TL; DR: DORA 2025 State of AI-Assisted Software Development — Food for Agile Thought #512
Welcome to the 512th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,467 peers. This week, Google Cloud’s DORA team debuts its DORA 2025 State of AI-Assisted Software Development, featuring seven capabilities, seven team profiles, and a case for value stream management. Rich Mironov urges product leaders to tell money stories, protect infrastructure, and translate bets for executives, and Stephanie Leue exposes roadmap fragility and argues for balanced allocations. Jing Hu critiques consumer-skewed AI usage and vanity adoption metrics, while John Cutler reframes the trade-offs between vertical and horizontal coupling.
Next, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille demystify AI evals from golden datasets to guardrails, Jenny Wanger argues strategy filters beat scoring frameworks, and Zvi Mowshowitz unpacks Nvidia’s rumored OpenAI stake, 10GW buildout, and Stargate implications. Kelly Hong, in conversation with Hamel Husain, explains the concept of context rot and urges the practice of disciplined context engineering. Also, Shane Hastie interviews Shannon Mason on why 100 percent utilization harms teams, advocating intentional slack, fewer context switches, and capacity planning aligned with strategy.
Lastly, James Reggio and Camilla Matias demonstrate how Brex’s AI platform automates step-by-step workflows, improving onboarding and communication, while IDEO defines people-first leadership through six learnable skills. Andy Cleff ties the Yes Habit to five thieves of time and advocates visible WIP and saying no. Moreover, Michael Bellato, Mårten Schultzberg, and Sebastian Ankargren share Spotify’s Experiments with Learning metric. Finally, Kevin Kelly proposes a periodic table of cognition, forecasting the emergence of many distinct AI minds.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week
(via Google Cloud Blog): 📖 2025 DORA State of AI Assisted Software Development
Google Cloud’s DORA team introduces its first State of AI-Assisted Software Development report, outlining a seven-capability model, seven team profiles, and how value stream management converts local AI gains into organizational performance.
🎯 Product
: 📺 Are Your Executives Really Interested in the Craft of Product Management?
Rich Mironov urges PMs to drop mindset evangelism, speak in terms of money stories, frame trade-offs explicitly, categorize work into portfolios, protect infrastructure, and act as a bilingual consigliere, translating product bets into executive-valued outcomes.
: The Roadmap Illusion
Stephanie Leue warns that feature-heavy roadmaps mask fragility, urging balanced portfolios across features, growth, innovation, and scaling or debt. Set allocation targets, review quarterly, make trade-offs explicit, and celebrate invisible wins to sustain momentum and resilience.
: Stop scoring everything: how to prioritize with strategy
Jenny Wanger argues that scoring frameworks rank ideas but fail to decide what belongs. She recommends filtering by clear strategy first to cut noise, improve accuracy, align culture, and make product ops drive strategic focus.
and : 🎙 AI Evals & Discovery
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille explain AI evals, covering golden datasets, synthetic data, error analysis, code checks, LLM-as-judge, discovery-informed evaluation, criteria drift, guardrails, and maintenance to ensure AI product quality.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
: Why Utah Uses More AI Than California?
Jing Hu contrasts OpenAI and Anthropic's economic data, arguing that AI usage skews personal, monetization is weak, and Utah’s spike is suspect. Leaders should ditch adoption vanity and measure productivity from augmentation.
: 📺 Context Rot: When Long Context Fails
In this YouTube session with Hamel Husain, Kelly Hong explains “context rot,” where models degrade on long inputs, struggle with semantic retrieval and distractors, and hallucinate more; large context windows can mislead. She advocates for context engineering, focused retrieval, and modular agents, rather than naively stuffing everything into prompts.
: OpenAI Shows Us The Money
Zvi Mowshowitz distills Nvidia’s up to $100B OpenAI tie-up, 10GW data center push, and Stargate expansion, arguing compute scarcity drives outsized bets on superintelligence while raising policy leverage, revenue round-tripping risks, and strategic fallout for rivals and regulators.
(via First Round Capital): Agent + Human Ops: How AI is Changing Roles and Workflows at Brex
James Reggio and Camilla Matias explain how Brex’s internal AI platform powers agents, reshapes hiring, and automates documented, step-by-step workflows, including customer identity and risk verification, which improves onboarding, dispute handling, and customer communications across the company.
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #3: October 1 – November 12, 2025
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Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #3 — October 1 – November 12.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
: Vertical vs. Horizontal Org Coupling
John Cutler maps vertical and horizontal coupling in organizations, noting shifting states from federated islands to command towers, trade-offs between cohesion and dependencies, differing leader frontline perspectives, and that context determines value as teams move through boxes over time.
(via IDEO U): What Is Human-Centered Leadership? 6 Human Skills for the Future of Work
The author outlines human-centered leadership as people-first and practical, emphasizing six learnable skills: curiosity, collaboration, adapting to ambiguity, experimentation, self-awareness, and maintaining momentum to navigate the AI era, build trust, and drive resilient outcomes.
: The Yes Habit and the Five Thieves of Time
Andy Cleff links the Yes Habit to five thieves of time, showing how fear-driven overcommitment wrecks flow. He urges teams to visualize WIP, work-item age, cycle time, and throughput, and to practice “No.”
📯 AI Transformation Déjà Vu: Why Today’s Failures Look Uncannily Like Yesterday’s “Agile Transformations”
Organizations seem to fail their AI transformation using the same patterns that killed their Agile transformations: Performing demos instead of solving problems, buying tools before identifying needs, celebrating pilots that can’t scale, and measuring activity instead of outcomes.
These aren’t technology failures; they are organizational patterns of performing change instead of actually changing. Your advantage isn’t AI expertise; it’s pattern recognition from surviving Agile. Use it to spot theater, demand real problems before tools, insist on integration from day one, and measure actual value delivered.
🎓 Learn more: AI Transformation Déjà Vu: Why Today’s Failures Look Uncannily Like Yesterday’s “Agile Transformations”.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
(via InfoQ): 🎙 The Myth of 100% Utilization: The Neuroscience of Productive Teams
Shane Hastie interviews Shannon Mason on why maximizing utilization backfires, highlighting the neuroscience of cognitive load, the value of intentional slack versus idle delays, the impact of context switching, and the benefits of practices such as focus days, as well as aligning capacity planning with strategy.
(via Spotify Engineering): Beyond Winning: Spotify’s Experiments with Learning Framework
Michael Bellato, Mårten Schultzberg, and Sebastian Ankargren describe Spotify’s Experiments with Learning metric, prioritizing decision-ready insights over wins, raising experimentation quality, guiding investment, managing testing bandwidth, and preventing regressions across hundreds of teams.
: The Periodic Table of Cognition
Kevin Kelly argues that we misunderstand intelligence like early electricity, proposing a periodic table of cognition with interdependent elements. A prototype map highlights uneven progress and predicts the emergence of many distinct AI minds before a coherent theory is established.
📅 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.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 April 22-23, 2026 | Guaranteed: Professional Scrum Product Owner – AI Essentials Training (PSPO AIE; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €799 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.) |
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 DORA 2025:
- 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 DORA 2025 — Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
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Help your team to learn about Personal AI Productivity by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
Read more: Food for Agile Thought #511: AI Bubble, Perfect Product Roadmap, Inversion as Mental Model, Scaling Culture?
