Food for Agile Thought #492: InfoQ Culture Trends 2025, Product Party Modes, Jerry Colonna on Leadership, Product Requirements
Also: PM: Show Me the Money, Build AI Agents for Newbies, Product Leader Mistakes
Hello everyone!
Welcome to the 492nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,631 peers.
This week, Shane Hastie and Charity Majors spotlight InfoQ culture trends 2025, including AI’s dual impact on speed and collaboration, while reaffirming the importance of psychological safety and Agile-DevOps maturity. John Cutler introduces team “modes” like Questing and Spellcasting, reframing burnout beyond WIP. David Pereira shares leadership lessons for new product leads, Liam Ottley demystifies AI agents, and Zvi Mowshowitz critiques Zuckerberg’s dystopian AI ambitions.
Next, Melissa Perri tells Leah Tharin why AI fails at product strategy without real problem-solving, while Rich Mironov urges PMs to speak the language of money in a pod with Jason Knight. Gary Marcus warns of GenAI’s corrosive impact on academia, and John Pavlus captures NLP’s identity crisis. Meanwhile, Joost Minnaar explores how Haier’s RenDanHeYi model reinvents corporate structure through radical decentralization and entrepreneurial accountability.
Lastly, Jerry Colonna tells Lenny Rachitsky how self-inquiry fuels resilient leadership, while Maarten Dalmijn calls time on the Scrum Master role. Milan Milanović details how Google tackles tech debt at scale, and Vitaly Friedman reframes UX design as risk management. Finally, Jake Bowen-Bate borrows from military strategy to rethink how we communicate product requirements with clarity and intent.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week
Shane Hastie and Charity Majors (via InfoQ): InfoQ Culture and Methods Trends Report — 2025
Shane Hastie and Charity Majors highlight 2025 trends in software development, from AI’s impact on speed and collaboration to the enduring need for psychological safety, observability, and evolving Agile and DevOps practices.
Source: InfoQ: InfoQ Culture and Methods Trends Report — 2025
Authors: Shane Hastie and Charity Majors
🎯 Product
John Cutler: Product Party Modes
John Cutler explores how product teams operate in varied “modes” like Questing, Spellcasting, and Chipping, arguing that work drains capacity differently and mismatched modes, not WIP alone, often cause overwhelm.
Source: Product Party Modes
Author: John Cutler
David Pereira: How to Lead with Impact: 5 Mistakes Great Product Leaders Don’t Make
David Pereira reflects on five common mistakes new product leaders make, from over-nicing and neglecting feedback to misunderstanding their proper role, urging leaders to adapt, stay humble, and grow beyond their PM roots.
Source: How to Lead with Impact: 5 Mistakes Great Product Leaders Don’t Make
Author: David Pereira
🎙 Leah Tharin and Melissa Perri: Why ‘AI’ is a terrible strategist
In her podcast with Leah Tharin, Melissa Perri unpacks why AI often falls short as a strategic tool. She critiques hype-driven innovation, urging a focus on real customer pain, and reveals how legacy companies sabotage themselves by clinging to outdated models and resisting true disruption.
Source: 🎙 Why ‘AI’ is a terrible strategist
Authors: Leah Tharin and Melissa Perri
Jason Knight and Rich Mironov: Rich Mironov — Product Managers Need to Understand the Language of Money
In conversation with Jason Knight, Rich Mironov stresses that product managers must understand financial levers, tell compelling money stories, and align with leadership priorities to drive real business impact.
Source: Rich Mironov — Product Managers Need to Understand the Language of Money
Authors: Jason Knight and Rich Mironov
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
📺 Liam Ottley: How to Build & Sell AI Agents: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
Liam Ottley offers a beginner-friendly, hands-on guide to building and monetizing AI agents. He covers foundational concepts, no-code tools, real-world applications, and practical strategies for turning AI skills into income.
Source: 📺 How to Build & Sell AI Agents: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
Author: Liam Ottley
Zvi Mowshowitz: Zuckerberg’s Dystopian AI Vision
Zvi Mowshowitz dissects Mark Zuckerberg’s candid AI vision, warning it prioritizes profit over well-being, pushing algorithmic manipulation, AI “friends,” and attention predation under a veneer of personalization and connection, with dystopian consequences.
Source: Zuckerberg’s Dystopian AI Vision
Author: Zvi Mowshowitz
Gary Marcus: ‘Everyone is cheating their way through college’ with GenAI. Who should bear the costs?
Gary Marcus critiques the rise of GenAI-fueled academic cheating, arguing that universities will collapse under the weight without systemic reform and funding. At the same time, tech leaders profit, and society pays the price.
Source: ‘Everyone is cheating their way through college’ with GenAI. Who should bear the costs?
Author: Gary Marcus
(via Quanta Magazine): When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History
John Pavlus chronicles the seismic transformation of NLP from an academic discipline to an LLM-dominated battleground, capturing researchers’ awe, anxiety, and ambivalence as corporate scale, existential debates, and paradigm shifts reshape the field.
Source: Quanta Magazine: When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #1 — September 4–25, 2025
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Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #1 — September 4–25, 2025.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
Lenny Rachitsky and Jerry Colonna: How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?
In conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, Jerry Colonna shares a transformative equation for leadership: practical skills and radical self-inquiry. He challenges leaders to confront how they may enable the very dysfunctions they resent.
Authors: Lenny Rachitsky and Jerry Colonna
Joost Minnaar (via Corporate Rebels): 10 Questions About Haier’s RenDanHeYi Model — Answered
Joost Minnaar distills Haier’s radical RenDanHeYi model into 10 essential answers, showing how decentralized micro-enterprises, entrepreneurial accountability, and internal market dynamics replace traditional corporate hierarchies at a massive, global scale.
Source: Corporate Rebels: 10 Questions About Haier’s RenDanHeYi Model — Answered
Author: Joost Minnaar
Maarten Dalmijn: The Return of the Scrum Master
Maarten Dalmijn challenges the notion of reviving the Scrum Master role, arguing it’s fundamentally flawed and often misused. Instead, he calls for deeper, paradigm-shifting change beyond Scrum and its traditional constructs.
Source: The Return of the Scrum Master
Author: Maarten Dalmijn
📯 Product Discovery Mistakes, Agile Leadership, Taylorism to Product Mindset — Hands-on Agile 2025
The second batch of videos of Hands-On Agile 2025 is in, and you don’t want to miss them: David Pereira reveals why product discovery often fails — and how teams can avoid common pitfalls to rapidly validate ideas and deliver real value. Also, Cliff Berg shares surprising insights from Agile 2 Academy’s study of highly agile companies like SpaceX, highlighting leadership behaviors rather than traditional Agile practices as key agility drivers, while Jonathan Odo explores timeless engineering principles shaping the future of high-performing, adaptive organizations.
These industry veterans bring decades of enterprise transformation experience, providing actionable insights you can implement immediately. Watch the session recordings to transform how you approach agility.
📺 Watch the videos now: Product Discovery Mistakes, Agile Leadership, Taylorism to Product Mindset — Hands-on Agile 2025.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
Dr Milan Milanović: How Google Measures and Manages Tech Debt
Dr. Milan Milanović shares how Google tackled the problem of technical debt at scale, defining ten types of debt, measuring their impact through engineering surveys, and managing them with frameworks, maturity models, and cultural change to boost developer productivity.
Source: How Google Measures and Manages Tech Debt
Author: Dr Milan Milanović
Vitaly Friedman (via Smashing Magazine): How To Launch Big Complex Projects
Vitaly Friedman shares hard-earned lessons on launching complex UX projects. He urges teams to plan backward, manage risks, tackle unknowns early, and treat design as risk mitigation, not decoration, for smoother, more successful delivery.
Source: Smashing Magazine: How To Launch Big Complex Projects
Author: Vitaly Friedman
(via Mind The Product): Context, intent, change, purpose, constraints — a model for communicating requirements
Jake Bowen-Bate draws lessons from military operations to suggest a structured, purpose-driven model for communicating product requirements, focusing on context, intent, change, purpose, and constraints to empower autonomous, adaptable teams.
📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events 2025
Upcoming classes and events:
🖥 🇬🇧 May 26–27 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master Advanced Training (PSM II; English)
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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
Read more: Food for Agile Thought 491: Automated Companies, Product Behaviors, Capacity Planning, How to Abandon Scrum.
📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product YouTube channel:
Hands-on Agile 2025: Q& A with Product Leader Coach and Product at Heart Organizer Petra Wille
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 Extra: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business mit Joe Justice
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