|
Welcome to the 482nd edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,693 peers. I am Stefan Wolpers, offering hands-on, actionable advice to agile professionals.
This week, Ethan Mollick explores the rapid rise of Claude 3.7 and Grok 3, urging leaders to rethink AI’s role beyond simple automation, while Dan Shipper and Alex Duffy assess GPT-4.5’s improved emotional intelligence but persistent hallucinations. Maarten Dalmijn warns against distrust’s bureaucratic cycle, advocating for trust-driven leadership, while Swizec Teller critiques failed rewrites, emphasizing iterative refactoring over disruptive rebuilds. Moreover, Eduardo Baptista, Julie Zhu, and Fanny Potkin highlight DeepSeek’s AI ambitions, raising regulatory concerns, and Ben Thompson examines AI’s evolution, semiconductor risks, and U.S. policy shifts.
Next, Marty Cagan envisions AI-driven product teams shrinking to three key roles—PM, designer, and engineer—as automation reshapes discovery and delivery. Leah Tharin and Tal Raviv discuss AI’s evolving role in product management, urging PMs to experiment with contextual AI tools. Des Traynor outlines essential product review questions, emphasizing AI reliability, impact assessment, and iteration. Jenny Wanger shares lessons from building the Product Culture Blueprint Drafter, highlighting AI automation, prompt engineering, and product operations’ evolving role.
Lastly, Zvi Mowshowitz analyzes Grok 3’s strengths, including speed and Twitter integration, while addressing its hallucinations, biases, and xAI’s struggle to patch its vulnerabilities. Paweł Huryn introduces Deep Market Researcher, an AI agent streamlining product managers’ market research and strategic planning, while Avantika Gomes advocates adaptability in product roadmaps, highlighting Figma’s iterative approach. Finally, Ash Maurya challenges the obsession with experimentation, arguing that strong explanations and thought experiments are essential for validating business models before costly testing.
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 Again — Join the Second Cohort: AI for Agile Practitioners: Pilot Cohort 2, May 14-June 11, 2025, at €199!
🏆 Tip of the Week
Ethan Mollick explores the rise of Claude 3.7 and Grok 3, highlighting AI’s rapid advancements, scaling laws, and their potential to transform knowledge work, urging leaders to rethink AI’s role beyond simple automation: "A new generation of AIs: Claude 3.7 and Grok 3."
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
-
Every: Dan Shipper and Alex Duffy analyze GPT-4.5’s strengths and weaknesses, highlighting its improved emotional intelligence and conversational flow while acknowledging its persistent hallucination issues and lack of a major intelligence leap: "GPT-4.5 Won’t Blow Your Mind. It Might Befriend It Instead."
-
Reuters: Eduardo Baptista, Julie Zhu, and Fanny Potkin report on DeepSeek’s accelerated AI push, with its R2 model poised to challenge Western dominance. China embraces the startup, while global regulators raise concerns over its rapid rise: "DeepSeek rushes to launch new AI model as China goes all in."
-
The Stratechery: Ben Thompson examines AI’s rapid evolution, highlighting DeepSeek and Grok 3’s rise, semiconductor supply chain risks, and how U.S. policy must adapt to maintain technological leadership in an increasingly competitive landscape: "AI Promise and Chip Precariousness."
-
Zvi Mowshowitz explores Grok 3’s capabilities, noting its speed and Twitter integration but highlighting hallucinations and biases. He discusses xAI’s attempts to patch Grok’s jailbreakability and politically charged responses: "Grok Grok."
➿ Agile & Leadership
-
Maarten Dalmijn argues that distrust within teams creates a vicious cycle of bureaucracy and inefficiency. Instead of enforcing oversight, leaders must address the root cause—building trust—to foster real ownership and accountability: "Distrust Breeds More Distrust."
-
Swizec Teller argues that rewrites often fail due to opportunity cost and moving targets. Instead of stopping everything, teams must iteratively refactor, balancing maintenance with improvements to avoid wasted effort and delayed value delivery: "You can't stop the business, or why rewrites fail."
🎓 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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
-
Silicon Valley Product Group: Marty Cagan envisions AI-driven product teams shrinking to three core roles—product manager, designer, and engineer—as automation reshapes discovery and delivery. He predicts disruption but also new opportunities for innovation and startups: "A Vision For Product Teams."
- 🎙 Leah Tharin interviews Tal Raviv on AI’s role in product management. They discuss AI as a thought partner, its impact on workflows, and why PMs should start small, iterate, and embrace contextual AI tools: "AI for PMs: Stop Overthinking, Start Tinkering."
-
Des Traynor shares key questions for product reviews, covering strategy, AI reliability, customer feedback, design, engineering, and analytics. He emphasizes critical thinking, impact assessment, and iterative improvement to ensure product success: "The questions I'll always ask in a product review."
🔄 Self-Paced Online Courses
🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
-
Pawel Huryn introduces Deep Market Researcher, an AI agent designed for Product Managers to perform rapid, in-depth market research. It automates competitive analysis, trends, and PRD preparation, streamlining strategic decision-making: "Deep Market Researcher AI Agent for Product Managers."
-
Figma: Avantika Gomes discusses when to deviate from a product roadmap, emphasizing adaptability in response to user feedback. She highlights Figma’s iterative approach, pivoting strategies, and embracing change to build better products: "When To Off-Road the Product Roadmap."
-
Ash Maurya Ash Maurya emphasizes that running experiments is not the most critical activity in startups. Instead, formulating good explanations is key. Thought experiments help stress-test business models before costly testing, ensuring clarity and viability: "Running experiments is NOT the most important activity."
📅 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 42,693 peers.
Best,
|
