TL; DR: Agentic Chaos — Food for Agile Thought #545
Welcome to the 545th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,577 peers. This week, Natalie Shapira et al. reveal how autonomous LLM agents leak information, spoof identities, and falsely report task completion when red-teamed in a live lab, a finding that sharpens the question Charlene Li raises with David Burkus: AI transformation fails when CEOs hand it off to IT because the real challenge is behavioral, not technical. April Dunford picks up the strategic thread, urging companies to rethink their positioning by forming a clear point of view about the future rather than chasing speed. Petra Wille echoes that theme in an interview with Jason Knight, arguing product leadership itself demands deliberate development, not just promotion. And while Peter Saddington declares AI has inverted every value of the Agile Manifesto, McKinsey doubles down on industrial thinking with an “AI assembly line” that decomposes knowledge work into standardized agent tasks.
Next, Ant Murphy reframes prioritization as a layered chain of decisions flowing from vision to outcomes, not a backlog exercise, while Petra Wille challenges product leaders to resist AI hype and take responsibility for shaping a future worth living in. Paweł Huryn offers a practical tool for that effort with PM Brain OS, an open-source second brain built on markdown and Claude Code. Yet building reliable AI systems remains elusive: Swarnendu Bhattacharya reports that 88% of AI agent projects fail because teams rely on prompts rather than deterministic constraints, and Andon Labs proved the point by giving four AI models their own radio stations only to watch them develop wild personalities while ignoring the business side entirely.
Lastly, Barry O’Reilly argues that AI reassembles tasks within jobs rather than replacing them, shifting value from routine friction to better judgment, a theme Seth Godin extends by urging people to use machines for leverage rather than competing against them. John Cutler reminds us that even defining teams honestly is hard because it exposes power structures that organizations prefer to ignore. Shreshta Shyamsundar and Anmol Jain push further, proposing an agentic P&L that replaces headcount with cognitive outcomes. Finally, Itamar Gilad challenges hyped AI PM archetypes in favor of one who improves all company functions, not just coding.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Agentic Chaos
(via arXiv.org): Agents of Chaos
Natalie Shapira et al. red-teamed autonomous LLM agents in a live lab environment with persistent memory, email, and shell access. Over two weeks, twenty researchers uncovered eleven failure patterns, including unauthorized compliance, information leaks, identity spoofing, cross-agent propagation of unsafe behavior, and agents falsely reporting task completion while the system state told a different story.
🎯 Product
and : Strong Product Leadership in the Age of AI
Petra Wille joins Jason Knight to discuss why product leadership requires deliberate development, not just promotion, and how AI is forcing leaders to rethink team structures, workflows, and decision-making beyond optimizing purely for speed.
: Positioning in the Age of AI
April Dunford suggests that AI is forcing companies to rethink their positioning by developing a clear point of view about the future, positioning against real current competitors, and staying close to what customers actually think.
: Prioritization Happens In Layers
Ant Murphy proposes that prioritization is not a backlog-level activity but a layered chain of decisions flowing from vision through strategy to outcomes, and that when it feels hard, you are likely operating at the wrong level.
: The Future Is Not Yet Invented: The Product Leader’s Influence on the World We All Will Live in
Petra Wille challenges product leaders to resist AI hype, question premature layoffs driven by shareholder interests, and take intentional responsibility for shaping a future worth living in.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
and : 📺 The Reason Your AI Rollout Isn’t Working with Charlene Li
Charlene Li joins David Burkus to argue that AI transformation fails when CEOs outsource it to IT because of behavioral change. Strategic leadership, not tool adoption, is what actually drives organizational value from AI.
: How Is AI Reshaping Jobs Instead of Replacing Them?
Barry O’Reilly proposes that AI is not replacing jobs but reassembling tasks within them, shifting value from managing friction and routine work toward better judgment and decision-making, and redesigning how people contribute.
(via Andon Labs): We let four AIs run radio stations. Here’s what happened.
Andon Labs gave four AI models their own radio stations, including bank accounts and a profit mandate. Five months later, each developed a wildly different personality, and almost none figured out the business side.
(via Medium): 88% of AI Agent Projects Never Reach Production. The Problem Is Not Your Model. It Is Your Harness.
Swarnendu Bhattacharya suggests that 88% of AI agent projects fail not because of model limitations but because teams rely on prompts instead of building deterministic system constraints, a discipline called harness engineering.
(via O’Reilly Media): The Agentic P&L: Beyond the Empire of Headcount
Shreshta Shyamsundar and Anmol Jain propose replacing the traditional headcount-driven P&L with an agentic model that measures departments by knowledge readiness, agent throughput, and cost per cognitive outcome.
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI4Agile BootCamp #7, May 28 to June 25, 2026
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: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI4Agile BootCamp #7, May 28 to June 25, 2026.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
: The Agile Industry is Defacto AI
Peter Saddington proposes that AI has inverted every value of the Agile Manifesto, turning documentation into the primary input for code generation and making the traditional Agile industry, its ceremonies, and its certifications obsolete.
: Value creation, bullshit jobs and the future of work
Seth Godin suggests that AI will eliminate jobs that feel pointless while creating new ones, and that resilience lies in using machines for leverage rather than competing against them at tasks they already do better.
: Why Defining Teams Is So Hard
John Cutler explains that defining teams is hard, not because it requires special expertise, but because honestly describing how work actually flows threatens existing narratives, incentives, and power structures that organizations prefer to leave undiscussed.
📯 Dear Micromanager: Your Distrust Has a Job; It’s Just Not the One You’re Doing
Twenty years of agile coaching failed to fix the micromanager who meddles with every draft, every meeting, every decision. This article shows where their distrust stops damaging teams and starts producing the verification work AI adoption actually needs. Welcome the Verification Architect!
Learn more: Dear Micromanager: Your Distrust Has a Job; It’s Just Not the One You’re Doing.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: PM Brain OS: The Second Brain for Product Managers, Made of Markdown
Paweł Huryn introduces PM Brain OS, an open-source ‘second brain’ for product managers built entirely from markdown files and Claude Code, designed to preserve decision context, surface contradictions, and prevent the knowledge decay that kills most AI memory systems.
: 3 AI PM Archetypes + 1
Itamar Gilad examines three hyped AI product manager archetypes and proposes a fourth: the AI-empowered PM who uses AI to improve all company functions, not just coding or spec generation.
(via McKinsey & Company): The AI assembly line: Strategic imperatives for CEOs
McKinsey proposes an “AI assembly line” where CEOs decompose cognitive work into standardized tasks executed by AI agents — essentially, Taylorism for knowledge work. The framework ignores decades of evidence on why industrial paradigms fail in complex, adaptive environments.
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🎶 Encore
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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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💯 🇩🇪 May 19-20, 2026 | Guaranteed: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 💯 🇬🇧 May 28 to June 25, 2026 | Guaranteed: AI4Agile BootCamp #7 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 8, 2026 | GUARANTEED: Claude Cowork: Stop Prompting. Start Delegating. (English; Self-paced Online Course) | Self-Paced Online Course | $129 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 9, 2026 | GUARANTEED: HoA 74: “CLAUDE.md” — The One File That Makes AI Remember How You Work. (English) | Meetup | FREE |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 10-July 2, 2026 | GUARANTEED: Claude Cowork BootCamp #2 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | $249 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 11, 2026 | GUARANTEED: HoA 75: Token Economics. (English) | Meetup | FREE |
| 🇩🇪 June 30-July 1, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 July 1, 2026 | GUARANTEED: AI 4 Agile Course v3 — Master AI for Agile Practitioners (English; Self-paced Online Course) | Self-Paced Online Course | $149 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
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 Agentic Chaos:
- Stop Writing Prompts. Let AI Do It for You — Hack #01, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- Socratic Prompting — Hack #10, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- Check Your AI’s Plan Before — Hack #7, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- From Product Requirements to Experiments to Learnings — Supported by Generative AI.
- Never Accept an LLM’s First Offer — Improve GenAI’s Usefulness w/ Feedback Loops and Challenges.
✋ Do Not Miss Out: Learn more about Agentic Chaos — Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
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Help your team to learn about how AI Intensifies Work by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
The post Food for Agile Thought #545: Real Life Agentic Chaos, Product Leadership & AI, AI Killed the Agile Industry, Assembly Line Comeback appeared first on Age-of-Product.com.
