|
Welcome to the 481st edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,718 peers. I am Stefan Wolpers, offering hands-on, actionable advice to agile professionals.
This week, Jim Highsmith, Jon Kern, Heidi Musser, and Sanjiv Augustine reflect on Reimagining Agile, advocating for a return to core values while pushing agility forward. David Pereira interviews Mike Cohn, emphasizing adaptability over rigid frameworks and AI’s growing role in product development. Meanwhile, Ravi Gupta warns that AI-native companies will disrupt industries, urging leaders to embrace AI-first thinking. M.G. Siegler analyzes the AI arms race, predicting a shift toward consumer-driven consolidation, with ChatGPT currently leading. Maarten Dalmijn critiques Institutionalized Competing Interests (ICI), where departmental silos obstruct collaboration, while John Cutler explores the hidden ego toll that prevents obvious improvements from taking root.
Next, Aakash Gupta interviews Marily Nika about excelling in AI product management, emphasizing key roles and essential skills, and avoiding hype-driven AI. Petra Wille underscores that successful product organizations thrive on disciplined habits rather than flashy frameworks, while Willem-Jan Ageling examines the evolving Product Owner role, warning against proxy POs and fragmented ownership. Meanwhile, Lewis C. Lin explores AI Brain Fog, where over-reliance on AI weakens critical thinking, offering the CLEAR framework to restore independent decision-making.
Lastly, Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, and Rikki Singh explore AI’s transformative impact on the software product development life cycle, from accelerating innovation to redefining roles. Zeno Rocha shares how Friction Logs at Resend help new hires rapidly spot and fix UX issues, reinforcing a culture of continuous improvement. Also, Simone Cicero critiques traditional design tools for failing to capture B2B ecosystem complexity, introducing new mapping techniques to align customer needs with strategic decision-making. Finally, Sebastian Raschka breaks down four key approaches to improving LLM reasoning models, offering insights from DeepSeek R1’s development and AI’s evolving landscape.
Could you do me a favor and forward this email to someone who will enjoy it? You’re awesome, thank you! 🙏
🛑 Becoming obsolete is a choice, not inevitable!
👉 Don’t miss out—just four seats left: Join the AI for Agile Practitioners: Pilot Cohort Program, April 1-15, 2025, at €199!
🏆 Tip of the Week
Agile Alliance: Jim Highsmith, Jon Kern, Heidi Musser, and Sanjiv Augustine reflect on Reimagining Agile, emphasizing a return to core Agile values while evolving agility for the future. They challenge the community to embrace change, share real stories, and push Agile forward: "Reimagining Agile (an update): Back to the Basics, Forward to the Future."
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
-
Ravi Gupta urges companies to rethink their AI strategy, warning that industry leaders will shift as AI-native businesses emerge. He challenges leaders to embrace AI-first thinking or risk falling behind in the coming transformation: "AI or Die."
-
MG Siegler examines the evolving AI landscape, predicting a shift from a chaotic arms race to consumer-driven consolidation. With ChatGPT leading, competition intensifies as companies seek dominance through pricing, productization, and ecosystem leverage: "The One AI to Rule Them All."
-
Sebastian Raschka explores four key approaches to enhancing LLM reasoning models: inference-time scaling, reinforcement learning, supervised fine-tuning, and distillation. He provides insights into DeepSeek R1’s development and AI’s evolving landscape: "Understanding Reasoning LLMs."
➿ Agile & Leadership
- 📺 David Pereira interviews Mike Cohn on Agile’s evolution, emphasizing adaptability over dogma, AI’s transformative role, and the Agile Alliance-PMI partnership as an opportunity to expand Agile’s reach rather than a takeover: "What Happened to Agile?"
-
Maarten Dalmijn explores how organizations fall into the trap of Institutionalized Competing Interests (ICI), where siloed expertise hinders collaboration. He advocates for hiring beyond specialization and prioritizing shared goals over departmental optimization: "Institutionalized Competing Interests: Part II."
-
John Cutler explores the hidden costs of change, highlighting the ego toll—the loss of credibility, authority, or identity that blocks apparent improvements. He urges leaders to reframe narratives, reduce perceived threats, and shift status to enable progress: "Who Pays the Ego Toll?"
🎓 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Align, Discover, Deliver: Advanced Product Backlog Management Cohort Class of March 6-April 3, 2025
Improve your career prospects by turning your Product Backlog into a strategic tool for empowered product teams to discover solutions, align stakeholders, and deliver measurable outcomes.
Are you ready to elevate your Product Management practice and drive meaningful outcomes for your team and stakeholders, living up to the promises of the product operating model?
This immersive cohort class will guide you in turning your Product Backlog into a strategic asset that aligns your vision, stakeholders, and team with customer needs and business goals:
- Excel at delivering value regularly — your #1 career success factor.
- Learn to distinguish between valuable and useless ideas.
- Abandon the feature factory. Instead, learn to contribute to customer and organizational success.
- Gain actionable insights, learn supportive tools, and practice everything in a safe community of like-minded peers.
- Learn to say no and build trust and rapport with stakeholders while focusing on creating value.
- Create engaging feedback loops.
Additional bonuses: You will have free access to the corresponding online course; just go ahead and revisit all cohort topics whenever you get a chance.
Quote: “If you are looking to move beyond merely delivering features and want to start consistently delivering outcomes and valuable deliverables to your customers, this course is essential. Stefan provides the focus and tools necessary to embark on a journey toward excellent product management. With a curriculum that includes vision, strategy, roadmap, product discovery, continuous delivery, idea management, hypothesis management, and backlog management, this course promises less than it delivers—a truly transformative experience.” (Hector Feliciano.)
Enjoy the benefits of an immersive cohort class and its community with like-minded agile peers on March 6, March 20, and April 3, 2025, from 3-6 pm CET/CEST. The class will be offered in English.
👉 Join now: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Align, Discover, Deliver: The Product Backlog Management Cohort Class of March 6-April 3, 2025.
🎯 Product
-
Petra Wille highlights that successful product organizations prioritize habits over hype—following through, documenting decisions, collaborating, sharing progress, and delivering frequently. Fancy frameworks won’t save you; real impact comes from consistently doing the work that matters: "What Successful Product Organizations Have in Common."
- 🎙 Aakash Gupta interviews Marily Nika on breaking into AI product management, highlighting key AI PM roles, critical skills beyond coding, avoiding hype-driven AI, and actionable strategies to land and excel in AI PM roles: "How to Become an AI PM – From Google AI PM Marily Nika."
🔄 Self-Paced Online Courses
🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
-
McKinsey & Company: Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, and Rikki Singh explore how AI transforms the software product development life cycle (PDLC), accelerates innovation, enhances customer value, and redefines roles. Organizations must integrate AI-first tooling, restructure teams, and adopt outcome-based business models: "How an AI-enabled software product development life cycle will fuel innovation."
-
Resend: Zeno Rocha shares how Friction Logs help new hires at Resend quickly identify and fix UX pain points, accelerating onboarding, fostering collaboration, and reinforcing a culture of continuous product improvement from day one: "How we use Friction Logs to improve the product."
-
Boundaryless: Simone Cicero critiques traditional design tools for failing to capture B2B ecosystem complexity. He introduces new mapping techniques and a Portfolio Map to align customer needs, organizational structure, and strategic decision-making for modern markets: "The Challenge of Mapping Complex Ecosystems in Design and Research."
📯 Hands-on Agile 2025: Embracing the Shift to Context-Based Agility — The Slides
If you weren’t at the virtual Hands-on Agile 2025 conference earlier this month, you missed an incredible opportunity to explore the shift from concept-based to context-based agility with nearly 800 fellow agilists. But don’t worry – I’m here to share some key takeaways and insights!
Check out the slides from the Live Stream speakers; I will keep you posted on the availability of the recordings.
Learn more: Hands-on Agile 2025: Embracing the Shift to Context-Based Agility — The Slides.
📅 Training Classes, Cohorts, Meetups & Events
Upcoming events:
See all upcoming classes here.
Don’t Miss Out: Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
I invite you to join the Hands-on Agile Slack team and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners worldwide.
If you want to join now, you will need to send your credentials through this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.
If you like the newsletter, please forward it to a friend or colleague—it would mean a lot to me! 🙏
Last but not least, if you are a first-time reader of this newsletter, click here to subscribe and join 42,718 peers.
Best,
|
