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Align, Discover, Deliver: The Product Backlog Management Cohort Class of March 6-April 3, 2025
Turn your Product Backlog into a strategic tool for empowered product teams to discover solutions, align stakeholders, and deliver measurable outcomes.
This guaranteed immersive cohort class will guide you in turning your Product Backlog into a strategic asset that aligns your vision, stakeholders, and team with customer needs and business goals. The cohort will be in English.
Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Align, Discover, Deliver: The Product Backlog Management Cohort Class of March 6-April 3, 2025.
Customer Voice: “If you are looking to move beyond merely delivering features and want to start consistently delivering outcomes and valuable deliverables to your customers, this course is essential. Stefan provides the focus and tools necessary to embark on a journey toward excellent product management. With a curriculum that includes vision, strategy, roadmap, product discovery, continuous delivery, idea management, hypothesis management, and backlog management, this course promises less than it delivers—a truly transformative experience.” (Hector Feliciano.)
🎯 Product
: What Successful Product Organizations Have in Common
Petra Wille highlights that successful product organizations prioritize habits over hype—following through, documenting decisions, collaborating, sharing progress, and delivering frequently. Fancy frameworks won’t save you; real impact comes from consistently doing the work that matters.
and : 🎙 How to Become an AI PM – From Google AI PM Marily Nika
Aakash Gupta interviews Marily Nika on breaking into AI product management, highlighting key AI PM roles, critical skills beyond coding, avoiding hype-driven AI, and actionable strategies to land and excel in AI PM roles.
: Scrum Created the Product Owner and Spawned a Myriad of Conflicting Functions
Willem-Jan Ageling explores the many interpretations of the Product Owner role, highlighting how some deviate from Scrum’s intent. He emphasizes that Product Ownership is an accountability, not a function, and warns against proxy POs and fragmented ownership.
📯 Hands-on Agile 2025: Embracing the Shift to Context-Based Agility — The Slides
If you weren't at the virtual Hands-on Agile 2025 conference earlier this month, you missed an incredible opportunity to explore the shift from concept-based to context-based agility with nearly 800 fellow agilists. But don't worry – I'm here to share some of the key takeaways and insights!
Check out the slides from the Live Stream speakers below; I will keep you posted on the availability of the recordings.
Learn more: Hands-on Agile 2025: Embracing the Shift to Context-Based Agility — The Slides.
🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
(via McKinsey & Company): How an AI-enabled software product development life cycle will fuel innovation
Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, and Rikki Singh explore how AI transforms the software product development life cycle (PDLC), accelerates innovation, enhances customer value, and redefines roles. Organizations must integrate AI-first tooling, restructure teams, and adopt outcome-based business models.
(via Resend): How we use Friction Logs to improve the product
Zeno Rocha shares how Friction Logs help new hires at Resend quickly identify and fix UX pain points, accelerating onboarding, fostering collaboration, and reinforcing a culture of continuous product improvement from day one.
(via Boundaryless): The Challenge of Mapping Complex Ecosystems in Design and Research
Simone Cicero critiques traditional design tools for failing to capture B2B ecosystem complexity. He introduces new mapping techniques and a Portfolio Map to align customer needs, organizational structure, and strategic decision-making for modern markets.
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📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel to improve learning, for example, about Reimagining Agile:
- Hands-on Agile 66: Escape the Feature Frenzy, Build to Sell with Sandrine Olivencia.
- Hands-on Agile 62: From Backlog Manager to Product Manager with David Pereira.
- Hands-on Agile 61: Toyota Kata Coaching for Agile Teams & Transformations with Fortune Buchholtz.
- Hands-on Agile 59: Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman.
- Hands-on Agile 57: Humble Planning with Maarten Dalmijn.
- Hands-on Agile EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn About Reimagining Agile — Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
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Help your team to learn about Reimagining Agile by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide: