TL; DR: Automated Companies — Food for Agile Thought #491
Welcome to the 491st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,669 peers. This week, Dwarkesh Patel envisions AI-powered automated companies that replace hiring, learning, and leadership with computing, radically reshaping how economies function. John Cutler curates 270 behaviors and 180 rituals from product leaders at Canva, Stripe, Notion, and more, revealing what makes strong product cultures tick. Ash Maurya rethinks roadmaps with a traction-first, constraint-driven approach. Ethan Mollick highlights how subtle personality tweaks in AI affect trust and influence, while Simon Willison uncovers ChatGPT o3’s eerily precise photo-location guessing, blending vision and reasoning in ways both brilliant and unsettling.
Next, Aakash Gupta shares how Attio builds AI-native products that disappear into workflows, avoiding flashy bolt-ons. Christina Wodtke warns against outsourcing thinking to AI, urging leaders to engage deeply with data, and Sangeet Paul Choudary dismantles shallow AI memes, redirecting focus to system-level change. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s analysis shows that Claude Code is rapidly reshaping front-end development, especially in startup environments.
Lastly, Willem-Jan Ageling outlines when and how to abandon Scrum; Gregor Ojstersek explores fixing “work about work” with more intelligent systems and AI, while McKinsey links decision quality to strategic speed. Moreover, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres reframe capacity planning conflicts, and Brian Feister debunks AI coding hype, pushing for experience-based, question-led practices over blind automation.
🎓 🖥 🇬🇧 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 490?
🗞 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: Automated Companies
: 📺 The Last Human CEO: What Fully Automated Firms Will Look Like
Dwarkesh Patel explores how future AI-powered firms—run by endlessly replicable digital workers—could outpace human organizations entirely, replacing hiring, learning, and leadership with computing, ultimately transforming the very structure of economies and companies.
🎯 Product
and : Product Behaviors and Rituals from The Lenny’s Podcast
John Cutler compiled 270 behaviors and 180 rituals from product leaders at companies like Canva, Stripe, and Notion—offering a treasure trove of real-world practices that shape exceptional product development cultures.
: Traction is the goal: Land Your First Customers 3X Faster
Ash Maurya breaks down how to replace product roadmaps with traction roadmaps, showing founders how to focus on measurable outcomes, tackle key bottlenecks, and land first customers faster using lean, constraint-driven tactics.
: When (and When Not) to Use AI in Digital Product Development
Christina Wodtke argues that using AI to replace thinking leads to uninspired work; instead, product leaders should engage with raw data first, then use AI to enhance clarity, not as a shortcut.
: Most People are Building AI Products Wrong – Here’s How to do it Right
Aakash Gupta argues that most AI products fail because they bolt AI onto old workflows. Drawing from Attio’s success, he shares a practical blueprint for building AI-native products that feel seamless, useful, and invisible.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
: Personality and Persuasion: Learning from Sycophants
Ethan Mollick explores how minor personality tweaks in AI, like ChatGPT 4o’s accidental sycophancy, can dramatically reshape user trust, behavior, and persuasion, raising urgent questions about influence, ethics, and our relationships with increasingly human-like machines.
: The many fallacies of ‘AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI will’
Sangeet Paul Choudary dismantles the viral line “AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI will,” showing how it misdirects attention from system-level shifts to task-level tweaks—true, but utterly useless.
: Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining
Simon Willison describes ChatGPT o3’s uncanny ability to guess photo locations with eerie precision, blending computer vision, code execution, and CSI-style reasoning into a simultaneously fascinating and dystopian AI experience.
(via Anthropic): Anthropic Economic Index: AI’s impact on software development
Anthropic analyzed 500,000 coding interactions and found that developers, especially in startups, rapidly adopt Claude Code for automation, particularly in user-facing app development, signaling early disruption in frontend software roles.
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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.
So, become the professional recruiters call first for “AI‑powered Agile.” Be among the first to master practical AI applications for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Product Owners, Product Managers, and Project Managers.
Tickets also include lifetime access to the corresponding online course, once it is published. The class is in English. 🇬🇧
Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #1 — September 4-25, 2025.
Customer Voice: “The AI for Agilists course is an absolute essential for anyone working in the field! If you want to keep up with the organizations and teams you support, this course will equip you with not only knowledge of how to leverage AI for your work as an Agilist but will also give you endless tips & tricks to get better results and outcomes. I thoroughly enjoyed the course content, structure, and activities. Working in teams to apply what we learned was the best part, as it led to great insights for how I could apply what I was learning. After the first day on the course, I already walked away with many things I could apply at work. I highly recommend this course to anyone looking to better understand AI in general, but more specifically, how to leverage AI for Agility.” (Lauren Tuffs, Change Leader | Business Agility.)
<!–
👉 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
: Checklist to Safely Abandon Scrum
Willem-Jan Ageling offers a thoughtful checklist for mindfully abandoning Scrum, urging teams to assess domain complexity, retain core principles like stakeholder collaboration and team empowerment, and avoid blindly swapping product management for project management.
: Coordination Crisis in Modern Tech Work
Gregor Ojstersek shares insights from the Coordination Crisis Summit, highlighting that over half of tech workers spend up to 50% of their week on “work about work” and explores how better systems—and thoughtful AI use—could fix it.
(via McKinsey & Company): Decision making in the age of urgency
McKinsey reveals that organizations making fast, high-quality decisions outperform peers, especially when decisions are made at the right level, aligned with strategy, and supported by stakeholder commitment, coaching, and streamlined processes.
📯 Contextual AI Integration for Agile Product Teams
Stop treating AI as a team member to “onboard.” Instead, give it just enough context for specific tasks, connect it to your existing artifacts, and create clear boundaries through team agreements. This lightweight, modular approach of contextual AI integration delivers immediate value without unrealistic expectations, letting AI enhance your team’s capabilities without pretending it’s human.
Learn more: Contextual AI Integration for Agile Product Teams
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
and : 🎙Capacity Planning
Petra Wille and Teresa Torres dissect why traditional capacity planning often clashes with outcome-driven discovery work, offering honest critiques, practical reframes, and smarter ways for teams to self-align without rigid control.
and : 🎙 Vibe Coding with Brian Feister
Brian Feister challenges the hype around “vibe coding,” advocating instead for deliberate, question-driven AI coding practices, especially in startups in this pod with Donna Spencer and Murray Robinson. He argues that actual productivity gains come from experience, not unquestioningly accepting AI-generated code.
<!–
🎶 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 Automated Companies:
- 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.
✋ Do Not Miss Out — Learn more about Automated Companies — 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 Automated Companies by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
The post Food for Agile Thought #491: Automated Companies, Product Behaviors, Capacity Planning, How to Abandon Scrum appeared first on Age-of-Product.com.
