TL; DR: Poor Decisions by Managers — Food for Agile Thought #515
Welcome to the 515th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,381 peers. This week, Henrik Mårtensson explores six decision-making traps managers fall into and how to overcome poor decisions with candor and deliberate practice. Janna Bastow highlights how skipping feasibility checks sabotages product delivery, offering lightweight tactics for trust and clarity in the AI era. Also, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille explore how product leaders shape their legacy through their impact, values, and reflection. Meanwhile, Jacob Poushter and team find AI anxiety outweighs optimism, and Maarten Dalmijn warns how process bloat kills team ownership.
Next, Melissa Suzuno outlines how product operating models shift focus from outputs to outcomes, scaling through pilot teams and leadership support. Roger Snyder addresses the tension between PM and PO, emphasizing the importance of alignment on purpose, ownership, and cadence, while Charlie Guo examines LLM performance drift, providing mitigation strategies. Barry O’Reilly lists 21 signs your AI project might be undead, and Martin Eriksson warns that empowerment fails without a strategic context and a deliberate shift in leadership stance.
Lastly, Pawel Brodzinski warns that autonomous AI agents lack the trust needed for broad adoption without transparency and alignment. Jens Meyer critiques veto-heavy cultures and calls for genuine accountability, where saying yes means accepting the outcome. Also, Emily Webber shares tips on selecting meaningful icebreakers that promote safety and connection, and Steve Blank defends science as the engine of innovation. Finally, Matt Kamelman stresses that smart AI starts with context, not just more data.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Poor Decisions by Managers
: Six Reasons Why Managers Make Poor Decisions
Henrik Mårtensson explains management mistakes through six lenses: bounded rationality, satisficing, double-loop learning, OODA, politics, neuroscience, advocating candor, decision tools, time-savvy heuristics, and deliberate practice to improve outcomes.
🎯 Product
and : Product & Leadership Legacy
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille unpack product and leadership legacy, contrasting impact and craft, linking brand and values, offering reflection prompts to guide growth, transitions, and how teams remember you.
(via ProdPad): The Feasibility Fallacy: Why Teams Still Trip Over Technical Feasibility
Janna Bastow demonstrates how skipping technical feasibility can derail trust and timelines, citing late discovery and unclear ownership. She advocates for five-minute checks, visible assumptions, pre-mortems, shared ownership, and addressing the costs, performance, and compliance of the AI era.
: The Product Operating Model Explained: From Pilot Teams to Full Transformation
Melissa Suzuno explains the product operating model, contrasting it with projects, stressing outcomes, continuous discovery, pilot teams, leader roles, handling resistance, and scaling pilots into organization-wide transformation, including regulated industries.
(via Productside): Product Manager Vs Product Owner: From Friction To Forward Motion
Roger Snyder argues that PM and PO friction stems from misaligned context, not competence. He recommends aligning on purpose, clarifying ownership, establishing cadence and language, managing stakeholders, and using outcome scorecards to align roadmap and backlog.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
(via Pew Research Center): How People Around the World View AI
Jacob Poushter, Moira Fagan, and Manolo Corichi report on global public opinion regarding AI, finding that awareness is high, but concern outweighs excitement. Trust favors domestic regulators and the EU, with youth, education, and Internet use correlating with enthusiasm.
: LLMs are getting dumber and we have no idea why
Charlie Guo argues LLMs show performance drift, examines five theories: quantization, stale training data, seasonal human mimicry, user bias, and post-training tweaks, and recommends RAG, fine-tuning, and strong eval suites.
: We Will Not Trust Autonomous AI Agents Anytime Soon
Pawel Brodzinski says we still will not trust autonomous AI agents. Autonomy requires transparency, alignment, clear boundaries, technical excellence, and care; models often lack these essential elements. Expect narrow, constrained uses and ongoing cat-and-mouse exploits.
: When AI Projects Are Zombies, Ghosts, or Ghouls and How to Spot Them
Barry O'Reilly explains how to spot undead AI ventures with 21 red flags: endless pilots, no learning loop, hidden data, vanity metrics, overstated claims, missing demos, unclear ROI, and fragile scalability.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
: How Big Is Your Kraken?
Maarten Dalmijn uses the Kraken metaphor to illustrate how bureaucracy and distrust shift teams from ownership to orchestration, hindering collaboration and delivery; he urges leaders to cut their tentacles, avoid SAFe, and stay close to the work.
: You Can't Just Flip the Switch on Empowerment
Martin Eriksson says empowerment fails when leaders skip stages; teams need a shift from directing to coaching, supporting, and then delegating, along with strategic context via Decision Stack. Directive leadership is appropriate.
(via INSEAD Knowledge): The Curious Comfort of Saying ‘No’
Jens Meyer argues that misaligned authority and accountability make saying no the safest move, hiding opportunity costs; urges shifting power to accountable doers, shrinking veto cultures, and designing systems where yes carries responsibility and consequences.
📯 Mastering AI as Agile Practitioners — The AI 4 Agile Course Is Out!
The Mastering AI with the AI 4 Agile Online Course launches this week, and I am proud that I avoided another delay. Scope creep happened despite my supposed expertise in preventing exactly that. The course expanded from a simple prompt collection to over 8 hours of video, custom GPTs, and materials that I’ll apparently continue to update indefinitely, as I’m still not satisfied that it’s comprehensive enough. (Also, the field is advancing so rapidly.)
At least the $129 lifetime access means you will benefit from my urge to fight my imposter syndrome with perfectionism and from my inability to call a project “done.” I guess we are in for the long term. 🙂
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🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: (More) Icebreakers for meetings and workshops that don’t suck (no really)
Emily Webber explains how to choose icebreakers that help: focus on context, inclusivity, and purpose to lower participation barriers, boost psychological safety, energize, and connect people and content with examples.
: No Science, No Startups: The Innovation Engine We’re Switching Off
Steve Blank argues science underpins power and startups, explaining the roles of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and VCs, the role of universities, and how cutting basic research erodes innovation; AI augments scientists, not replaces them.
(via ThoughtWorks): Why context engineering is like teaching AI to skip stones
Matt Kamelman argues that effective AI requires context engineering: selecting and routing the right information, not more. Blend embeddings, graphs, and RAG with dual memories for compliant, stable, adaptable reasoning outputs.
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| Date | Class and Language | City | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 November 6-December 4, 2025 | Guaranteed: AI for Agile BootCamp #4 — November 6 – December 4, 2025 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT |
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See all upcoming classes here.
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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 Poor Decisions:
- 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.
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