Food for Agile Thought #483: Leadership Blindspots, Tyranny of Incrementalism, Who Does Strategy?

Welcome to the 483rd edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,689 peers. I am Stefan Wolpers, offering hands-on, actionable advice to agile professionals.

This week, Luona Lin and Kim Parker reveal U.S. workers’ anxiety around AI’s workplace impacts, while Lennart Meincke, Ethan Mollick, Lilach Mollick, and Dan Shapiro stress context-dependent complexities in prompt engineering. Charlie Guo sees AI hallucinations becoming manageable, Claire Lew identifies overlooked leadership blindspots, Joost Minnaar showcases Haier’s entrepreneurial employee model, and Arjun Shah champions ambitious “maximum thinking” over incrementalism.

Next, Will Larson explains how anyone, including engineers, can meaningfully shape organizational strategy through practical influence, while Ian Vanagas shares PostHog’s lessons on team autonomy, rapid iteration, and customer-driven development. Scott Sehlhorst highlights the power of clear problem statements, and Roman Pichler emphasizes intentional team design as key to sustained product success.

Lastly, Dan Shipper highlights Michael Taylor’s AI tool, Rally, which transforms customer research through risk-free audience simulations, while Aakash Gupta and Colin Matthews showcase rapid, code-free AI prototyping with Bolt, Lovable, v0, Replit, and Cursor. Johanna Rothman clarifies ranking versus prioritization for limiting WIP, and Jeff Gothelf outlines effective OKR retrospectives emphasizing preparation and evidence-based adjustments.

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🏆 Tip of the Week

Pew Research Center: Luona Lin and Kim Parker highlight Pew Research’s recent survey, revealing that U.S. workers feel more anxiety than optimism about AI in workplaces, believing it might reduce job opportunities and speed tasks without improving quality significantly: "U.S. Workers Are More Worried Than Hopeful About Future AI Use in the Workplace."

🧠 Artificial Intelligence

• SSRN: Lennart Meincke, Ethan Mollick, Lilach Mollick, and Dan Shapiro emphasize that AI benchmarking and prompt engineering lack universal standards, highlighting that effective prompting depends heavily on context, with politeness or constraints sometimes improving—and sometimes harming—performance: "Prompting Science Report 1: Prompt Engineering is Complicated and Contingent."

• Charlie Guo argues AI hallucinations, previously seen as critical flaws, are becoming manageable as models improve, specialized tools mitigate errors, and users adapt to collaborative augmentation rather than full automation: "Hallucinations Are Fine, Actually."

• 📺 Every: Dan Shipper explores Michael Taylor’s creation, Rally, an innovative AI tool enabling realistic audience simulations for rapid, risk-free customer feedback, transforming traditional approaches to market research and decision-making: "He Built an AI Audience Simulator. It’s the Future of Customer Research."

➿ Agile & Leadership

• Claire Lew highlights the ten most critical leadership blindspots uncovered through extensive research, emphasizing that leaders often unknowingly create conditions they seek to avoid, encouraging self-reflection to genuinely improve team trust and performance: "The 10 Biggest Leadership Blindspots Based on 10 Years of Research."

• Corporate Rebels: Joost Minnaar explores how Haier transforms employees into entrepreneurs by granting them autonomy, profit-sharing opportunities, and freedom to fail—creating a culture that rewards innovation, ownership, resilience, and continual experimentation: "Haier’s Radical Experiment: What If Every Employee Was an Entrepreneur?"

• Medium: Arjun Shah argues against incremental “MVP culture,” advocating instead for “maximum thinking,” emphasizing ambitious visions, sustained commitment, and bold innovation as essential to achieving transformative, industry-defining breakthroughs: "Thinking in Maximums. Escaping the tyranny of incrementalism."

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🎯 Product

• Will Larson argues anyone in an organization can influence strategy, regardless of role, emphasizing practical approaches for engineers and executives to navigate constraints and political sensitivities to shape organizational decisions meaningfully: "Who gets to do strategy?"

• PostHog: Ian Vanagas distills lessons from PostHog, emphasizing small-team autonomy, clear ownership, rapid shipping with real user feedback, engineer-driven product decisions, meaningful metrics, targeted experimentation, and genuine excitement about the product: "50 things we’ve learned about building successful products."

• Roman Pichler explains that successful product teams rely heavily on intentional team design—comprising clear goals, empowerment, and organizational support—which significantly impacts performance, outweighing even effective launches or coaching interventions: "Setting up Product Teams for Success."

• Scott Sehlhorst emphasizes that even when product managers don't set strategic direction, clearly defining problem statements within mandated initiatives provides essential clarity, helps avoid premature solutions, and ensures meaningful outcomes: "Problems in the Solution."

🔄 Self-Paced Online Courses

• 🇬🇧 The Advanced Product Backlog Management Course: Transform Your Career by Mastering Alignment Tools, Building Transparent Processes Your Stakeholder Love, and Learn to Fix Backlog Anti-Patterns — $149.

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• 📺 Aakash Gupta and Colin Matthews provide a live, hands-on tutorial demonstrating five leading AI prototyping tools—Bolt, Lovable, v0, Replit, and Cursor—to rapidly build and refine product features without writing code: "Tutorial of Top 5 AI Prototyping Tools: Bolt, Lovable, v0, Replit, and Cursor."

• Johanna Rothman clarifies the critical difference between ranking and prioritization, arguing that true ranking—selecting exactly one item per position—is essential to limit WIP, boost throughput, and ensure meaningful team autonomy: "How to Tell the Difference Between Rank-Order and Prioritization."

• Jeff Gothelf provides a clear, practical guide for running quarterly OKR retrospectives, emphasizing preparation, visual clarity, evidence-driven course corrections, and keeping discussions future-focused to maximize meeting effectiveness and stakeholder alignment: "How to Run an OKR Retrospective: A Step-by-Step Guide."

📅 Training Classes, Cohorts, Meetups & Events

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• 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 Mar 11-12 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Mar 26-27 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master - Advanced Training (PSM II; English)
• 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 April 10 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Product Discovery & Validation (PPDV; German)
• 🖥 🇬🇧 April 24 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class (PSFS; English)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 April 29-30 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 May 14-June 11 — Live Virtual Cohort: AI for Agile Practitioners — Pilot Cohort Class (English)

See all upcoming classes here.

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