TL; DR: Meeker’s AI Trends — Food for Agile Thought #496
Welcome to the 496th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,588 peers. This week, Mary Meeker explores AI trends in a massive presentation and how it is reshaping industries faster than the Internet ever did, with massive adoption and investment. Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion discuss selecting ideal pilot teams for transforming toward a product operating model, while Itamar Gilad builds on Marty Cagan’s concept by identifying eight core functions of empowered organizations. Charlie Guo humorously outlines how to fail at adopting AI, and Peter Yang compares Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini across key use cases, each excelling in different areas.
Next, Christina Wodtke shows how product sense can be trained through deliberate practice and reflection. Jake Bowen-Bate defends the product triad model amid rising AI role blending. Also, Geoffrey A. Fowler highlights Claude’s lead in AI reading tests, and Thomas Ptacek critiques LLM skeptics in software. Janna Bastow shares examples of practical acceptance criteria to improve clarity, reduce scope creep, and enhance product delivery across teams.
Lastly, Jeff Sutherland, John Anthony Coleman, and Ralph Jocham unveil the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack for today’s complex realities. Moreover, Maarten Dalmijn champions fluid team roles over rigid Scrum labels. Laurianne McLaughlin and M. Shawn Read highlight essential AI-era leadership traits. Finally, Steven Sinofsky reframes AI as another disruptive abstraction. Jason Cohen breaks down three viable, strategic pricing models.
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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: Meeker’s AI Trends
(via Bond): Trends – Artificial Intelligence
Mary Meeker outlines how AI drives unprecedented change, with surging adoption, investment, and innovation across global markets. AI surpasses Internet-era acceleration, reshaping technical, financial, and geopolitical landscapes in real-time.
🎯 Product
: 📺 How to Choose the Right Pilot Teams for a Product Operating Model Transformation
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion explain how to choose pilot teams for a product operating model transformation, emphasizing small, skilled, and motivated teams with strong relationships, customer access, and products in early or growth stages.
: Developing Product Sense: How to See the Forest and the Trees
Christina Wodtke demystifies product sense as a learnable skill. Through hands-on practice, personal synthesis, user conversations, and reflective prediction, PMs can sharpen their intuition and make better, faster product decisions that resonate with stakeholders.
: The Product Operating Model Explained
Itamar Gilad unpacks Marty Cagan’s Product Operating Model, outlining eight interdependent functions that distinguish modern, empowered, customer-focused organizations from traditional ones driven by hierarchy, rigidity, and outdated management assumptions.
(via Mind The Product): Strength through tension – in defence of the product triad
Jake Bowen-Bate defends the product triad against AI-driven role blending, arguing that while capabilities may overlap, spreading accountability across product, design, and engineering still leads to better decisions through healthy tension.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
: ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini: The Best AI Model for Each Use Case in 2025
Peter Yang compares Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini across nine use cases, finding Claude best for writing and coding, ChatGPT strongest for personal assistance and memory, and Gemini leading in video and affordability.
: How To Fall Behind in The Age of AI
Charlie Guo offers a sharp, satirical guide for resisting AI adoption, humorously outlining how to fall behind with confidence by ignoring progress, avoiding experimentation, and clinging to outdated tools and workflows.
(via The Washington Post): 5 AI bots took our tough reading test. One was smartest — and it wasn’t ChatGPT.
Geoffrey A. Fowler ran a head-to-head reading comprehension test on five AI bots using literature, legal contracts, medical studies, and political speeches, revealing Claude as the top performer and exposing significant inconsistencies and hallucinations across the board.
: My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
Thomas Ptacek delivers a fiery, deeply technical case for AI-assisted coding, arguing that LLM skeptics, especially in software, are missing the point, ignoring today’s tools and clinging to outdated developer romanticism.
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #1 — September 4-25, 2025
The job market’s shifting. Agile roles are under pressure. AI tools are everywhere. But here’s the truth: the Agile pros who learn how to work with AI, not against it, will be the ones leading the next wave of high-impact teams.
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Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #1 — September 4-25, 2025.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
and : What about the Scrum Guide in 2025?
Jeff Sutherland, John Anthony Coleman, and Ralph Jocham introduce the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack to help teams bring Scrum to life beyond the 2020 Guide to address the increasingly VUCA-ish real-world experience.
: Stop Talking So Much About the Different Scrum Roles
Maarten Dalmijn urges teams to stop obsessing over Scrum roles. Like Total Football, high-performing Scrum Teams succeed when roles are fluid, collaboration is strong, and everyone aligns toward delivering valuable products.
(via MIT Sloan Management Review): 📺 10 Essential Leadership Traits for the AI Era
Laurianne McLaughlin and M. Shawn Read share insights from the 2025 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, highlighting courage, curiosity, playfulness, and present-future balance as essential leadership traits in the age of AI transformation.
📯 Instilling Agility, Common Strategy Mistakes, Disempowered Teams — Hands-on Agile 2025
The third batch of videos of Hands-On Agile 2025 is in, and you don’t want to miss them: Johanna Rothman warns against fake “Agile,” urging a focus on genuine agility by choosing fit-for-purpose lifecycles and improving feedback loops. At the same time, Roman Pichler outlines five common product strategy mistakes and how to avoid them for better product outcomes, and Maarten Dalmijn highlights systemic blockers to empowered teams and advocates for shifting from rules to cultivating environments that enable high performance.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: From Typewriters to Transformers: AI is Just the Next Tools Abstraction
Steven Sinofsky argues that AI is just the latest in a long line of disruptive abstractions, like calculators or word processors. Disruptions unsettle because they devalue cherished skills, not because they’re dangerous.
(via Jason Cohen): More or Less
Jason Cohen explores three distinct pricing strategies: more for more, more for less, and less for less. He argues that each is viable if fully embraced, strategically aligned, and executed with conviction, clarity, and consistency.
(via ProdPad): 19 Acceptance Criteria Examples for Different Products, Formats and Scenarios
Janna Bastow shares 19 real-world acceptance criteria examples across industries and formats, showing how clear, testable criteria aligned with user stories can reduce ambiguity, prevent scope creep, and streamline QA and delivery.
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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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 🇩🇪 July 8-9, 2025 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇬🇧 July 10, 2025 | Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class (PSFS; English; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €599 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇩🇪 September 2-3, 2025 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 September 4-25, 2025 | Guaranteed: AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #1 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 September 15-October 6, 2025 | Guaranteed: AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #2 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇬🇧 September 23-24, 2025 | Professional Scrum Master Advanced Training (PSM II; English; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
See all upcoming classes here.
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📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product YouTube channel to improve learning, for example, about an AI Success Framework for Organizations:
- Sandrine Olivencia: Restoring Agility through Lean Craftsmanship.
- Q& A with Product Leader Coach and Product at Heart Organizer Petra Wille.
- Maarten Dalmijn: The 5 Obstacles to Empowered Teams.
- 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.
- 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.
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The post Food for Agile Thought #496: Meeker’s AI Trends, Product Model Transformation Teams, Developing Product Sense, Scrum Guide 2025 appeared first on Age-of-Product.com.
