When product teams fail to establish stakeholder alignment and implement rigorous Product Backlog management, they get caught in an endless cycle of competing priorities, reactive delivery, and shipping waste.
The result? Wasted resources, frustrated teams, and missed business opportunities. Success in 2025 requires turning your Product Backlog from a chaotic wish list into a strategic tool that connects vision to value delivery. Learn how to do so.
Welcome to the 477th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,791 peers. This week, Aakash Gupta provides an AI playbook for Product Managers to leverage AI effectively, while Martijn Oost critiques oversimplified organizational change, emphasizing context and experimentation. Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick delve into balancing psychological safety with high standards in tech teams. James Shore outlines six pillars for building exceptional product engineering organizations, and Esther Derby and Viktor Cessan share strategies for engaging resistant teams and fostering trust without imposing unwanted help.
Next, Roman Pichler introduces a holistic product strategy system for sustainable success, while Itamar Gilad emphasizes embracing uncertainty through outcome-focused planning and evidence-based decision-making. Ant Murphy highlights the power of a “NOT doing” list to reduce waste and foster simplicity, and Mike Belsito shares empathy-driven strategies to turn stakeholder challenges into innovation opportunities.
Lastly, John Cutler emphasizes nuanced capacity allocation for sustainable growth, David Burkus advocates fostering team accountability through empowerment and honesty, Ash Maurya highlights automated customer feedback loops for continuous learning, and Alex Ewerlöf discusses delivering value, adapting to market shifts, and fostering personal growth to navigate challenges effectively.
Join Sandrine Olivencia on how to escape the Feature Frenzy and build instead products and services that sell. (The recording is in English.)
📺 Watch the video now: Escape the Feature Frenzy, Build to Sell with Sandrine Olivencia – Hands-on Agile #66.
Welcome to the 476th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,817 peers. This week, we feature John Cutler on how Lean principles adapt to stabilize scaling challenges, Simon Powers on budgeting strategies for impactful organizational change, and Steven Sinofsky dissecting engineering patterns that fail despite sounding practical. James Hawkins addresses escaping the “deadline doom loop,” while Steve Denning examines the synergy of hierarchies and networks for fostering innovation and competence.
Next, Dan Olsen debunks claims of product management’s demise, highlighting AI’s role in enhancing PM effectiveness. Peter Yang interviews Aman Khan on PM Career-Defining AI Skills in 2025, while Mihika Kapoor shares her playbook for turning bold ideas into viral internal successes. Moreover, David Pereira offers practical guidance on refactoring, bridging technical and business priorities through actionable insights and real-world examples.
Lastly, we explore Stefan Lindegaard’s toolbox for scaling high-performance teams with tools like the Capability Gap Map. Petra Wille highlights trust and generosity as keys to thriving communities, and Melissa Suzuno showcases Vistaly’s role in continuous discovery. Finally, Katelyn Bourgoin shares psychology-driven strategies to shape customer pricing perceptions effectively.
The Forensic Product Backlog Analysis: A 60-minute team exercise to fix your Backlog. Identify what’s broken, find out why, and agree on practical fixes—all in five quick steps. There is no fluff, just results.
Want technical excellence and solve customer problems? Start with a solid Product Backlog.
Welcome to the 475th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,812 peers. This week, Dave Snowden challenges the “Agile Industrial Complex” to move beyond rote behaviors toward fostering natural agility and strategic impact. Charles Lambdin dissects Agile’s waning influence, citing political naïveté and misaligned priorities, while Chris Matts warns of superficial “Product Transformations” in 2025, echoing past Agile missteps. Gene Gendel discusses with Andy Cleff and Jay Hrcsko how HR and finance can either constrain or enable agility. Finally, Gregor Ojstersek and Michał Poczwardowski offer actionable tips for creating meetings engineers won’t hate, emphasizing relevance and purpose.
Next, Aletheia Delivre introduces “Walk the Park” and “Customer Love Sprints,” rituals that help teams tackle UX debt and prioritize customer-focused improvements. John Cutler advocates for nuanced customer segmentation via organizational psychographics, aligning strategy and product with GTM approaches, and Marty Cagan reflects on AI’s evolving role in product management, examining its effects on discovery, creativity, and team satisfaction. Also, Jason Cohen shares actionable strategies for uncovering customer insights before building a product, emphasizing creative outreach and leveraging networks.
Lastly, Nir Eyal reframes failure as a growth opportunity, advocating for resilience through structured reflection and positivity. Benji Weber explores overcoming resistance to Extreme Programming by inviting teams to embrace collaboration and shared ownership. Moreover, Kent Beck contrasts the “Desert” and “Forest” mindsets, showcasing how XP practices lead to near-zero production bugs. Gustavo Razzetti uncovers five hidden team habits that sabotage collaboration, while Van Halen’s “no brown M&Ms” clause offers a metaphor for identifying overlooked details, much like sentinel species signal broader systemic risks.
