Food for Agile Thought #491: Automated Companies, Product Behaviors, Capacity Planning, How to Abandon Scrum
Also: Traction, To AI or not to AI, Coordination Crisis, Sycophants
Hello everyone!
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.
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Did you miss the previous Food for Agile Thought issue 490?
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Automated Companies
📺 Dwarkesh Patel: 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.
Source: 📺 The Last Human CEO: What Fully Automated Firms Will Look Like
Author: Dwarkesh Patel
🎯 Product
John Cutler: 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.
Source: Product Behaviors and Rituals from The Lenny’s Podcast
Authors: John Cutler and Lenny Rachitsky
Ash Maurya: 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.
Source: Traction is the goal: Land Your First Customers 3X Faster
Author: Ash Maurya
Christina Wodtke: 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.
Source: When (and When Not) to Use AI in Digital Product Development
Author: Christina Wodtke
Aakash Gupta: 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.
Source: Most People are Building AI Products Wrong — Here’s How to do it Right
Author: Aakash Gupta
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
Ethan Mollick: 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.
Source: Personality and Persuasion: Learning from Sycophants
Author: Ethan Mollick
Sangeet Paul Choudary: 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.
Source: The many fallacies of ‘AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI will’
Author: Sangeet Paul Choudary
Simon Willison: 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.
Source: Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining
Author: Simon Willison
(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.
Source: Anthropic: Anthropic Economic Index: AI’s impact on software development
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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.
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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.)
➿ Agile & Leadership
Willem-Jan Ageling: 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.
Source: Checklist to Safely Abandon Scrum
Author: Willem-Jan Ageling
Gregor Ojstersek: 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.
Source: Coordination Crisis in Modern Tech Work
Author: Gregor Ojstersek
(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.
Source: McKinsey & Company: Decision making in the age of urgency
📯 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
🎙 Petra Wille and Teresa Torres: 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.
Source: 🎙Capacity Planning
Authors: Petra Wille and Teresa Torres
🎙 Murray Robinson and Brian Feister: 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.
Source: 🎙 Vibe Coding with Brian Feister
Authors: Murray Robinson and Brian Feister
📅 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 10 — Webinar: From Velocity to Breakthroughs: Using AI to Decode Team Dynamics in Targeted Retrospectives (English)
🖥 🇩🇪 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
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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: 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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