TL; DR: No Place to Hide from AI — Food for Agile Thought #482
Welcome to the 482nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,693 peers. This week, with no place to hide from AI, 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 Wenger 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.
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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
: A new generation of AIs: Claude 3.7 and Grok 3
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.
Take Claude’s native coding ability, I can now get working programs through natural conversation or documents, no programming skill needed.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
and (via Every): GPT-4.5 Won’t Blow Your Mind. It Might Befriend It Instead.
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.
(via Reuters): DeepSeek rushes to launch new AI model as China goes all in
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.
(via The Stratechery): AI Promise and Chip Precariousness
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.
: Grok Grok
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.
➿ Agile & Leadership
: Distrust Breeds More Distrust
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.
: You can’t stop the business, or why rewrites fail
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.
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Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Align, Discover, Deliver: The Product Backlog Management Cohort Class of March 6-April 3, 2025.
Customer Voice: “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.)
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🎯 Product
(via Silicon Valley Product Group): A Vision For Product Teams
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.
and : 🎙 AI for PMs: Stop Overthinking, Start Tinkering
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.
: The questions I’ll always ask in a product review
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.
: Drafting Your Product Culture: How I Built a product operations AI Tool
Jenny Wanger shares her journey of building the Product Culture Blueprint Drafter, an AI tool that transforms workshop discussions into actionable product culture documents. She explores lessons on AI automation, prompt engineering, and the evolving role of product operations.
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🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
: Deep Market Researcher AI Agent for Product Managers
Paweł 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.
(via Figma): When To Off-Road the Product Roadmap
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.
: Running experiments is NOT the most important activity.
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.
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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, that there is no need to hide from AI:
- Hands-on Agile 66: Escape the Feature Frenzy, Build to Sell with Sandrine Olivencia.
- Hands-on Agile 62: From Backlog Manager to Product Manager with David Pereira.
- Hands-on Agile 61: Toyota Kata Coaching for Agile Teams & Transformations with Fortune Buchholtz.
- Hands-on Agile 59: Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman.
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🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
The post Food for Agile Thought #482: No Place to Hide from AI, Cagan’s Vision For Product Teams, Distrust Breeds Distrust, Market Research Agent appeared first on Age-of-Product.com.
