TL; DR: GPT-5 — Food for Agile Thought #505
Welcome to the 505th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,569 peers. This week, Grant Harvey highlights how OpenAI’s GPT-5 merges prior models into a unified system with smarter routing, improved reasoning, reduced hallucinations, and new personal assistant capabilities. Christina Wodtke reframes product sense as learnable pattern recognition, sharpened through structured practice, while Leah Tharin warns that while AI accelerates simple work, over-shipping without impact wastes resources. Ethan Mollick explores GPT-5’s proactive, multi-model intelligence, and Dan Shipper’s team praises its speed, usability, and versatility despite some coding limitations.
Next, Janna Bastow details how painted door tests validate demand before building, saving resources and guiding priorities when used responsibly. Kyle Poyar shares 12 ChatGPT workflows boosting GTM efficiency across marketing, sales, and growth, and OpenAI highlights GPT-5’s coding, reasoning, and customization strengths with new API controls. Dave West contends AI makes Scrum fundamentals more vital. Also, Charity Majors notes that durable code remains crucial even as AI accelerates disposable software creation.
Lastly, Alexis Gauba and Ben Hylak note GPT-5’s strength in engineering and parallel tasks, though writing quality has dipped. Microsoft presents 1,000+ AI adoption cases driving efficiency and innovation. Kevin Kelley reflects on AI’s role in personal, private creation, and StaySassy urges trimming metrics to a few actionable ones. Finally, Pawel Brodzinski stresses communication quality over coding speed as the real driver of estimation accuracy, even with AI-assisted development.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: GPT-5
(via The Neuron): GPT-5 is here… here’s everything you need to know (so far…)
Grant Harvey reports that OpenAI’s GPT-5 unifies previous models into a single system with smarter routing, boosting coding, reasoning, health, and writing skills, reducing hallucinations, and introducing personal assistant features and expanded developer tools.
🎯 Product
: Building Product Sense: Why Your Gut Needs an Education
Christina Wodtke explains that product sense is learned pattern recognition, not magic, and can be developed faster by actively dissecting successful products, analyzing flows, and writing observations to turn gut feelings into informed judgment.
: AI's ‘Just Ship it.’ problem
Leah Tharin argues that while AI speeds up simple tasks, it cannot solve complex problems or speed validation, and over-shipping without impact risks waste, missed opportunities, and ultimately shipping yourself out of business.
(via ProdPad): Nailing the Painted Door Test: When and How to Fake it Before You Make It
Janna Bastow explains how painted door tests quickly validate feature demand before development, helping teams save resources, de-risk big bets, and prioritize with evidence, while avoiding misuse that erodes trust or delivers misleading signals.
: What GTM teams are doing with ChatGPT
Kyle Poyar shares 12 real-world ChatGPT workflows from GTM teams, spanning product marketing, content, growth, and sales, showing how it streamlines research, localization, experimentation, personalization, and insights while cutting time and costs.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
: GPT-5: It Just Does Stuff
Ethan Mollick describes GPT-5 as a proactive multi-model system that autonomously selects approaches, suggests next steps, and builds surprisingly complex outputs from minimal prompts, reducing friction for everyday and advanced AI use.
(via OpenAi): Using GPT-5: Learn best practices, features, and migration guidance for GPT-5
OpenAI outlines GPT-5’s strengths in coding, instruction following, and tool use, plus new API controls for reasoning, verbosity, and custom tools, offering migration guidance and best practices for maximizing performance.
(via Every): GPT-5: Our hands-on review of OpenAI's newest model based on weeks of testing
Dan Shipper and team find GPT-5 a fast, simplified daily driver for most users, offering competitive pricing and strong research, writing, and pair programming skills. However, it lags behind Claude Code for large, autonomous coding tasks.
and (via Latent Space Podcast): GPT-5 Hands-On: Welcome to the Stone Age
Alexis Gauba and Ben Hylak share that GPT-5 excels at software engineering, tool use, and parallel task execution, marking a shift toward agent-like behavior. However, it lags in writing quality compared to earlier models.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
(via Scrum.org): AI And The Future Of Teams - Scrum Fundamentals Are Still Relevant
Dave West argues AI will become a valuable Scrum team member, increasing the need for discipline, transparency, and empiricism, making Scrum fundamentals more relevant for both teams and individuals working with AI.
(via Honeycomb): Disposable Code Is Here to Stay, but Durable Code Is What Runs the World
Charity Majors argues that software is splitting into disposable and durable code, with AI impacting both. Still, durable code remains essential for high-stakes, reliable systems where trust, maintainability, and long-term confidence are critical.
(via Microsoft): AI-powered success—with more than 1,000 stories of customer transformation and innovation
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📯 Agile AI Agents
I tried ChatGPT's new Agent Mode: Is it really a new Agile AI Agent that autonomously identifies noteworthy signals in the daily communication and data noise? Or is it a glorified automated prompt execution device?
Let's find out. (Note: I only have a Plus account, which limits the experience.)
🎓 Learn more: Agile AI Agents.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: An Audience of One
Kevin Kelley explores how AI lowers the barriers to creation, enabling people to co-create primarily for personal joy. Most AI-generated works will remain private, serving as self-communication rather than seeking a broader audience.
My hypothesis is that in the near future, the bulk of creative content generated by humans – with the assistance of AI – will have an audience of one. Most art generated each day will be consumed primarily only by its human co-creator.
: You Have Too Many Metrics
The author argues that most teams track too many metrics and waste effort, urging focus on a few actionable ones with clear expectations, regular review, and committed action when results fall outside agreed bounds.
: The Most Underestimated Factor in Estimation
Pawel Brodzinski argues that in product development, communication quality outweighs coding speed in affecting estimates, with poor communication doubling workload and strong collaboration significantly reducing effort, regardless of AI-assisted coding capabilities.
📅 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 April 15-29, 2026 | Guaranteed: Claude Cowork BootCamp (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | $149 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 May 19-20, 2026 | Guaranteed: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 May 28 to June 25, 2026 | Guaranteed: AI4Agile BootCamp #7 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 🇩🇪 June 30-July 1, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
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 GPT-5e:
- Hands-on Agile #68: How to Analyze Unstructured Team Interview Data with AI.
- Fabrice Bernhard: The Lean Tech Manifesto.
- 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.
- Hands-on Agile EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
✋ Do Not Miss Out: Learn more about GPT-5 — 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 would 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: