Food for Agile Thought #501: Damage by Passive AI Use, Resistance to Product Models, Trusted Product Engineers, JTBD Interview
Also: Adv. PBM v2 Course Launch, No Babysitters, Gen AI for Coaching, Walmart AI
Hello everyone!
Welcome to the 501st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,598 peers.
This week,
warns that passive AI use can dull creativity and critical thinking, while Johanna Rothman emphasizes that product development’s core lies in collaborative learning and flow, not code typing. interviews PostHog’s on scaling through engineer autonomy and minimal control. Seth Godin explores AI’s historical parallels, and Cedric Chin distills practical insights from Jobs to be Done interviews for product strategy.Next,
and Hope Gurion unpack resistance patterns in product operating model pilots and offer ways to build shared clarity. interviews Tanguy Crusson on Atlassian’s AI-powered discovery. critiques budgeting myths, Louis Columbus details Walmart’s scalable AI platform, and Daniel Lereya shares how Monday.com’s AI Month fostered a culture of bold, decentralized innovation at scale.Lastly, Grant Harvey dissects Grok 4’s impressive yet troubling launch, and Elvis Saravia reframes prompt engineering as context design for LLMs. Chuck Whitten and team call for AI-led business reinvention beyond tech. Megan Saker maps product documentation’s lifecycle value, and
, with , offers a framework to measure AI’s real impact on engineering teams.
🎓 🖥 🇬🇧 Next Tuesday: The AI-Enhanced Advanced Product Backlog Management Course Version 2
While many Product Owners spend sizable chunks of their time defending Product Backlog decisions, top-performing teams use systematic alignment processes to turn stakeholders into allies and backlogs into strategic assets.
This intensive course delivers the exact frameworks and AI-enhanced workflows that save successful Product Owners 15–20 hours weekly while improving stakeholder trust.
What’s Included:
✅ Self-paced video modules with practical exercises
✅ Launch week live Q&A sessions with Stefan
✅ Custom GPTs for Product Owner workflows
✅ Complete anti-patterns diagnostic toolkit
✅ Community access
✅ Lifetime access to all course updates and materials
✅ Certificate of completion.
👉 Please note: The course will only be available for sign-up until July 22, 2025!
🎓 Join the Launch of the AI-Enhanced Version 2 on July 15: Learn How to Master the Most Important Artifact for any Successful Agile Practitioner!
Did you miss the previous Food for Agile Thought issue 500?
🎓 Join Stefan in one of his upcoming Professional Scrum training classes!
🏆 The Tip of the Week
Ethan Mollick: Against ‘Brain Damage’
Ethan Mollick argues that AI doesn’t damage our brains but can erode critical thinking and creativity if used passively, urging us to engage first, think independently, and use AI as a mindful partner to enhance learning and collaboration.
Source: Against ‘Brain Damage’
Author: Ethan Mollick
🎯 Product
Johanna Rothman: A Little Scree About AI and the Hard Parts of Product Development
Johanna Rothman argues that the real challenge in product development lies not in typing code but in collaborative learning, understanding complexity, and validating hypotheses, areas where LLMs fall short when used solo and without a focus on flow efficiency.
Source: A Little Scree About AI and the Hard Parts of Product Development
Author: Johanna Rothman
📺 David Pereira: No Babysitters, No Bottlenecks: Inside PostHog’s Unstoppable Product Machine
David Pereira interviews James Hawkins on how PostHog scales by trusting product engineers to decide what to build, rejecting top-down control, embracing chaos, and continuously shipping without roadmaps, gatekeeping, or micromanagement.
Source: No Babysitters, No Bottlenecks: Inside PostHog’s Unstoppable Product Machine
Author: David Pereira
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion: Expecting Resistance: Handling Stakeholder & Leader Concerns During Product Operating Model Pilot
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion spotlight three common stakeholder and leadership resistances during product model pilots — attachment to familiar solutions, control cravings, and decision bottlenecking — and recommend practices that shift teams toward empowerment and shared strategic clarity.
Source: Expecting Resistance: Handling Stakeholder & Leader Concerns During Product Operating Model Pilot
Authors: Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion
📺 Aakash Gupta: AI Product Discovery: Complete Course
Aakash Gupta interviews Tanguy Crusson on using AI throughout Atlassian’s product discovery process, revealing how teams move from raw user pain to validated impact without PRDs, but through prototypes, rituals, and sharp strategic judgment.
Source: 📺 AI Product Discovery: Complete Course
Author: Aakash Gupta
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
(via Venturebeat): How Walmart built an AI platform that makes it beholden to no one (and that 1.5M associates actually want to use)
Louis Columbus outlines how Walmart built its LLM-agnostic Element platform to industrialize AI development at scale, turning AI from isolated projects into a repeatable, feedback-driven capability that enhances operations across 1.5 million associates.
Daniel Lereya: What if we gave 700 people one month to rethink how they work with AI?
Daniel Lereya shares how Monday.com’s 700-person AI Month sparked a mindset shift toward bold experimentation, reducing blockers, accelerating delivery, and embedding AI as a core part of everyday product development.
Source: What if we gave 700 people one month to rethink how they work with AI?
Author: Daniel Lereya
(via The Neuron): Everything to Know About Grok 4: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Grant Harvey explores Grok 4’s groundbreaking performance gains and disturbing failures, highlighting how xAI’s choices led to antisemitic outbursts and raising deeper concerns about AI safety, systemic misalignment, and the toxicity of training data.
Source: The Neuron: Everything to Know About Grok 4: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Elvis Saravia: Context Engineering Guide
Elvis Saravia reframes prompt engineering as context engineering, emphasizing that real LLM performance comes from carefully structuring, optimizing, and maintaining instructions, inputs, memory, and workflows across increasingly complex AI systems and agentic applications.
Source: Context Engineering Guide
Author: Elvis Saravia
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #2 — September 15 — October 6, 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 #2 — September 15 — October 6, 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
Seth Godin: Productivity, AI and pushback
Seth Godin reflects on historical resistance to innovation, arguing that AI, like past technologies, will ultimately boost productivity, and our real challenge is choosing how to create human value in an AI-shaped world.
Source: Productivity, AI and pushback
Author: Seth Godin
Maarten Dalmijn: ‘What’s the Ideal Percentage for Spending on Tech Debt?’
Maarten Dalmijn critiques popular budgeting heuristics for tech debt, innovation, and bug fixes, arguing they offer comfort and defensibility but often mask uncertainty and complexity rather than confronting reality directly.
Source: ‘What’s the Ideal Percentage for Spending on Tech Debt?’
Author: Maarten Dalmijn
(via Bain & Company): Unsticking Your AI Transformation
Chuck Whitten, Sarah Elk, Florian Mueller, and Richard Fleming argue that AI transformation demands more than tools or pilots. It requires top-down leadership, process redesign, focused bets, and operating models that hardwire ongoing business reinvention.
Source: Bain & Company: Unsticking Your AI Transformation
📯 Harnessing Generative AI for Agile Coaching
Discover how generative AI can supercharge Agile coaching in high-pressure environments. This webinar presents a real-world scenario where traditional coaching fails and demonstrates how AI identifies emotional cues, contradictions, and recurring pain points hidden within team dynamics.
Learn from Stefan how to reduce cognitive load, make faster, evidence-based decisions, and ethically amplify your coaching impact. Bonus: The same techniques also accelerate product discovery:
📺 Watch now to rethink your approach: How to Analyze Unstructured Interviews with AI.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
Cedric Chin (via Commonplace): Putting the Jobs to be Done Interview to Practice
Cedric Chin shares lessons from conducting Jobs to be Done interviews, highlighting their challenges, practical techniques to enhance recall and insight, and how qualitative findings can inform product strategy when paired with data.
Source: Commonplace: Putting the Jobs to be Done Interview to Practice
Author: Cedric Chin
(via ProdPad): Product Documentation: The Definitive List of Everything You Need
Megan Saker outlines the full spectrum of product documentation across the product lifecycle, demonstrating how well-crafted documentation enhances clarity, alignment, and efficiency while preventing chaos, confusion, and poorly adopted features.
Source: ProdPad: Product Documentation: The Definitive List of Everything You Need
Gregor Ojstersek: How to Measure AI Impact in Engineering Teams
Gregor Ojstersek and Laura Tacho present a structured framework for measuring AI’s impact in engineering teams, moving beyond hype to track utilization, value creation, and cost using telemetry, surveys, and real-time experience sampling.
Source: How to Measure AI Impact in Engineering Teams
Author: Gregor Ojstersek
📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events 2025
Upcoming classes and events:
🖥 🇩🇪 September 2–3 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 SOLD OUT: September 4–25 — Live Virtual Cohort: AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort (English)
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 September 15–October 6 — Live Virtual Cohort: AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort (English)
🖥 🇬🇧 September 23–24 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master — Advanced Training (PSM II; English)
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 October 1–November 12 — Live Virtual Cohort: AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort (English)
🖥 🇬🇧 October — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner AI-Essentials Schulung mit PSPO-AIE-Zertifikat (English)
👉 See all upcoming classes here
🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on YouTube
Now available on the Age-of-Product YouTube channel:
Hands-on Agile #68: How to Analyze Unstructured Team Interview Data with AI.
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: Taylorism-Lean-Agile-Product Mindset — Jonathan Odo
Hands-on Agile Extra: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business mit Joe Justice
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