Food for Agile Thought #500: 5C Strategy Framework, Product Enshittification, Fail Fast Culture Failure, How to Unlearn

TL; DR: 5C Strategy Framework — Food for Agile Thought #500

Welcome to the 500th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,612 peers. This week, Maarten Dalmijn highlights how companies often confuse comfort with strategy and offers the 5C strategy framework to foster genuine strategic thinking. Janna Bastow warns against “enshittification,” the slow death of products driven by misaligned incentives. David Pereira reframes “fail fast” as harmful, advocating for deliberate learning, while McKinsey and Thomas Claburn scrutinize the prerequisites and limits of generative and agentic AI in delivering real business value.

Next, Mike Goitein critiques the obsession with shipping speed, showing how Linear wins by polishing for quality. Richard Mironov reminds product leaders to defend user value and team integrity. Additionally, insights from MIT Sloan’s CIO Symposium reveal that leadership-induced AI failures occur when vision and human factors are ignored. Vaidheeswaran Archana warns of looming LLM cost hikes, and Andy Cleff calls for proactive, trust-based team health strategies.

Lastly, Annie Peshkam and David Dubois stress the importance of shared unlearning for progress. David Burkus urges transparent adaptability, and John Cutler rethinks value hierarchies. Finally, Brian Rain clarifies the true essence of Kanban by pointing to its “theater version,” and Diegovz introduces the RAAEE framework for tracking meaningful product impact beyond vanity metrics.

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📺 How to Analyze Unstructured Team Interview Data with AI — A Step-by-Step Guide including Prompting and Ethics.

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🏆 The Tip of the Week: The 5C Strategy Framework

Maarten Dalmijn: The 5C Strategy Framework: Why Most Companies Suck at Strategy

Maarten Dalmijn argues that most companies mistake safe, shallow plans for real strategy and introduces the 5C framework to spotlight what actual strategy demands: clarity, courage, concessions, constraints, and a defined challenge.

Source: The 5C Strategy Framework: Why Most Companies Suck at Strategy

Author: Maarten Dalmijn

🎯 Product

Janna Bastow (via ProdPad): Fighting the Enshittification of Products: Why Good Products Go Bad and What to Do About It

Janna Bastow explores how once-beloved products slowly deteriorate through “enshittification” as incentives shift from user value to short-term gains, urging product leaders to resist this decay by championing vision, trust, and ethical metrics.

Source: ProdPad: Fighting the Enshittification of Products: Why Good Products Go Bad and What to Do About It

Author: Janna Bastow

David Pereira: Why Fail Fast Culture Doesn’t Fly In Most Places

David Pereira challenges the fail-fast mantra, arguing that most cultures resist failure and instead thrive when focused on learning through deliberate de-risking, experimentation, and delivering measurable value over shipping features.

Source: Why Fail Fast Culture Doesn’t Fly In Most Places

Author: David Pereira

Michael Goitein: Why Fast Feature Shipping Is Slowly Killing Your Product

Mike Goitein argues that relentless feature shipping undermines product quality, highlighting how Linear’s focus on polishing over velocity drives user retention, long-term value, and sustainable competitive advantage in software development.

Source: Why Fast Feature Shipping Is Slowly Killing Your Product

Author: Michael Goitein

Rich Mironov: What We Fight For

Richard Mironov reflects on what product leaders truly fight for: delivering real value to users, supporting their teams with care and integrity, and safeguarding the long-term health of the business.

Source: What We Fight For

Author: Rich Mironov

🧠 Artificial Intelligence

(via McKinsey & Company): Seizing the agentic AI advantage

McKinsey outlines how most generative AI initiatives deliver minimal business impact due to the scattering of pilots and overreliance on horizontal tools. Agentic AI promises transformation—if CEOs rewire workflows, governance, and operating models.

Source: McKinsey & Company: Seizing the agentic AI advantage

(via The Register): AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study

Thomas Claburn examines why most AI agents struggle with office tasks, achieving success rates of no more than 30 percent, revealing that vendor hype often outpaces real capability and highlighting significant concerns regarding risk, trust, and maturity.

Source: The Register: AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study

(via MIT Sloan Management Review): 📺 9 Mistakes Leaders Make With AI Strategy

At the 2025 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, leaders shared how AI strategies fail when treated as mere tools, ignoring human factors, stalling in pilots, or lacking a bold vision to reimagine business from the ground up.

Source: MIT Sloan Management Review: 📺 9 Mistakes Leaders Make With AI Strategy

Vaidheeswaran Archana: The Unsustainable Economics of LLM APIs: Understanding the Coming Price Realignment

Vaidheeswaran Archana explains how today’s LLM API prices are unsustainably subsidized to win market share, warning of inevitable price hikes and urging teams to budget realistically, optimize usage, and prepare for long-term cost shifts.

Source: The Unsustainable Economics of LLM APIs: Understanding the Coming Price Realignment

Author: Vaidheeswaran Archana

🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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.

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Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #2 — September 15 – October 6, 2025.

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➿ Agile & Leadership

Andy Cleff: Team Health: Moving Beyond Survival Mode

Andy Cleff explores how evolving pressures and AI-driven insights are reshaping team health, urging leaders to shift from reactive fixes to proactive, trust-centered practices that build resilience, engagement, and adaptive capacity.

Source: Team Health: Moving Beyond Survival Mode

Author: Andy Cleff

David Burkus: Leading Through Uncertainty: 4 Tactics For Guiding Your Team Through Change

David Burkus debunks the myth of flawless leadership during uncertainty, urging leaders to model adaptability, foster trust through transparency, and collaborate on change to build resilient, learning-driven teams ready for the unexpected.

Source: Leading Through Uncertainty: 4 Tactics For Guiding Your Team Through Change

Author: David Burkus

(via INSEAD Knowledge): How Leaders and Teams Can Unlearn Together

Annie Peshkam and David Dubois explain that leaders must create space for shared unlearning by surfacing hidden tensions, challenging outdated assumptions, and fostering trust-building conversations that unlock clarity, connection, and meaningful progress.

Source: INSEAD Knowledge: How Leaders and Teams Can Unlearn Together

📯 The Agile Paradox: Why Tactical Adoption Rarely Leads to True Transformation

Many companies adopt Agile practices like Scrum but fail to achieve true transformation. This “Agile Paradox” occurs because they implement tactical processes without changing their underlying command-and-control structure, culture, and leadership style.

True agility requires profound systemic changes to organizational design, leadership, and technical practices, not just performing rituals. Without this fundamental shift from “doing” to “being” agile, transformations stall, and the promised benefits remain unrealized.

Learn more: The Agile Paradox: Why Tactical Adoption Rarely Leads to True Transformation.

🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring

John Cutler: The Problem With Value Hierarchies (Video)

John Cutler critiques traditional value hierarchies for oversimplifying strategy, arguing real work behaves more like a dynamic fabric. He proposes artifact types, lenses, and rituals to support adaptive, outcome-driven operating systems.

Source: The Problem With Value Hierarchies (Video)

Author: John Cutler

(via Medium): Why Most Kanban Teams Aren’t Actually Doing Kanban

Brian Rain challenges the widespread myth that using a task board equates to practicing Kanban, urging teams to adopt WIP limits, flow metrics, explicit policies, and continuous improvement to realize Kanban’s full potential.

Source: Medium: Why Most Kanban Teams Aren’t Actually Doing Kanban

(via UX Planet): RAAEE: The ultimate tracking framework for your product features

Diegovz introduces the RAAEE framework to go beyond clicks, helping teams track feature performance across Reach, Attractiveness, Adoption, Effectiveness, and Engagement for deeper insights into the real impact of the product and user behavior.

Source: UX Planet: RAAEE: The ultimate tracking framework for your product features

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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 the 5C Strategy Framework:

• Hands-on Agile #68: How to Analyze Unstructured Team Interview Data with AI.
• 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.

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🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition

Read more: Food for Agile Thought #499: Product Disruption and Denial, Quick AI Guide, Dual Track in Action, 100-Year Leadership Vision.