Food for Agile Thought #514: State of AI Report 2025, Stakeholder Management, What Breaks Product Decisions, 25 Years of XP
Also: Influence on Politics, Cost of Distraction, AI Failure Myth, OpenAI Platform Play
Hello everyone!
Welcome to the 514th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,403 peers.
This week, Nathan Benaich’s State of AI Report 2025 highlights advancements in reasoning, China’s momentum, massive compute, sharper geopolitics, and a pragmatic shift toward reliability and governance.
offers a hands-on way to surface implicit strategy through learner-mode interviews, drafting, and iterative feedback, while tackles product-centricity in non-digital firms, urging a networked operating model that links funding, intent, collaboration, architecture, and outcomes. Nino Paoli notes Citi’s prompt training push while warning that real impact needs ongoing upskilling and integration. Additionally, highlights trust as the actual bottleneck that must be addressed before AI can effectively amplify execution.Next,
sharpens stakeholder management with a power-interest focus, trust building, early involvement, and NVC for real conflict resolution. draws out Ryan Singer on keeping six-week bets lean through framing, alignment, and timely founder input, while David Shapiro challenges “AI pilot failure” myths, focusing on integration and governance issues. Then, Sangeet Paul Choudary shifts AI agent talk to coordination and standards, and marks 25 years of XP, calling for TDD, pairing, CD, and lean flow.Lastly,
probes OpenAI’s platform push, weighing integrations against privacy, incentives, and trust. urges teams to own interview synthesis, then use AI to spot cross-patterns without losing empathy or skill. Sean Goedecke demonstrates that staff engineers can influence politics by aligning momentum and delivering visible wins, and and Marcos Arribas share culture-at-scale practices from autonomy to right-sized quality. Finally, Anton Zaides advocates ruthless meeting hygiene to protect deep engineering flow.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: State of AI Report 2025
Nathan Benaich (via Air Street Capital): State of AI Report 2025
Nathan Benaich introduces the State of AI Report 2025, which covers research, industry, politics, safety, surveys, and predictions. Its highlights include reasoning breakthroughs, China’s rise, mainstream adoption, industrial-scale computing, tougher geopolitics, and a pragmatic shift toward safety, focusing on reliability and governance.
Source: Air Street Capital: State of AI Report 2025
Author: Nathan Benaich
🎯 Product
Jenny Wanger: What to Do When Your Manager Doesn’t Have a Strategy
Jenny Wanger outlines a practical playbook to surface implicit product or business strategy from managers: approach as a learner, interview like user research, draft the strategy, flag assumptions, iterate with feedback, and help leaders communicate clearly.
Source: What to Do When Your Manager Doesn’t Have a Strategy
Author: Jenny Wanger
John Cutler: Product-Centricity When You Don’t Sell A Digital Product
John Cutler explains why non-digital enterprises struggle with product-centricity, highlighting funding mismatches, translation layers, dependency-bound flow, and longer feedback loops. He advocates for a networked operating model that integrates team funding, intent, collaboration, architecture, and outcomes to facilitate coherent investment and execution.
Source: Product-Centricity When You Don’t Sell A Digital Product
Author: John Cutler
Roman Pichler: 5 Tips to Succeed with Stakeholder Management
Roman Pichler outlines five key moves for effective stakeholder management: focus on key players using a power-interest grid, build trust, align on outcome-based goals, involve stakeholders early through regular workshops, and resolve conflicts using Non-Violent Communication to avoid weak compromises.
Source: 5 Tips to Succeed with Stakeholder Management
Author: Roman Pichler
📺 David Pereira and Ryan Singer: The Missing Part That Makes or Breaks Most Product Decisions
David Pereira interviews Ryan Singer on avoiding bloated bets: frame before shaping, secure alignment for impact, delay high fidelity, engage founders at key moments, and pursue ruthless clarity so that six-week projects stay on track and in their timebox.
Source: 📺 The Missing Part That Makes or Breaks Most Product Decisions
Authors: David Pereira and Ryan Singer
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
(via Fortune): Citi begins retraining 175,000 employees in working with AI: ‘great prompting versus basic prompting to generate impactful results’
Nino Paoli reports Citi is mandating prompt-writing training for 175,000 employees to boost productivity, framing AI as a co-pilot. Critics note that training alone is insufficient without continuous upskilling, integration, and leadership that empowers purposeful use.
David Shapiro: They are lying to you about AI failures
David Shapiro argues the “95% of AI pilots fail” meme misreads enterprise reality, where pilots are designed to fail. Success hinges on integration, governance, and fit; small, well-embedded wins compound while hype distracts from operational learning.
Source: They are lying to you about AI failures
Author: David Shapiro
Sangeet Paul Choudary: The problem with agentic AI in 2025
Sangeet Paul Choudary argues that agentic AI is less about automating tasks and more about coordination; leaders must redesign workflows, kill unnecessary steps, and build governance standards so that many agents act coherently and compound advantages over time.
Source: The problem with agentic AI in 2025
Author: Sangeet Paul Choudary
Casey Newton: OpenAI’s platform play
Casey Newton analyzes OpenAI’s push to turn ChatGPT into a platform, enabling in-app integrations and commerce, while raising concerns about data privacy, incentive distortions, and trust, echoing Facebook’s platform era and its eventual retreat.
Source: OpenAI’s platform play
Author: Casey Newton
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp #4 — November 6 — December 4, 2025
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Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp #4 — November 6 — December 4, 2025.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
Dave Rooney: How Time Flies: A Quarter Century of Extreme Programming
Dave Rooney reflects on 25 years of Extreme Programming, celebrating enduring values like TDD, pairing, and continuous delivery, warning Scrum without XP practices is unsustainable, and urging lean flow, simple forecasting, and renewed focus on technical excellence.
Source: How Time Flies: A Quarter Century of Extreme Programming
Author: Dave Rooney
🎙 Shane Hastie (via InfoQ): Building Engineering Culture Through Autonomy and Ownership
Shane Hastie interviews Marcos Arribas on scaling engineering culture: empower autonomous teams with ownership, use feature flags for safe speed, keep PRs small, right-size quality to product maturity, apply AI to POCs, and keep hiring juniors to sustain growth.
Source: InfoQ: 🎙 Building Engineering Culture Through Autonomy and Ownership
Author: Shane Hastie
Maarten Dalmijn: Most Organizations Will Never Reap the Benefits of AI
Maarten Dalmijn argues most firms miss AI’s benefits because trust, not technology, is the bottleneck; distrust breeds bureaucracy and weak teams. Build high-performing, empowered teams first, then use AI to amplify real execution.
Source: Most Organizations Will Never Reap the Benefits of AI
Author: Maarten Dalmijn
📯 The Agile AI Manifesto
The Agile world is splitting into two camps: Those convinced AI will automate practitioners out of existence, and those dismissing it as another crypto-level fad. Both are wrong. The evidence reveals something far more interesting and urgent: Principles written in 2001, before anyone imagined GPT-Whatever, align remarkably well with the most transformative technology of recent years. This is not a coincidence. I believe it is proof that human-centric values transcend technological disruption; it is the Agile AI Manifesto.
🎓 Learn more: The Agile AI Manifesto: The Agile Manifesto Predicted AI.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
Teresa Torres: Customer Interview Analysis: Where AI Helps and Hurts
Teresa Torres warns against outsourcing customer interview synthesis to AI, urging teams to master story-based interviews, synthesize per interview before having the AI create cross-interview patterns, use AI as a collaborator for notes and perspectives, and protect empathy, context, and skills.
Source: Customer Interview Analysis: Where AI Helps and Hurts
Author: Teresa Torres
Sean Goedecke: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer
Sean Goedecke demonstrates that staff engineers can influence politics without scheming: by riding executive waves, aligning pet projects with current priorities, maintaining ready-made technical programs, and making high-profile efforts succeed to earn capital for future impact.
Source: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer
Author: Sean Goedecke
(via Weave): Distracting software engineers is way more harmful than most managers think
Anton Zaides warns that meeting creep destroys deep work for engineers, even with AI tools. He urges ruthless meeting hygiene, shared focus blocks, lighter PR rituals, and leadership modeling to protect long, uninterrupted flow that drives quality and speed.
Source: Weave: Distracting software engineers is way more harmful than most managers think
📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events 2025
Upcoming classes and events:
🖥 💯 🇩🇪 October 21–22 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 November 6-December 4 — Live Virtual Cohort: AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort (English)
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 November 10–11 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master — Advanced Training (PSM II; English)
🖥 🇩🇪 December 9–10 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
🖥 🇬🇧 December 16–17 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master — Advanced Training (PSM II; English)
🖥 🇬🇧 December 18 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Training (PSFS; 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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