TL; DR: ROT (Return on Tokens) — Food for Agile Thought #548
Welcome to the 548th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,528 peers. This week, Packy McCormick and Markie Wagner call token maxing wasteful: AI should compile processes into code, not burn tokens at runtime; ROT (return on tokens) is essential. Deb Liu warns that chasing efficiency gains only builds a faster treadmill, while Elena Verna insists companies need employees with agency, not more agents. Roman Pichler centers emotional intelligence as the capability AI cannot replicate, Jenny Wanger swaps team health scorecards for structured conversations, and Grant Harvey examines who controls Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.
Next, Gary Marcus questions whether AI IPOs resemble early Amazon or history’s largest capital misallocation. At the same time, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor argue that AI only compresses execution, not decision-making, leaving engineers irreplaceable. Gaurav Savla offers PMs a practical playbook for shipping AI features, from latency budgets to drift monitoring, and Rich Mironov warns that funding software as one-time projects kills products past v1.0. Also, Sean Goedecke examines why trust between engineers and PMs erodes so quickly.
Lastly, Ara Kharazian reports that top firms spend $7,449 per employee per month on AI, with Anthropic overtaking OpenAI. Yet, Kristin Broughton, Mark Maurer, and Jennifer Williams find that only 26% of companies fully track those costs. Ruben Dominguez believes most organizations overestimate their AI maturity by two levels, and Cris Beswick adds that declining empathy and psychological safety quietly dismantle the capacity to innovate. Finally, Ben Maraney shows what structured adoption looks like through Forter’s agent sprint.
🎓 🇬🇧 OUT NOW — $129: The Claude Cowork Online Course
You have been prompting AI for months. The results are inconsistent, every conversation starts from zero, and the model forgets who you are. That is the ceiling of prompting.
The Claude Cowork Online Course teaches you to break through it: build Skills that encode your expertise, connect them to your tools, and assemble Agents who handle recurring work the way you would handle it yourself. No coding required.
What You Will Get:
✅ 8+ hours of self-paced video modules: Skills, Agents, and what turns AI into a compounding system — ✅ Tested with a live BootCamp cohort (April 2026) — ✅ The A3 Framework: decide what to delegate and what to keep — ✅ Starter kit with Cowork installation guide, CLAUDE.md, and Skill templates — ✅ Slides, prompts, skills, artifacts; over 100 downloads — ✅ Designed for the $20/month Pro plan — ✅ Lifetime access to the version you purchase — ✅ Claude Cowork Foundational Certificate.
👉 Please note: The course will be available for $129 from June 8 to 15, 2026! (After that, $199.) 👈
🎓 Save Your Seat Risk-free — 14 Days Money-Back Guarantee: Claude Cowork: Stop Prompting. Start Delegating. No Coding Required!
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: ROT (Return on Tokens)
and : Return on Tokens (ROT)
Packy McCormick and Markie Wagner suggest that tokenmaxxing is wasteful and that AI should serve as a compiler turning business processes into deterministic code, not as a runtime burning tokens.
🎯 Product
: What I tell CEOs who want a product team scorecard
Jenny Wanger proposes that product team health cannot be reduced to a scorecard and instead offers four structured conversational lenses covering data usage, user understanding, team ownership, and cross-departmental communication.
: Working with product managers
Sean Goedecke explores why trust between engineers and product managers breaks down so readily, with both sides resorting to manipulation or lies, and shares practical advice on building better relationships.
: Emotional Intelligence for Product Managers: The Competitive Advantage AI Can't Replicate
Roman Pichler suggests that emotional intelligence is the critical product management capability AI cannot replicate, enabling better user empathy, stronger stakeholder collaboration, and more effective leadership than intellectual ability alone.
(via O’Reilly Media): The PM's Playbook for Shipping AI Features That Actually Work in Production
Gaurav Savla shares a practical playbook for PMs shipping AI features, covering latency budgets, fallback hierarchies, quality measurement, A/B testing pitfalls, model drift monitoring, and why production hardening can never wait until 'later.'
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
: The AI Treadmill: Why the people most ahead in AI feel the most behind — and what to do about it
Deb Liu observes that the people furthest ahead in AI often feel the most behind and warns that using every efficiency gain to do more simply creates a faster treadmill.
: An entire industry is being propped up by math that is insane.
Gary Marcus challenges Jensen Huang's comparison of AI IPOs to early Amazon and Google, citing a Wharton paper that warns of a 2.7x productivity boost or history's largest capital misallocation.
(via The Neuron): Claude Fable 5: Anthropic’s Mythos Launch Explained
Grant Harvey dissects Claude Fable 5, Anthropic's first public Mythos-class model. It excels at long-horizon coding and vision tasks but quietly limits AI researchers and blocks biologists, sparking debate over who controls frontier capabilities.
and : Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor propose that AI only compresses the execution layer of software development, leaving decision-making and delivery fully intact, which is why engineers are not being replaced.
(via Forter): Making Agents Easy: 13 Lessons from Forter's Agentic AI Sprint
Ben Maraney shares 13 lessons from Forter's company-wide AI agent sprint, showing how an internal MCP server, simple platforms, and proactive legal alignment enabled everyone across R&D to build agents.
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Claude Cowork BootCamp #2, June 10-July 2, 2026
You bought the Claude Pro subscription. You installed the desktop app. You pointed Cowork at a folder, watched it churn for thirty seconds, and got something that looked impressive but was not quite useful. You tried again. Same result.
Most people who try Claude Cowork get stuck in the same place. They do not know which of their tasks are good candidates for automation. They do not know how to build Skills that survive a second use. They do not know where the current limits sit. So they keep treating Cowork like a chat tool and miss the point of having an AI assistant who actually does the work.
The Claude Cowork BootCamp fixes that. In four hands-on sessions, you build working Skills and AI Agents during the sessions, not after. You leave with a compounding system, not a stack of prompts.
The Founding Cohort sold out in April 2026. Cohort #2 starts June 10, 2026.
A Note on Positioning: This BootCamp is built for knowledge workers who want to automate repetitive work with Claude Cowork. There is no Agile-specific content in the curriculum. The class is in English. 🇬🇧
Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Claude Cowork BootCamp #2, June 10-July 2, 2026 — No Coding Required.
Customer Voice: “Vijay Reddy, Principal SPC & AI Governance Lead: “Three weeks ago I could use AI. Today I can deploy it. The Cowork Bootcamp is the only AI training I have taken that shifted my thinking from ‘what can I prompt?’ to ‘what should I architect?’ — and that shift showed up immediately: on the same day as Session 3, I shipped a production AI research agent live at sagent.sai4rai.org, applying Stefan’s CLAUDE.md principles and the A3 Framework in real code, not just in exercises. I would recommend this to any agile coach, product manager, or practitioner who is tired of AI training that teaches tools but leaves you without a system for knowing when and how to actually delegate to AI at scale.” (Vijay Reddy, Founder & Executive Director, SAI4RAI.)
➿ Agile & Leadership
: Your AI strategy has a trust problem, not a tooling problem: Your company needs agency, not agents.
Elena Verna believes companies don't need more AI agents; they need employees with actual agency. The real blocker to speed isn't tooling but command-and-control cultures that gate information and decisions behind titles.
: The Inevitable Failure of One-Shot Project Funding
Rich Mironov proposes that funding software as one-time projects inevitably fails because products require ongoing bug fixes, infrastructure updates, and the original team's institutional knowledge to survive beyond v1.0.
: Your Culture Is Killing Your Innovation Capability — And The Data Proves It
Cris Beswick reframes Emtrain's 2026 Workplace Culture Report as an innovation crisis: declining empathy, eroding psychological safety, and leadership skill gaps are silently dismantling organizations' ability to innovate at scale.
📯 Stop Prompting, and Start Building Compounding AI Systems
Every AI conversation starts from zero because the model forgets who you are. The Claude Cowork Online Course teaches you to change that: build persistent Skills, connect your tools, and assemble agents for recurring work. No coding.
Learn more: Stop Prompting, and Start Building Compounding AI Systems.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
(via The Wall Street Journal): The Metric CFOs Struggle to Track: AI Usage
Kristin Broughton, Mark Maurer, and Jennifer Williams report that only 26% of companies fully track their AI costs, as token-based pricing catches CFOs off guard and forces new spending controls.
(via Ramp Builders): How much does it cost to be AI-pilled?
Ara Kharazian shares updated Ramp AI Index data showing that the top 1% of firms spend $7,449 per employee per month on AI, while Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI in business adoption share.
: What Level Is Your AI Team, Really? A 5-Level Diagnostic
Ruben Dominguez proposes a five-level diagnostic for AI adoption maturity, complete with coaching plans. He believes most companies overestimate their progress by two levels, mistaking casual tool use for transformation.
📅 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 8, 2026 | GUARANTEED: Claude Cowork: Stop Prompting. Start Delegating. (English; Self-paced Online Course) | Self-Paced Online Course | $129 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 10-July 2, 2026 | GUARANTEED: Claude Cowork BootCamp #2 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | $249 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 July 1, 2026 | GUARANTEED: HoA 75: Token Economics. (English) | Meetup | FREE |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 July 15, 2026 | GUARANTEED: AI 4 Agile Course v3 — Master AI for Agile Practitioners (English; Self-paced Online Course) | Self-Paced Online Course | $149 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🇩🇪 August 25-26, 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 ROT (Return on Tokens):
- Stop Writing Prompts. Let AI Do It for You — Hack #01, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- Socratic Prompting — Hack #10, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- Check Your AI’s Plan Before — Hack #7, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- From Product Requirements to Experiments to Learnings — Supported by Generative AI.
- Never Accept an LLM’s First Offer — Improve GenAI’s Usefulness w/ Feedback Loops and Challenges.
✋ Do Not Miss Out: Learn more about ROT (Return on Tokens) — 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 how AI Intensifies Work by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
