TL; DR: Product Model Failures — Food for Agile Thought #525
🎉 Happy 2026 and welcome to the 525th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,782 peers. This week, John Cutler warns product operating model failures when artifacts replace enabling conditions, while Stephanie Leue shows how reactive overload blocks real product work. Itamar Gilad critiques Google’s drift toward output over learning. Andrej Karpathy tracks 2025 LLM shifts reshaping who builds software, and Janelle Teng Wade examines AI’s power-law economics and fragile bets. Also, Mike Fisher uses Nokia to show how relentless change overwhelms the capacity for absorption and judgment.
Next, Marty Cagan and Elias Lieberich describe Google’s product model built on empowered teams, discovery, and outcomes at scale. Ant Murphy surveys 2026 product shifts and urges PMs to strengthen strategy and business judgment amid noisy AI adoption. Stephane Derosiaux questions AI productivity claims outside greenfield work, while Teresa Torres shares how she deliberately uses Claude Code, even for non-coding tasks. Andi Roberts distills Adam Kahane’s view of change through habits, experiments, and relationships.
Then, Johanna Rothman argues that culture shifts through stories, experiments, and flow metrics that improve decisions, not activity counts. Kevin Kelly reframes data as a commons that gains value through connection and shared governance, Sean Goedecke shows how complexity erodes system understanding over time, and Rich Mironov urges product leaders to speak in revenue terms. Finally, Jenn explains why sustainable meetups depend on organizer energy, clear norms, and intentional culture design.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Product Model Failures
: Here's why so many companies that are adopting the ‘product operating model’ will fail
John Cutler warns that product operating models fail when artifacts replace conditions, suggesting messy paths marked by centralization, refactoring, and flux, where adaptability matters more than fixed structures over time and scale.
🎯 Product
: Why Your Product Managers Are Drowning
Stephanie Leue describes product managers drowning in reactive work, suggesting leadership must fix systemic overload by protecting focus time, limiting priorities, improving discovery, and reducing the administrative burden so product strategy and customer insight can actually happen.
: The Product Operating Model at Google - A Critical View
Itamar Gilad critiques Google’s product operating model, suggesting that big-bet strategies, weakened discovery, and output-driven incentives eroded learning, culture, and adaptability, offering lessons for companies to avoid similar regressions.
(via Silicon Valley Product Group): The Product Model at Google
Marty Cagan and Elias Lieberich explain how Google’s product model relies on empowered teams, evidence-driven discovery, technical leadership, and an outcome-focused approach to scale products and compete in AI markets.
: How Product is Changing in 2026
Ant Murphy reviews 2026 product shifts, noting a market recovery, a profit focus, widespread AI use with limited ROI, blurred roles, and urges PMs to prioritize strategy, business acumen, influence, and optionality.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
: 2025 LLM Year in Review
Andrej Karpathy reviews 2025 LLM shifts, highlighting RLVR-driven reasoning, jagged intelligence, agentic local tools, new application layers, vibe coding, and emerging GUIs that change who builds software and how work.
: 2025 Year-In-Review: AI Bubble or Breakthrough?
Janelle Teng Wade reviews 2025’s AI debate, showing power-law winners concentrating value, capital, and risk, while questioning infrastructure spend, enterprise adoption, and valuations, concluding that 2026 will likely mix bubble dynamics with genuine breakthroughs.
: The 70% AI productivity myth: why most companies aren't seeing the gains
Stephane Derosiaux challenges AI productivity hype, showing that most enterprises see modest or negative gains due to legacy systems, learning curves, and measurement illusions, while real benefits cluster in AI-native, greenfield, low-complexity work.
and (via YouTube): 📺 Full Tutorial: Automate Your Life with Claude Code in 50 Min
In this video with Peter Yang, Teresa Torres describes using Claude Code as a daily thought partner for writing, research, and task management, combining strict context management with human judgment to work faster, think more clearly, and retain ownership of decisions.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
: When Change Outruns Us: Why Growth Depends on Absorption and Recovery
Mike Fisher suggests organizations fail when change outpaces absorption, using Nokia to show that constant reorgs exhaust learning, erode judgment, and confuse velocity with progress, and proposes recovery and meaning as prerequisites for sustainable growth.
: Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems: Adam Kahane book summary and key practices
Andi Roberts summarizes Adam Kahane’s book, proposing that systems change through everyday habits, small experiments, working with cracks, and radical engagement across differences, favoring practical action, relationships, and patience over heroic transformation plans.
: Want to Invite Culture Change? Use Stories About Who We Are, Part 2
Johanna Rothman explains that culture change works through stories, suggesting that flow metrics and experiments shift how managers show value, learn faster, reduce WIP, and replace activity metrics with decision-quality and feedback-driven progress.
: Data Manifesto
Kevin Kelly proposes that data belongs to the commons, gains value through movement and connection, carries shared rights and responsibilities, challenges privacy assumptions, and needs social and technical tools for governance.
📯 The Immunity Response: How Organizations Neutralize Change
Organizations resist change through immune responses: encapsulation, assimilation, exhaustion, redefinition, and expulsion. But immune systems attack what they recognize. Hence, if you are in the business of change and expect push-back, stop announcing transformations. Instead, to overcome the immunity response, start solving problems: The principles spread through practice, through demonstrations of value, not by proclamation.
This article is Part 3 of a three-part series. In Part 1, Agile Is Dead, Long Live Agility, we saw how the Agile brand became toxic while the principles spread faster than ever under different names. In Part 2, The Reformation That Became the Church, we traced how every disruptive movement hardens into the orthodoxy it opposed.
This final part answers the question we left open: Can you practice the principles without the apparatus? Yes. But only if you understand why organizations reject change and how to stop triggering that rejection.
Learn more: The Immunity Response: How Organizations Neutralize Change.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: Nobody knows how large software products work
Sean Goedecke explains that large software systems become opaque due to complexity and change, leaving even engineers uncertain, documentation lagging, and tacit team knowledge critical, fragile, and easily lost over time during reorganizations.
: 📺 Workshop: Practicing the Language of Money
Rich Mironov suggests product leaders stop explaining processes and instead communicate in money stories, translating roadmaps, trade-offs, and the cost of delay into simple revenue impacts executives understand and can act on.
(via LessWrong): Opinionated Takes on Meetups Organizing
Jenn suggests that sustainable meetups prioritize the organizer’s energy over ideals, proposing benevolent leadership, clear participation norms, selective openness, and intentional culture design to prevent burnout and sustain communities over the long term.
📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
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| Date | Class and Language | City | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 February 19, 2026 | Guaranteed: Hands-on Agile #72: Become Your Organization's AI Champion: A Crowdsourced Playbook (English; Live Virtual Meetup) | Meetup | FREE |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 March 10-11, 2026 | Guaranteed: Professional Scrum Master—Advanced Training (PSM II; English; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 March 19 to April 16, 2026 | Guaranteed: AI4Agile BootCamp #6 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇩🇪 March 24-25, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇩🇪 April 22-23, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner – AI Essentials Training (PSPO AIE; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €799 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇩🇪 May 19-20, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
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 Product Model Failures:
- 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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🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
Read more: Food for Agile Thought #524: Irreplaceable Skills, Prototypes over PRD, Context Before Code, Deflation by AI.