TL; DR: Wrong Product Development Models — Food for Agile Thought #489
Welcome to the 489th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,673 peers. In this week’s edition, John Cutler dissects the fallacy of linear product development models, advocating for messy, fractal approaches that mirror real-world complexity. Marty Cagan sees generative AI as a lever for genuine team autonomy beyond legacy constraints. Dan Shipper champions OpenAI’s o3 for complex, agentic workflows, while Gary Marcus rebuts AGI hype Tyler Cowen advocates. Moreover, Maarten Dalmijn warns against Big Bang rewrite failures, urging incremental progress, better morale, and reduced risk through visible, sustainable change.
Next, John Cutler clarifies the four distinct jobs of prioritization, warning against their conflation, and Hamel Husain shares AI product lessons centered on iteration and domain expertise. Ant Murphy offers a path out of OKR theatre through focused, product-driven goals. Additionally, Tina Huang reveals how AI and fundamentals combine for intuitive, context-aware app development.
Lastly, Aakash Gupta and Anthony Maggio share how they built a no-code AI PM agent in under 90 minutes. David Burkus explains how trust is rebuilt through consistent leadership action. Also, Gregor Ojstersek urges culture-first AI adoption in engineering, avoiding its imposition. Finally, Kevin O’Sullivan demystifies product analytics, while Paweł Huryn shares a no-code guide to building voice agents with n8n and MCP servers.
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This week, the most popular discussion on LinkedIn was: Scrum Masters, are you working too much?
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🏆 The Tip of the Week
: Connecting Dots
John Cutler unpacks why modeling product development as a neat cascade breaks down in reality, advocating instead for layered, messy, fractal structures that reflect real intent, causality, and emergent impact, beyond Jira boards and mono-processes.
🎯 Product
: The 4 Prioritization Jobs (And Why It Matters)
John Cutler divides prioritization into four jobs: efficiency, leverage, autonomy, and support. He explains how conflating them creates confusion, misalignment, and systemic dysfunction in teams and organizations.
(via Silicon Valley Product Group): Team Autonomy and AI
Marty Cagan explores how generative AI could resolve long-standing issues of team autonomy, distinct from empowerment, by enabling product teams to work more independently across legacy systems, tech debt, and complex dependencies.
(via O’Reilly Media): A Field Guide to Rapidly Improving AI Products
Hamel Husain shares hard-won lessons from over 30 AI product implementations—arguing that success comes not from tools or features, but from fast iteration, rigorous evaluation, and empowering domain experts with real data insights.
: 📺 We Built an AI Agent to Automate PM in 73 mins (ZERO CODING)
Aakash Gupta and Anthony Maggio built an AI agent for PM tasks in 73 minutes—no code needed. Learn Airtable’s automation, systems thinking, and model-driven strategy shaping modern product teams.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
(via Every): Vibe Check: o3 Is Here—And It’s Great
Dan Shipper shares why OpenAI’s o3 is his new go-to AI: it is fast, smart, agentic, and deeply integrated into ChatGPT, making it useful for complex tasks, research, coding, leadership coaching, and beyond.
: OpenAI’s o3 and Tyler Cowen’s Misguided AGI Fantasy
Gary Marcus critiques Tyler Cowen’s claim that OpenAI’s o3 is AGI, arguing it’s part of a growing trend of hype-driven, one-sided commentary that ignores AI’s persistent limitations and undermines intellectual rigor.
: 📺 Vibe Coding 101
Tina Huang demystifies vibe coding, showing how combining AI agents with engineering fundamentals enables fast, intuitive app development—provided you understand thinking frameworks, debugging, context, and MVP discipline.
🖥 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class w/ PSFS Certificate — April 24, 2025
The Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills (PSFS) training by Berlin Product People is a one-day official Scrum.org facilitation class for advanced Scrum practitioners and agile coaches, including the industry-acknowledged PSFS certification. The PSFS training class is designed as a live virtual class and will be in English.
Enjoy the benefits of a live virtual immersive class with like-minded agile peers from 09:00 – 17:30 CEST.
Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class w/ PSFS Certificate — April 24, 2025.
Customer Voice: “Great experience – “You reap what you saw.” What I really liked about it was the constant usage of facilitation techniques & Liberating Structures to engage all participants & harness the collective knowledge while reaching the goal of the exercises during the workshop. Therefore, my experience was great because I could really leave with some insights from the whole group that I could apply in my daily work starting from the next day. “You reap what you saw” and in this case, it was the collective intelligence of everyone in the training class.” (Source.)
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➿ Agile & Leadership
: The Explosive Nature of ‘Big Bang’ Rewrites
Maarten Dalmijn dismantles the myth of Big Bang rewrites, warning they often lead to delays, demoralization, and failure, arguing for fast, visible progress or gradual rewrites to avoid compounding risk and waste.
: How To Rebuild Trust On A Team (When It’s Your Fault)
David Burkus outlines how leaders rebuild trust after missteps: own up to the impact, involve the team, demonstrate change through behavior, and stay consistent, because trust isn’t declared; it’s shown daily.
: Enforcing the use of AI in engineering teams – good or bad thing?
Enforcing AI use in engineering can backfire. Gregor Ojstersek recommends a bottom-up, culture-first approach. Instead, he recommends focusing on psychological safety, knowledge sharing, realistic expectations, and empowering teams to adopt AI meaningfully.
📯 The Fantastic Optimus Alpha Approach to Data-Informed Retrospectives
In this experiment, OpenAI’s new stealthy LLM Optimus Alpha demonstrated exceptional performance in team data analysis, quickly identifying key patterns in complex agile metrics and synthesizing insights about technical debt, value creation, and team dynamics. The model provided a tailored Retrospective format based on real team data.
Its ability to analyze performance metrics and translate them into solid, actionable Retrospective designs represents a significant advancement for agile practitioners.
Learn more: The Fantastic Optimus Alpha Approach to Data-Informed Retrospectives
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: Escape OKR Theatre
Ant Murphy breaks down how to escape OKR theatre by diagnosing common anti-patterns, like too many objectives, vague targets, and unrealistic stretch goals. Instead, he offers practical, strategic guidance rooted in product thinking.
(via Userpilot): Product Analytics: A Complete Guide for Product Teams
Kevin O’Sullivan offers a comprehensive, hands-on guide to product analytics, clarifying key metrics, tools, and methods teams can use to turn behavioral data into meaningful product decisions and continuous improvement.
: J.A.R.V.I.S. for PMs: Automate Anything with n8n and Any MCP Server
Paweł Huryn shares a no-code guide for building AI voice agents using n8n and MCP servers—automating workflows locally or in the cloud—empowering product managers to build J.A.R.V.I.S.-like assistants.
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🎶 Encore
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📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
You can secure your seat for Scrum training classes, workshops, and meetups directly by following the corresponding link in the table below:
| Date | Class and Language | City | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 April 24, 2025 | GUARANTEED: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class (PSFS; English; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €649 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 April 29-30, 2025 | GUARANTEED: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 May 14-June 11, 2025 | SOLD OUT: AI for Agile Practitioners: Pilot Cohort Program (English; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Cohort | €199 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇬🇧 May 26-27, 2025 | Professional Scrum Master Advanced Training (PSM II; English; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇩🇪 June 3-4, 2025 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 5-July 3, 2025 | Guaranteed: AI for Agile Practitioners: Pilot Cohort Program (English; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €249 incl. 19% VAT |
See all upcoming classes here.
You can book your seat for the training directly by following the corresponding links to the ticket shop. If the procurement process of your organization requires a different purchasing process, please contact Berlin Product People GmbH directly.
📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel to improve learning, for example, about Product Development Models:
- Roman Pichler: The Top Reasons Why a Product Strategy Fails.
- Johanna Rothman: How to Instill Agility, not Agile Practices.
- Cliff Berg: Leadership Behaviors That Lead to Actual Agility.
- Jurgen Appelo: Humans Robots Agents — Hands-on Agile 2025.
- Peter Merel: the agile way — Hands-on Agile 2025.
- Dr Lynn Kelley: Change Questions: The Keys to Implementing Organizational Change—Hands-on Agile 2025.
- Hands-on Agile EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
✋ Do Not Miss Out — Learn more about Product Development Models — Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
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Help your team to learn about Leadership Blindspots by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
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The post Food for Agile Thought #489: Wrong Product Development Models, Empowerment by AI, PM Agents, Rebuilding Trust appeared first on Age-of-Product.com.
