TL; DR: Scrum Expansion Pack — Food for Agile Thought #497
Welcome to the 497th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,573 peers. This week, Jeff Sutherland, John Coleman, and Ralph Jocham introduce a Scrum Expansion Pack to help teams stay outcome-focused in complex, AI-driven environments. John Cutler questions the continued use of stories and epics, advocating for outcome-oriented practices, and Roman Pichler highlights how strategic ownership empowers product teams. Interestingly, Sam Altman and Steven Sinofsky offer diverging views on AI’s trajectory and our misunderstandings of its nature.
Next, Brian de Haaff urges product teams to embrace strategic planning instead of reactive agility in AI. Aakash Gupta and Jeremy Epling discuss how Vercel’s v0 accelerates prototyping, while Ben Hylak reviews o3 Pro’s orchestration strength. Andy Cleff shares lessons from Spotify’s structural evolution. Also, Sarah Wang, Shangda Xu, Justin Kahl, and Tugce Erten highlight enterprise AI’s shift to essential, AI-native infrastructure and procurement maturity.
Lastly, Barry O’Reilly explores AI-native leadership by unlearning control and leveraging agents, while Alex Ewerlöf shows how Wardley Maps and Pace Layering align tech and business strategy. Lucy Pitticas-Rothwell details how Product Ops measures impact qualitatively. Finally, Paweł Huryn and Erin Mikail Staples emphasize tailoring AI evaluation—moving beyond generic metrics to domain-specific, human-in-the-loop approaches that ensure trust and effectiveness.
🎓 🖥 🇬🇧 The AI-Enhanced Advanced Product Backlog Management Course Version 2—July 1, 2025
While many Product Owners spend sizable chunks of their time defending Product Backlog decisions, top-performing teams use systematic alignment processes to turn stakeholders into allies and backlogs into strategic assets.
This intensive course delivers the exact frameworks and AI-enhanced workflows that save successful Product Owners 15-20 hours weekly while improving stakeholder trust.
What’s Included:
- ✅ Self-paced video modules with practical exercises
- ✅ Launch week live Q&A sessions with Stefan
- ✅ Custom GPTs for Product Owner workflows
- ✅ Complete anti-patterns diagnostic toolkit
- ✅ Community access
- ✅ Lifetime access to all course updates and materials
- ✅ Certificate of completion.
👉 Please note: The course will only be available for sign-up until July 7, 2025!
🎓 Join the Launch of the AI-Enhanced Version 2 on July 1: Learn How to Master the Most Important Artifact for any Successful Agile Practitioner!
Did you miss the previous Food for Agile Thought issue 496?
🗞 Shall I notify you about articles like this one? Awesome! You can sign up here for the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter and join 42,000-plus subscribers.
🎓 Join Stefan in one of his upcoming Professional Scrum training classes!
🏆 The Tip of the Week: Scrum Expansion Pack
and : The Scrum Guide Expansion Pack
Jeff Sutherland, John Coleman, and Ralph Jocham created the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack to help teams stay outcome-focused, adapt to AI, and apply Scrum effectively in today’s complex, tech-driven environments. Beware, though: The Expansion Pack comes at ten times the length of the Scum Guide 2020.
🎯 Product
: The Gradual Fall of Stories And Epics
John Cutler explores why many teams are moving beyond stories and epics, arguing they’ve become overloaded, outdated proxies for collaboration and impact, replaced by leaner, goal-driven practices rooted in tangible outcomes.
: Strategy and Product Teams
Roman Pichler outlines how empowering product teams to own strategy boosts alignment, speed, and value delivery while highlighting the importance of portfolio strategy, coaching, and cross-functional collaboration to mitigate risks.
(via Aha! Blog): The Future of Product Development Is Less Agile
Brian de Haaff argues that in an AI-accelerated world, successful product teams will shift from reactive agility to upfront strategic planning, building fewer, better products with clarity, purpose, and higher expectations for quality.
and : 📺 Behind v0 (Top AI Prototyping Tool): Tutorial and Story from the CPO
Aakash Gupta interviews Vercel’s Jeremy Epling to explore v0, the AI prototyping tool reshaping product development. Learn how PMs, designers, and teams build faster, validate sooner, and shift from PRDs to live demos.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
: The Gentle Singularity
Sam Altman reflects on the accelerating path toward superintelligence, arguing that AI is amplifying human potential, shifting productivity curves, and ushering in a future where intelligence and energy become nearly limitless resources.
(via Andreessen Horowitz): 16 Changes to AI in the Enterprise: 2025 Edition
Sarah Wang, Shangda Xu, Justin Kahl, and Tugce Erten reveal how enterprise AI has matured from experimentation to core infrastructure, with growing budgets, structured procurement, multi-model strategies, and a clear shift toward buying AI-native apps over building in-house.
: ‘The Illusion of Thinking’ — Thoughts on This Important Paper
Steven Sinofsky reflects on Apple’s “The Illusion of Thinking” paper, warning that anthropomorphizing AI misleads users, inflates expectations, and distracts from its true nature as a powerful but non-human tool still entirely directed by human intent and responsibility.
(via Latent Space Podcast): God is hungry for Context: First thoughts on o3 pro
Ben Hylak reviews o3 Pro, praising its reasoning and planning capabilities when given deep context. Unlike chat models, it excels as a tool-integrated orchestrator for complex, real-world decision-making and execution.
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #1 — September 4-25, 2025
The job market’s shifting. Agile roles are under pressure. AI tools are everywhere. But here’s the truth: the Agile pros who learn how to work with AI, not against it, will be the ones leading the next wave of high-impact teams.
So, become the professional recruiters call first for “AI‑powered Agile.” Be among the first to master practical AI applications for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Product Owners, Product Managers, and Project Managers.
Tickets also include lifetime access to the corresponding online course, once it is published. The class is in English. 🇬🇧
Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #1 — September 4-25, 2025.
Customer Voice: “The AI for Agilists course is an absolute essential for anyone working in the field! If you want to keep up with the organizations and teams you support, this course will equip you with not only knowledge of how to leverage AI for your work as an Agilist but will also give you endless tips & tricks to get better results and outcomes. I thoroughly enjoyed the course content, structure, and activities. Working in teams to apply what we learned was the best part, as it led to great insights for how I could apply what I was learning. After the first day on the course, I already walked away with many things I could apply at work. I highly recommend this course to anyone looking to better understand AI in general, but more specifically, how to leverage AI for Agility.” (Lauren Tuffs, Change Leader | Business Agility.)
➿ Agile & Leadership
: Spotify's Organizational Evolution: From Hierarchy to Distributed Leadership
Andy Cleff explores Spotify’s ongoing transformation from hierarchy to a dynamic, ecosystem-inspired model, revealing how experimentation, autonomy, and distributed leadership evolved in response to real-world scaling pressures and organizational pain points.
: AI-Native Leadership: Traits, Tasks, and Tools for the New Era of Decision-Making
Barry O’Reilly shares a personal journey into AI-native leadership, showing how letting go of control, unlearning outdated habits, and embracing AI agents can radically improve decision-making, focus, and leadership effectiveness.
: Wardley Maps & Pace Layering for Senior Tech Leads and Engineering Leaders
Alex Ewerlöf explains how Wardley Maps and Pace Layering empower senior tech leaders to align architecture, strategy, and team focus by visualizing system maturity, business value, and change cadence.
📯 When Incentives Sabotage Product Strategy
Learn why many Product Owners and Managers worry about the wrong thing: saying no instead of saying yes to everything. This article reveals three systematic rejection techniques that strengthen stakeholder relationships while protecting product strategy to avoid that organizational incentives sabotage product strategy.
Discover how those drive feature demands, why AI prototyping complicates strategic decisions, and how transparent Anti-Product Backlog systems transform resistance into collaboration.
Learn more: When Incentives Sabotage Product Strategy.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
(via Mind The Product): How to measure impact in Product Operations
Lucy Pitticas-Rothwell explains how Product Operations teams at FreeAgent define, track, and evaluate impact by focusing on qualitative outcomes, leading indicators, and tailored KPIs instead of relying solely on quantitative metrics.
: Evaluating AI Products: How to Find The Right Metrics
Paweł Huryn explains why generic AI metrics fall short and how high-performing teams conduct error analysis to define app-specific evaluators, revealing that domain knowledge and human-in-the-loop judgment remain essential.
(via Galileo): How to choose the right metrics for your AI evaluations?
Erin Mikail Staples explains how choosing the right AI evaluation metrics—like accuracy, safety, confidence, and expression—is key to building trustworthy systems, with practical guidance on tailoring evaluation strategies to your goals.
📅 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 September 2-3, 2025 | GUARANTEED: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 September 4-25, 2025 | SOLD OUT: AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #1 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 September 15-October 6, 2025 | Guaranteed: AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #2 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇬🇧 September 23-24, 2025 | Professional Scrum Master Advanced Training (PSM II; English; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 October 1-November 12, 2025 | Guaranteed: AI for Agile BootCamp #3 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇩🇪 Oktober 2, 2025 | Professional Scrum Product Owner AI-Essentials Training (PSPO AIE; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €349 incl. 19% VAT |
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 Scrum Expansion Pack:
- Sandrine Olivencia: Restoring Agility through Lean Craftsmanship.
- Q& A with Product Leader Coach and Product at Heart Organizer Petra Wille.
- Maarten Dalmijn: The 5 Obstacles to Empowered Teams.
- Roman Pichler: The Top Reasons Why a Product Strategy Fails.
- Johanna Rothman: How to Instill Agility, not Agile Practices.
- Cliff Berg: Leadership Behaviors That Lead to Actual Agility.
- Peter Merel: the agile way — Hands-on Agile 2025.
- Dr Lynn Kelley: Change Questions: The Keys to Implementing Organizational Change—Hands-on Agile 2025.
- Hands-on Agile EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
✋ Do Not Miss Out — Learn more about the Scrum Expansion Pack — 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 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 Automated Companies by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
