Leadership resistance to your pre-mortem reveals whether your organization’s operating model prioritizes comfortable narratives over preventing failure. This article shows you how to diagnose cultural dysfunction and decide which battles to fight.
Welcome to the 520th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,332 peers. This week, Shane Parrish explores Charlie Munger’s take on the psychology of bad decisions, revealing mental pitfalls that sabotage judgment. Teresa Torres distills how AI product teams earn trust and learn faster by narrowing focus and embracing uncertainty. Lenny Rachitsky talks with Stewart Butterfield about building useful products without falling for the founder’s ego, and Jim Highsmith warns that alignment fails without accountability. Also, Christina draws a clear line between tracking performance and setting meaningful, time-bound goals.
Next, Dean Peters presents AI workflows that help PMs stress-test ideas faster and reveal shallow thinking, while Ethan Mollick explains how Gemini 3 behaves like a junior teammate, not just a chatbot. Benedict Evans positions AI as a platform shift, still searching for business models. Maik Seyfert shows how informal shadow systems drive real decisions, and Laura Klein breaks down the costly myths behind skipping user research and the cultural blocks that enable them.
Last, Jenn Spykerman shares tactics for surviving AI chaos when leadership checks out, including spotting failure early and scoping for safety. Gergely Orosz talks with Martin Fowler about how AI reshapes coding while core engineering still holds firm, and Brian Balfour shows how AI prototyping slashes costs and accelerates product alignment. Then, Maarten Dalmijn warns against premature complexity in architecture. Finally, Max Woolf explores Nano Banana’s edge in precise image generation despite style transfer issues and IP risks.
The public Scrum training market is shrinking, while demand for self-paced AI and Product courses is growing among agile practitioners. Consequently, I will shift toward online courses on AI for Agile and Product Operating Models in 2026. And I will rejuvenate the Agile Camp Berlin in the summer of 2026. Learn more about what is in the pipeline.
Welcome to the 519th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,339 peers. This week, Ben Thompson sketches the AI bubble benefits, from lasting infrastructure and to accelerated innovation, while David Pereira and Radhika Dutt challenge OKR theatre with puzzle solving. John Cutler explores switching product lenses so ops reduce complexity instead of worshipping frameworks, and Richard Mironov demands real AI “money stories” before ROI pressure bites. Also, Shane Hastie interviews Jon Kern and Anita Zbieg, who stress AI’s tendency to amplify both team strengths and dysfunctions.
Next, Brian Balfour shares how AI prototyping helps teams explore solutions faster and sharpen decisions. A Chief Product Officer, an author argues, must juggle culture-building and CEO alignment to survive, and Dwarkesh Patel interviews Satya Nadella on Microsoft’s AGI playbook, from data centers to sovereign model strategies. Grant Harvey showcases Moonshot’s local-ready Kimi K2 model, capable of deep reasoning, while Jon Levy points to team culture and glue players as the real drivers of performance.
Lastly, J.P. Morgan warns that the AI sector must hit $650 billion in annual revenue by 2030 to avoid fallout from overcapacity. Teja Kusireddy finds that most VC-backed AI startups are overpriced API wrappers. Christine Miao urges emotionally intelligent leadership to address fear around AI, and Lucas F. Costa blames weak Retrospectives on a lack of ownership and urgency. Finally, Barry O’Reilly and Aakash Gupta offer hands-on ways to track AI transformation progress and save hours of labor from product workflows.
What if your organization’s “Agility” dysfunction isn’t an implementation problem but a missing-conditions problem that switching to, say, a product operating model cannot solve? This article identifies the success factors for agility that are absent in your organization. It gives you concrete Monday-morning actions to test what’s actually possible within your sphere of influence to drive change, because agility matters.
Welcome to the 518th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,351 peers. This week, Martin Eriksson applies his decision stack to Fujifilm vs Kodak, showing how Fujifilm avoided Kodak’s fate by aligning strategy and execution. Jason Fried reflects on why great products feel whole and personal, shaped more by craft than management, while Laura Klein calls out the chaos of DIY AI adoption and urges ops teams to step in with structure. Steve Newman questions AI’s readiness for complex, adaptive work, and Christina Wodtke highlights how premortems surface risks before they hit delivery.
Next, David Pereira offers 21 practical templates to help product managers focus on value without slipping into a performative process. Jana Paulech unpacks how bias distorts product discovery and calls for better documentation and broader input. Also, Chris Loy redefines prompt engineering as context engineering, applying software principles to AI workflows, and Sebastian Raschka surveys emerging LLM alternatives with different trade-offs. Simon Powers warns that change efforts fall flat when they rely on outdated mental models.
Lastly, John Cutler shows how Shape Up uses constraints to channel focus and pace when paired with clear intent. Andi Roberts advocates for small-scale experiments to navigate uncertainty and build learning cultures. Additionally, Peter Hunter and Elena Stojmilova share how decentralizing architecture decisions improved team ownership and speed, and Allan Kelly reframes OKRs as tools for autonomy and alignment. Finally, Mike Fisher suggests treating organizational change as a Hero’s Journey to unite teams around purpose.
