TL; DR: Agile Coach Bubble Origins — Food for Agile Thought #485
Welcome to the 485th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,652 peers. This week, Viktor Cessan explores the Agile Coach bubble origin, which was inflated by cheap capital. Marty Cagan and Felipe Castro stress that outcomes over outputs remain elusive without adopting the product model. Maarten Dalmijn identifies systemic dysfunction—not poor PMs—as the real challenge and proposes CACAO as a remedy. David Pereira urges teams to treat the backlog as a strategic tool, not a dumping ground. Also, Lenny Rachitsky interviews Anton Osika on how Lovable hit $10M ARR in 60 days by letting users describe apps in plain language—AI handles the rest.
Next, Ben Thompson interviews Sam Altman on OpenAI’s evolution from research lab to consumer tech giant, unpacking ChatGPT, AGI, and pursuing “the next Facebook.” Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar expose how AI search engines misattribute and fabricate news content, damaging trust, and publisher economics. Peter Yang offers 12 grounded rules for building real apps with AI—especially for non-coders, while Charity Majors dismantles the 10x engineer myth, advocating for resilient, inclusive teams where “normal” engineers thrive. And Andy Cleff makes a case for self-selection: empowered teams deliver better outcomes than top-down assignments ever could.
Lastly, Rita McGrath defends bureaucracy’s stabilizing role but calls for permissionless systems. Ben Kuhn shares his Anthropic crisis project management lessons, and John Cutler uses LLMs to visualize individual interactions, which are documented during interviews. Finally, Ted Neward reframes organizational “debt” as strategic or destructive—urging awareness.
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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: Agile Coach Bubble Origins
: How Cheap Money Created an Agile Coach Bubble
Viktor Cessan argues the Agile Coach bubble was fueled by cheap money and burst when financial discipline returned—survival now requires proving real business value, not just facilitating team rituals.
🎯 Product
and (via Silicon Valley Product Group): Outcomes Are Hard
Marty Cagan and Felipe Castro explain why moving from outputs to outcomes is deceptively hard. Teams struggle to define, measure, and deliver meaningful, problem-solving results without adopting the product model.
: The 5 Obstacles to High-Performing Product Teams
Maarten Dalmijn dissects why Product Management feels so broken: it’s not the PMs, but the Kraken—counter-productive organizational systems. He offers CACAO as the antidote to empower truly high-performing product teams.
and : Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (CEO and co-founder)
Lenny Rachitsky interviews Anton Osika on how Lovable reached $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people by letting users describe apps in plain language—AI handles the rest, code included.
: Why Backlog Management Is Dangerous for Most Teams
David Pereira warns that most teams treat their backlog like a Christmas wishlist—bloated, outdated, and distracting. He urges ruthless pruning, outcome-driven thinking, and reframing backlog management as a strategic enabler, not a to-do list.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
and (via The Stratechery): An Interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman About Building a Consumer Tech Company
Ben Thompson interviews Sam Altman on OpenAI’s unexpected pivot from research lab to consumer tech giant, discussing AGI, ChatGPT’s origin, business model tensions, and what it means to “build the next Facebook.”
(via Columbia Journalism Review): AI Search Has A Citation Problem
Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar reveal that AI search engines misattribute, fabricate, and confidently cite news content incorrectly—over 60% of the time—undermining trust, transparency, and publisher revenue.
: 12 Rules to Vibe Code Without Frustration
Peter Yang shares 12 hard-earned rules for “vibe coding” with AI—emphasizing simplicity, planning, ruthless testing, and debugging—to help non-coders build real apps without burning out or getting stuck.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
(via IEEE Spectrum): Why Great Engineering Orgs Thrive on ‘Normal’ Engineers
Charity Majors argues that great engineering organizations empower “normal” engineers to deliver consistent value—debunking 10x myths and shifting focus from individual brilliance to resilient, inclusive, team-based systems.
: Self-Selection: Start Small, Think Big
Andy Cleff urges leaders to ditch rigid team assignments and try self-selection—backed by a decade of success. Start small, create guardrails, and let teams form around real value streams, not spreadsheets.
: The Benefits of Bureaucracy: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Red Tape
Rita McGrath makes the case that bureaucracy, while frustrating, is a historic upgrade from autocratic chaos—offering stability, fairness, and competence—but argues it’s now time to explore permissionless alternatives.
📯 The Agile Prompt Engineering Framework
Agile teams have always sought ways to work smarter without compromising their principles. Many have begun experimenting with new technologies, frameworks, or practices to enhance their way of working. Still, they often struggle to get relevant, actionable results that address their specific challenges. Regarding generative AI, there is a better way for agile practitioners than reinventing the wheel team by team—the Agile Prompt Engineering Framework.
Learn why it solves the challenge: a structured approach to prompting AI models designed specifically for agile practitioners who want to leverage this technology as a powerful ally in their journey.
Learn more: The Agile Prompt Engineering Framework.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: How I’ve run major projects
Ben Kuhn shares his crisis-mode project management playbook from Anthropic: focus intensely, update plans constantly, overcommunicate deliberately, delegate smartly, and simplify goals—because execution speed depends on information flow, not just code.
: Debts, Tech and Otherwise
Ted Neward explores debt beyond tech: from talent to process, culture to support. Not all debt is bad—some is strategic. However, reckless, inadvertent debt silently undermines long-term resilience and viability.
: I’m No AI Expert, but I Like My Graphs!
John Cutler shares how he uses LLMs step-by-step to visualize work operating systems post-interview. In a short explanatory video, he simplifies the struggle with unstructured data with a one-click graphing solution.
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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 the Agile Coach Bubble:
- 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 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 EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
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Help your team to learn about Leadership Blindspots by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
The post Food for Agile Thought #485: Agile Coach Bubble Origins, Outcomes Are Bl**dy Hard, Product Team Anti-Patterns, Running Major Projects appeared first on Age-of-Product.com.
