Food for Agile Thought #484: Product’s Hard Nature, Brittle Product Teams, Pivots, and Blameful Post-Mortems

Welcome to the 484th edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,673 peers. I am Stefan Wolpers, offering hands-on, actionable advice to agile professionals.

This week, Ethan Mollick examines vibe coding, where AI-native teams blend human expertise and AI to iterate and collaborate rapidly. Maarten Dalmijn critiques rigid planning, advocating for elastic teams that thrive in complexity. In anticipating engineering’s shift toward AI management roles, Jasper Gilley quit his FAANG job, seeing automation redefine technical careers. Michael Küsters likens middle management to Rock-Paper-Scissors, where unpredictability is key to success. At the same time, Fred Hebert dissects AI integration, emphasizing thoughtful human-in-the-loop design to avoid automation pitfalls.

Next, Itamar Gilad argues that product success is rare due to underestimated complexity and misaligned forces, advocating for strategic clarity and intentional culture-building. Then, David Pereira highlights how pilot testing helps PMs validate assumptions, reduce risks, and iterate faster, and Brian Balfour predicts AI will redefine product teams—transforming methodologies, roles, monetization, and distribution—urging AI-native strategies. In an interview with Peter Yang, Anthropic’s Scott White details how Claude 3.7 Sonnet accelerates product development through AI-generated PRDs, evals, and agentic coding tools.

Lastly, we critique overly blameless post-mortems, advocating for balanced accountability to prevent mediocrity, and Johanna Rothman champions rolling-wave planning to reduce pressure and improve adaptability. Ash Maurya stresses that successful pivots require rapid business model testing and external accountability. Additionally, Zvi Mowshowitz dissects Manus, a Chinese AI agent hyped as groundbreaking but revealed as a Claude wrapper, and, finally, Andrew Chen explores “vibe coding,” where AI reshapes software creation, predicting a shift toward intuitive, GUI-driven design, fragmented UX, and adaptive, self-improving applications.

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🏆 Tip of the Week

Ethan Mollick explores “vibe coding,” demonstrating how AI-native product teams blend human expertise and AI to rapidly prototype, creatively iterate, and dynamically collaborate—reshaping product development in a vibe-filled work environment: "Speaking Things Into Existence."

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🧠 Artificial Intelligence

• Honeycomb: Fred Hebert explores the critical question of where humans fit in AI-driven systems, emphasizing thoughtful integration to avoid automation pitfalls and maintain essential human expertise and situational awareness: "AI: Where in the Loop Should Humans Go?"

• Zvi Mowshowitz analyzes Manus, a hyped Chinese AI agent revealed as a cleverly marketed Claude wrapper, highlighting influencer-driven hype and how LLMs plus basic “vibe coding” can quickly simulate advanced capabilities: "The Manus Marketing Madness."

• Andrew Chen describes “vibe coding,” an AI-driven coding approach emphasizing intuition over traditional coding, predicting shifts toward youth-created software, GUI-based design, fragmented UX, adaptive self-improving apps, and evolving dev team roles: "Vibe coding, some thoughts and predictions."

➿ Agile & Leadership

• Maarten Dalmijn explains that organizations unintentionally create brittle teams by obsessing over predictability and excessive planning, sacrificing adaptability; instead, fostering elastic teams that embrace complexity, flexibility, and short feedback loops produces better results: "Why Most Organizations Produce Brittle Teams Instead of Elastic Teams."

• As Michael Küsters explains, Middle management is a balancing act between stability, performance, and disruption. Success lies in unpredictability—dynamically shifting strategies, avoiding rigid cycles, and staying ahead of inevitable shifts: "Predictability in middle management? Good luck!"

• Jasper Gilley quit his FAANG job, anticipating automation will rapidly reduce engineering roles to “AI context managers” or “infrastructure janitors,” reshaping careers around human skills rather than traditional technical expertise. "I quit my FAANG job because it'll be automated by the end of 2025"

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🎯 Product

• David Pereira highlights that pilot testing can bridge the gap between PMs and leadership by quickly converting assumptions into evidence, reducing product risks, enabling faster iteration, and effectively identifying valuable and distracting features: "How Pilot Projects Can Give PMs the Support They Lack from Leadership."

• Itamar Gilad argues product success is rare because organizations underestimate complexity, fail to align conflicting forces, and neglect culture—emphasizing embracing uncertainty, strategic clarity, and treating organizational culture intentionally as a product: "Why Is Product So Hard?"

• 🎙 In Peter Yang’s interview, Anthropic’s Scott White explains using Claude 3.7 Sonnet for efficient, iterative product building through AI-generated PRDs, precise evals, rapid prototyping, cross-team collaboration, and agentic coding tool: "Inside the Best AI Model for Coding and Writing | Scott White (Anthropic)."

• Reforge: Brian Balfour argues that AI will fundamentally redefine product teams, transforming methodologies, roles, tools, monetization, and distribution, urging teams to embrace AI-native strategies and rethink their entire product approach: "AI Native Product Teams: How They Will Think, Work, and Build Differently."

🔄 Self-Paced Online Courses

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🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• The author argues that overly blameless software post-mortems harm accountability, emphasizing the need for balanced “blameful” practices that clearly assign fault, encourage ownership, and fairly hold teams accountable to prevent sustained mediocrity: "Blameful Post-Mortems."

• Johanna Rothman Johanna Rothman recommends reducing planning by adopting rolling-wave approaches that limit detailed planning to short, manageable periods, enabling teams to deliver faster, adapt to reality, build trust, and significantly lower pressure: "How to Reduce Planning, Deliver More, and Surprisingly, Reduce Pressure."

• Ash Maurya emphasizes successful pivots require quickly stress-testing business models, avoiding random experimentation, maintaining external accountability, and separating founder success from individual idea success to accelerate product building effectively: "The Art of the Pivot."

📯 The Alignment-to-Value Pipeline: Building Products That Matter

Effective product development requires both strategic alignment and healthy Product Backlog management. Misalignment leads to backlog bloat, trust erosion, and building the wrong products. By implementing proper alignment tools, separating discovery from delivery, and maintaining appropriate backlog size (3-6 sprints), teams can build products that truly matter.

Success depends on trust, collaboration, risk navigation, and focusing on outcomes over outputs. Learn more about how to embrace the alignment-to-value pipeline and create your product operating model.

Learn more: The Alignment-to-Value Pipeline: Building Products That Matter.

📅 Training Classes, Cohorts, Meetups & Events

Upcoming events:

• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 June 3-4 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)

See all upcoming classes here.

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