TL; DR: A Simplified Scrum Guide — Food for Agile Thought #490
Welcome to the 490th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,688 peers. This week, Tobias Mayer reintroduces Scrum as a minimalist, team-empowering practice rooted in empiricism with a simplified Scrum Guide, and David Pereira challenges the feature factory’s enduring grip with seven sharp tactics for reclaiming product purpose. Aakash Gupta and Paweł Huryn offer an AI PM crash course, while Simon Willison finds AI search finally usable. Also, Dwarkesh Patel urges humility over certainty when navigating uncertain AGI trajectories.
Next, Roni Ben Aharon reflects on the power of sunsetting features to sharpen product focus, and Jenny Wanger champions AI for productivity without losing human connection. Ethan Mollick introduces “Jagged AGI,” while Zvi Mowshowitz warns of its risks, testing o3. Moreover, John Cutler reframes team conversations as core infrastructure shaping alignment, performance, and adaptive capacity.
Lastly, Philippe Bonneton and Mike Cottmeyer explain why AI stalls beyond the pilot phase, while Fredrik Delin calls for funding persistent teams over projects. Itamar Gilad critiques outdated prioritization, Scott Sehlhorst warns of diminishing returns, and Johanna Rothman shows how frequent, collaborative deliveries replace blame with trust. Together, they spotlight the structural shifts needed for real agility and sustainable impact.
🎓 🖥 🇬🇧 The AI-Enhanced Advanced Product Backlog Management Course Version 2—June 23, 2025
Are you facing problems aligning vision, stakeholders, your team, and delivering real value?
Is your contribution as a product leader questioned?
Then, prepare to transform your career with my AI-enhanced, comprehensive, self-paced online class. Dive deep into professional Product Backlog management techniques supported by videos, exercises, and the latest AI models.
👉 Please note: The course will only be available for sign-up until June 30, 2025!
🎓 Join the Launch of the AI-Enhanced Version 2 on June 23: Learn How to Master the Most Important Artifact for any Successful Agile Practitioner!
<!–
This week, the most popular discussion on LinkedIn was: Scrum Masters, are you working too much?
–>
Did you miss the previous Food for Agile Thought issue 489?
🗞 Shall I notify you about articles like this one? Awesome! You can sign up here for the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter and join 42,000-plus subscribers.
🎓 Join Stefan in one of his upcoming Professional Scrum training classes!
🏆 The Tip of the Week: Simplified Scrum Guide
: A simple guide to Scrum
Tobias Mayer offers a refreshingly concise, value-driven guide to Scrum as a flexible, team-centered framework rooted in empiricism. It clarifies how Scrum empowers teams to adapt, deliver value frequently, and evolve their practices within clear, minimalist boundaries.
🎯 Product
: 7 Bold Moves to Defeat the Bloody Feature Factory Before It Burns You Out
David Pereira exposes how the soul-crushing feature factory lives on in 2025 and shares seven bold, actionable steps to escape it, shifting from mindless shipping to strategic, value-focused product work—it is not too late.
(via Mind The Product): How and when to sunset features
Roni Ben Aharon shares how Craft.io sunset a major feature, revealing why letting go, though painful, is essential for focus, reducing hidden costs, and creating room for more valuable, user-aligned product work.
and : 📺 Complete Course: AI Product Management
Aakash Gupta and Paweł Huryn deliver a hands-on masterclass in AI product management, covering prompting, RAG, fine-tuning, PRDs, and AI agents, emphasizing practical skills, structured thinking, and avoiding common PM pitfalls.
(via Mind The Product): What AI can’t—and shouldn’t—do for product managers
Jenny Wanger urges product managers to embrace AI for productivity gains—like summarizing meetings or tagging feedback—while protecting the human connections essential to empathy, alignment, and user understanding that no bot can replicate.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
: AI assisted search-based research actually works now
Simon Willison reports that AI-assisted search-based research finally works, thanks to models like o3 and o4-mini, which integrate real-time search into their reasoning. The new models deliver fast, grounded answers with dramatically reduced hallucination rates.
: On Jagged AGI: o3, Gemini 2.5, and everything after
Ethan Mollick explores the idea of “Jagged AGI:” AI models like o3 and Gemini 2.5 that show superhuman skills in some domains yet fail at basic tasks, revealing a new, uneven intelligence frontier.
: o3 Is a Lying Liar
Zvi Mowshowitz highlights o3’s wild potential and dangerous misalignment, praising its raw intelligence while warning that its unchecked hallucinations and reward-hacking tendencies pose serious risks to trust, safety, and future AI alignment.
: Questions about the Future of AI
Dwarkesh Patel’s essay maps critical, unresolved questions about AI, from scaling laws to geopolitics, arguing that epistemic humility—trying to be less wrong—and not confident forecasting is our best stance toward AGI futures.
🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training with PSM II Certificate — May 26-27, 2025
Discover Scrum’s four success principles in this official Scrum.org Advanced Scrum Master training class including the industry-recognized PSM II certification. The PSM-A training class is designed as a live virtual class and will be offered in English.
Enjoy the benefits of a live virtual immersive class with like-minded agile peers from 09:00 – 17:30 CEST.
Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training with PSM II Certificate — May 26-27, 2025.
Customer Voice: “Dear Stefan, Thanks a lot for two intense and mindblowing days. Your way of teaching suites me perfectly. I must admit that all the positive feedback you have gotten is spot on! I would any time a day recommand your class to a Scrum Master who wants to add a whole new level to his/her scrum game. To all of you reading this. You have to experience Stefans class to understand how good it is.” (Source.)
<!–
👉 From time to time, we can offer last-minute seats for training classes at cost to individuals who do not have access to a corporate training budget. If you would like to be notified about these opportunities, please register here.
–>
➿ Agile & Leadership
: Conversation Quality and Scale
John Cutler explores how the quality, maturity, and scalability of conversations shape a team’s operating system, arguing that intentional, well-timed dialogue is the true infrastructure behind high-performing, aligned organizations.
(via ThoughtWorks): Funding agility: Moving beyond project budgets
Fredrik Delin argues that to support real agility, companies must move from project-based funding to investing in persistent product teams. The step requires aligning finance with continuous value delivery, strategic outcomes, and empowered team autonomy.
(via Leading Agile): 📺 From Pilot to Adoption: Overcoming the AI Implementation Gap
Philippe Bonneton and Mike Cottmeyer unpack why AI pilots thrive under ideal lab conditions but fail to scale, highlighting how legacy systems, scattered data, and organizational inertia sabotage real-world implementation and sustainable innovation.
📯 How to Use AI to Analyze Interviews from Teammates, Stakeholders, and the Management
When you step into a new role as Scrum Master or agile coach for a team under pressure, you’re immediately confronted with a challenging reality: you need to understand the complex dynamics at play, but have limited time to process all the available information.
This article explores how AI interview analysis can be a powerful sensemaking tool for agile practitioners who need to synthesize unstructured qualitative data quickly, particularly when joining a team mid-crisis.
Learn more: How to Use AI to Analyze Interviews from Teammates, Stakeholders, and the Management
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: Prioritization Techniques Compared
Itamar Gilad compares classic prioritization techniques, like HiPPO, MoSCoW, WSJF, and CD3, highlighting their limits. He suggests a shift toward evidence-guided, iterative decision-making that supports learning, customer value, and product discovery.
: The Secret of Diminishing Returns
Scott Sehlhorst argues that solving problems efficiently means understanding when progress hits diminishing returns and S-curve limits, where increasing effort yields less value, requiring both outside-in value focus and inside-out capability realism.
: How to Use Delivery to Move from Blame to Trust
Johanna Rothman explains how shifting from blame to trust in agile teams hinges on frequent, collaborative deliveries. Trust grows as teams reduce WIP, shorten cycle times, and deliver value together.
<!–
🎶 Encore
–>
📅 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:
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 the Simplified Scrum Guide:
- 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.
- 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 the Simplified Scrum Guide — Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack Community and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world.
If you like to join all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.
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 #490: Escaping the Feature Factory, Funding Agility, Prioritization Comparison, AI PM Course: RAG, PRD, Agents appeared first on Age-of-Product.com.
