Food for Agile Thought #490: Escaping the Feature Factory, Funding Agility, Prioritization Comparison, AI PM Course: RAG, PRD, Agents
Also: Scrum Simplified, RAG, PRD, Agents, o3 Is a Lying Liar
Hello everyone!
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 Itamar Gilad critiques outdated prioritization, Scott Sehlhorst warns of diminishing returns, and Johanna Rothman shows how frequent, collaborative deliveries replace blame with trust.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Simplified Scrum Guide
Tobias Mayer: 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.
Source: A simple guide to Scrum
Author: Tobias Mayer
🎯 Product
David Pereira: 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.
Source: 7 Bold Moves to Defeat the Bloody Feature Factory Before It Burns You Out
Author: David Pereira
Roni Ben Aharon (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.
Source: Mind The Product: How and when to sunset features
Author: Roni Ben Aharon
📺 Aakash Gupta and Pawel Huryn: 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.
Source: 📺 Complete Course: AI Product Management
Authors: Aakash Gupta and Pawel Huryn
Jenny Wanger (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.
Source: Mind The Product: What AI can’t — and shouldn’t — do for product managers
Author: Jenny Wanger
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
Simon Willison: 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.
Source: AI assisted search-based research actually works now
Author: Simon Willison
Ethan Mollick: 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.
Source: On Jagged AGI: o3, Gemini 2.5, and everything after
Author: Ethan Mollick
Zvi Mowshowitz: 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.
Source: o3 Is a Lying Liar
Author: Zvi Mowshowitz
Dwarkesh Patel: 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.
Source: Questions about the Future of AI
Author: Dwarkesh Patel
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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 lead the next wave of high-impact teams.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
John Cutler: 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.
Source: Conversation Quality and Scale
Author: John Cutler
Fredrik Delin (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.
Source: ThoughtWorks: Funding agility: Moving beyond project budgets
Author: Fredrik Delin
📺 Mike Cottmeyer (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.
Source: Leading Agile: 📺 From Pilot to Adoption: Overcoming the AI Implementation Gap
Author: Mike Cottmeyer
📯 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
Itamar Gilad: 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.
Source: Prioritization Techniques Compared
Author: Itamar Gilad
Scott Sehlhorst: 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.
Source: The Secret of Diminishing Returns
Author: Scott Sehlhorst
Johanna Rothman: 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.
Source: How to Use Delivery to Move from Blame to Trust
Author: Johanna Rothman
📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events 2025
Upcoming classes and events:
🖥 💯 🇩🇪 April 29–30 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
🖥 🇬🇧 May 26–27 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master Advanced Training (PSM II; English)
🖥 🇩🇪 June 3–4 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
🖥 🇩🇪 June 25 — Webinar: Als KMU jetzt mit KI durchstarten — trotz EU AI Act (German)
🖥 🇩🇪 July 8–9 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
🖥 🇬🇧 July 10— Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Training (PSFS; English)
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 September 4–25 — Live Virtual Cohort: AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort (English)
👉 See all upcoming classes here
🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
Read more: Food for Agile Thought 489: Wrong Product Development Models, Empowerment by AI, PM Agents, Rebuilding Trust.
📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product YouTube channel:
Hands-on Agile 2025: The 5 Obstacles to Empowered Teams — Maarten Dalmijn
Hands-on Agile 2025: The Top Reasons Why a Product Strategy Fails — Roman Pichler
Hands-on Agile 2025: How to Instill Agility, not Agile Practices — Johanna Rothman
Hands-on Agile 2025: Taylorism-Lean-Agile-Product Mindset — Jonathan Odo
Hands-on Agile 2025: Leadership Behaviors That Lead to Actual Agility — Cliff Berg
Hands-on Agile 2025: How to Overcome Common Mistakes with Product Discovery — David Pereira
Hands-on Agile 2025: Humans Robots Agents: Redesigning Leadership and Organizations in the Age of AI — Jurgen Appelo
Hands-on Agile 2025: The Agile Way — Peter Merel
Hands-on Agile 62: From Backlog Manager to Product Manager w/ David Pereira
Hands-on Agile Extra: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business mit Joe Justice
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