TL; DR: Quick AI Guide— Food for Agile Thought #499
Welcome to the 499th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,561 peers. This week, Ethan Mollick offers a hands-on, quick AI guide to maximizing the benefits of AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude by exploring their lesser-known features and practical applications. Maarten Dalmijn shares tactics for surviving impossible deadlines by focusing on outcomes and delivering early, while Marty Cagan warns product teams to adapt to AI before it disrupts them. Additionally, Andrej Karpathy reframes LLM success as a “context engineering” challenge, and researchers expose alarming risks of agentic misalignment in top AI models under pressure.
Next, Jason Cohen urges ruthless, transparent prioritization to focus on rare 10x-impact tasks while letting minor issues smolder. Ant Murphy shares how to run discovery and delivery in tandem through iteration and confidence-based decisions. Additionally, Christina Wodtke ranks AI companies by the ethical harm they cause. Stanford researchers expose the misalignment of AI investment with worker needs, and Holly Cummins explores how rest and play fuel creativity in engineering.
Lastly, Gregor Ojstersek reveals why many engineering leaders now view AI with skepticism, citing hype and falling team morale. Andy Cleff examines IKEA’s century-long adaptability and leadership patterns, and Greg Kontos challenges the misuse of user stories. Finally, Maret Kruve presents ADEPT for early-stage discovery, and Philippe Bourgau shows how mob programming drives long-term efficiency through shared learning and better design.
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🎓 Join the Launch of the AI-Enhanced Version 2 on July 15: Learn How to Master the Most Important Artifact for any Successful Agile Practitioner!
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Quick AI Guide
: Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide
Ethan Mollick offers a practical guide to choosing and using AI systems, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, emphasizing real-world applications, powerful models, in-depth research, and underutilized features like voice mode and branching.
🎯 Product
(via Silicon Valley Product Group): Disruption and Denial
Marty Cagan reflects on historical resistance to the Internet. He draws parallels to AI, urging product teams to adapt their discovery and delivery approaches before disruption comes from more agile competitors.
: Maarten's Guide to Shipping With Impossible Deadlines V0.8
Maarten Dalmijn shares a pragmatic guide for navigating impossible deadlines by anchoring in outcomes, aggressively descoping, shipping early, and adapting strategy through real-world feedback rather than rigid planning and scope fixation.
(via Jason Cohen): Ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor
Jason Cohen argues that because time is brutally limited, prioritization must be ruthless and transparent, focusing on rare 10x-impact tasks while intentionally letting lesser fires burn, even if others misunderstand.
: Let's talk Dual Track: Continuous Discovery and Delivery
Ant Murphy outlines how to run continuous discovery and delivery in parallel by embracing iteration, breaking down large problems, using confidence to guide decisions, and separating opportunities from execution.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
: +1 for ‘context engineering’ over ‘prompt engineering.’
Andrej Karpathy highlights that building robust LLM applications is less about prompt engineering and more about “context engineering:” the nuanced craft of curating the right data, structure, and flow to optimize large language model performance.
(via Anthropic): Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats
Researchers stress-tested 16 top AI models and found that, under simulated pressure, many autonomously chose harmful insider behaviors, such as blackmail or corporate espionage, revealing serious risks of agentic misalignment in autonomous deployments.
(via Stanford News): Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce
A nationwide audit reveals major mismatches between what U.S. workers want AI agents to automate or augment and where investment is going, highlighting worker resistance, collaboration preferences, and shifting skill demands.
(via Medium): I Love Generative AI and Hate the Companies Building It
Christina Wodtke explores the ethical failures of major AI companies, arguing that none offer truly responsible options and ranks them by harm to help users make informed, albeit compromised, choices.
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #2 — September 15 - October 6, 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 #2 — September 15 - October 6, 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
and (via InfoQ): Productivity Through Play: Why Messing Around Makes Better Software Engineers
Holly Cummins joins Shane Hastie to discuss how play, rest, and unstructured time boost engineering productivity, challenge harmful work norms and support creativity amid rising cognitive load and evolving AI-driven practices.
: Why 51% of Engineering Leaders Believe AI Is Impacting the Industry Negatively
Gregor Ojstersek explains why over half of engineering leaders now view AI negatively, linking unrealistic executive expectations, industry hype, and AI-driven pressure to falling team motivation and eroding psychological safety.
: IKEA's 100-Year Vision: Inspired Leadership Evolution Across Generations
Andy Cleff explores how IKEA evolved from a kitchen-table startup into a resilient global ecosystem, highlighting leadership succession, cultural transmission, and strategic adaptability as key patterns in their 100-year organizational vision.
📯 Ethical AI for Product Owners & Product Managers
Without ethical AI, Product Owners and Product Managers (PO/PMs) face a dilemma: balancing AI’s potential with its product discovery and delivery risks. Unchecked AI can introduce bias, compromise data, and erode empathy.
To navigate this, implement four guardrails: ensuring data privacy, preserving human value, validating AI outputs, and transparently attributing AI’s role. This approach transforms PO/PMs into ethical AI leaders, blending AI’s power with indispensable human judgment and empathy.
Learn more: Ethical AI for Product Owners & Product Managers.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
(via Medium): ADEPT: The Product Discovery Framework that Fits on a Sticky Note
Maret Kruve introduces ADEPT, a sticky-note-sized framework that helps teams navigate uncertainty in early product ideas by mapping assumptions, evidence, and risk across five dimensions to guide focused discovery.
(via Simple Thread): A Place for User Stories and User Stories in Their Place
Greg Kontos critiques the overuse of user stories, arguing they should describe feature-level requirements only. For technical or implementation details, teams benefit from using more suitable alternative formats.
: 3 compounding benefits of mob programming that make it cost-effective
Philippe Bourgau explains how mob programming becomes cost-effective over time by reducing work through shared knowledge, accelerating continuous improvement, and enabling higher-quality design discussions that compound into long-term productivity gains.
📅 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 Quick AI Guide:
- Fabrice Bernhard: The Lean Tech Manifesto.
- 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 Quick AI Guide — Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
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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:
