Food for Agile Thought #543: AI Playbook, Product Taste, Competitor Intelligence Agent, CEO AI Psychosis
Also: Research w/ Engineers, Scrum Never Mattered, Faking Belonging?
Hello everyone!
Welcome to the 543rd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,597 peers.
This week, John Cutler warns in his AI Playbook that AI accelerates broken practices just as much as good ones, while Guy Champniss adds that the psychological toll of AI adoption on employee motivation may quietly erase the productivity gains organizations expect. Teresa Torres and Petra Wille challenge the rising “taste” narrative in product management, proposing that discovery skills and evidence beat gut feeling. David Pereira diagnoses why product management in Europe often underperforms, pointing to roadmap theater and consensus paralysis, and Laura Klein reminds us that involving engineers in research builds shared understanding faster than any handoff ever could.
Next, Andrej Karpathy describes how software development is shifting from vibe coding to agentic engineering, where judgment and architectural understanding matter more than writing code, and Cedric Chin offers three techniques for making sense of AI without losing your current frame. Also, Richard Kasperowski reminds us that CEOs never cared about Scrum, only results, and that AI raises the bar on engineering fundamentals. Paweł Huryn shows how Claude Design compresses product discovery from weeks to hours, and Wyndo and Dheeraj Sharma walk through building a competitor intelligence agent that develops editorial judgment over time.
Lastly, Jake Handy warns that executives mistake AI token consumption for productivity, while Paul LaPosta shows how AI-generated code inflates DORA metrics by boosting speed while eroding system understanding. Jack Clark raises the stakes further, estimating a 60%+ chance of fully automated AI R&D by 2028. Jim Lewis, Jeff Sauro, and colleagues find that AI usability evaluations catch only half the problems humans identify while generating unverified issues on top. Finally, Mike Fisher reminds us that belonging is not a soft perk but a measurable performance driver, built or destroyed one manager interaction at a time.
🎓 🇬🇧 The Claude Cowork Online Course — Available June 1–8 for $129
You have been prompting AI for months. The results are inconsistent, every conversation starts from zero, and the model forgets who you are. That is the ceiling of prompting.
The Claude Cowork Online Course teaches you to break through it: build Skills that encode your expertise, connect them to your tools, and assemble Agents who handle recurring work the way you would handle it yourself. No coding required.
What You Will Get:
✅ 8+ hours of self-paced video modules: Skills, Agents, delegation frameworks — ✅ Tested with a live BootCamp cohort (April 2026) — ✅ The A3 Framework: decide what to delegate and what to keep — ✅ Starter kit with folder structure, CLAUDE.md, and Skill templates — ✅ All texts, slides, prompts, graphics; you name it — ✅ Designed for the $20/month Pro plan — ✅ Lifetime access to the version you purchase — ✅ Claude Cowork Foundational Certificate.
👉 Please note: The course will be available for $129 from June 1 to 8, 2026! (After that, $199.) 👈
🎓 Join the Waitlist of the Course Now: Claude Cowork: Stop Prompting. Start Delegating. No Coding Required!
Did you miss the previous Food for Agile Thought issue 542?
🎓 Join Stefan in one of his upcoming Professional Scrum training classes!
🏆 The Tip of the Week
John Cutler: The AI Playbook Puzzle
John Cutler suggests that AI supercharges good practices and accelerates bad ones, and that the real meta-skill now is reading context and challenging your own assumptions instead of following playbooks.
Source: The AI Playbook Puzzle
Author: John Cutler
🎯 Product
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille: Taste
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille question the hype around ‘taste’ as a product skill, suggesting it often masks personal preference as expertise. They propose investing in discovery skills and evidence over intuition.
Source: Taste
Authors: Teresa Torres and Petra Wille
Wyndo: What I Learned From Building a Competitor Intelligence Agent
Wyndo and Dheeraj Sharma describe building a competitor intelligence agent in Claude Cowork that retains memory across runs, compares weekly scans, and surfaces content gaps that compound over time into editorial judgment.
Source: What I Learned From Building Competitor Intelligence Agent
Author: Wyndo
David Pereira: 7 Reasons Why Product Is Damn Hard In Europe
David Pereira identifies seven reasons product management in Europe underperforms: roadmap theater, project over product thinking, consensus paralysis, risk aversion, process obsession, and job descriptions used as shields against change.
Source: 7 Reasons Why Product Is Damn Hard In Europe
Author: David Pereira
Pawel Huryn: From Weeks to Hours: How Claude Design Compresses Product Discovery
Paweł Huryn explores how Claude Design compresses product discovery by turning ideas into clickable prototypes in minutes, not days, and bridging the gap from approved design to shipped code without the usual Figma-to-engineering rebuild.
Source: From Weeks to Hours: How Claude Design Compresses Product Discovery
Author: Pawel Huryn
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
(via Harvard Business Review): The Psychological Costs of Adopting AI
Guy Champniss suggests that AI adoption’s negative psychological impact on employee motivation may cancel out the productivity gains companies are chasing, putting already questionable ROI models under even more pressure.
Source: Harvard Business Review: The Psychological Costs of Adopting AI
📺 Andrej Karpathy (via Sequoia Capital): From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
Andrej Karpathy proposes that software development is shifting from vibe coding to agentic engineering, where the developer’s role moves from writing code to directing AI agents with judgment, taste, and architectural understanding.
Source: Sequoia Capital: 📺 From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
Author: Andrej Karpathy
Cedric Chin (via Commonplace): How to Improve at Sensemaking AI?
Cedric Chin proposes three techniques for sensemaking AI: holding alternative frames without abandoning your current one, reading cues to detect hidden frames, and collecting fragments from past technological shifts for calibration.
Source: Commonplace: How to Improve at Sensemaking AI?
Author: Cedric Chin
Jack Clark: AI systems are about to start building themselves.
Jack Clark believes there is a 60%+ chance that fully automated AI R&D, where a model autonomously trains its own successor, will happen by the end of 2028, with profound implications for alignment, the economy, and society.
Source: AI systems are about to start building themselves.
Author: Jack Clark
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Claude Cowork BootCamp #2, June 10-July 2, 2026 — No Coding Required
You bought the Claude Pro subscription. You installed the desktop app. You pointed Cowork at a folder, watched it churn for thirty seconds, and got something that looked impressive but was not quite useful. You tried again. Same result.
Most people who try Claude Cowork get stuck in the same place. They do not know which of their tasks are good candidates for automation. They do not know how to build Skills that survive a second use. They do not know where the current limits sit. So they keep treating Cowork like a chat tool and miss the point of having an AI assistant who actually does the work.
The Claude Cowork BootCamp fixes that. In four hands-on sessions, you build working Skills and AI Agents during the sessions, not after. You leave with a compounding system, not a stack of prompts.
The Cowork BootCamp is in English. 🇬🇧
Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Claude Cowork BootCamp 2, June 10-July 2, 2026 — No Coding Required.
Customer Voice: “Three weeks ago, I could use AI. Today I can deploy it. The Cowork Bootcamp is the only AI training I have taken that shifted my thinking from ‘what can I prompt?’ to ‘what should I architect?’ — and that shift showed up immediately: on the same day as Session 3, I shipped a production AI research agent live at sagent.sai4rai.org, applying Stefan’s CLAUDE.md principles and the A3 Framework in real code, not just in exercises. I would recommend this to any agile coach, product manager, or practitioner who is tired of AI training that teaches tools but leaves you without a system for knowing when and how to actually delegate to AI at scale.” (Vijay Reddy, Principal SPC & AI Governance Lead, sai4rai.org.)
➿ Agile & Leadership
Jake Handy: Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis
Jake Handy warns that executives are confusing AI token consumption with productivity, fueled by sycophantic models and flashy agent dashboards. His fix: write specs first, measure outcomes, and sleep eight hours.
Source: Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis
Author: Jake Handy
Richard Kasperowski: Scrum Doesn’t Matter (And It Never Did): Slides from my keynote at the Global Scrum Gathering. Vancouver, May 5, 2026
Richard Kasperowski, keynoting the Global Scrum Gathering 2026, uses his own production data to suggest that CEOs never cared about Scrum, only results, and that AI makes engineering fundamentals more important, not less.
Author: Richard Kasperowski
Mike Fisher: You Can’t Fake Belonging
Mike Fisher draws on veteran transition research and workplace data to suggest that belonging is not a soft perk but a measurable performance driver, built or destroyed by the immediate manager, one interaction at a time.
Source: You Can’t Fake Belonging
Author: Mike Fisher
📯 The AI Spending Trap: Why Adoption Outpaces Outcomes
If you have spent the last twenty years arguing that velocity is not value, that adoption is not impact, that an Agile transformation is not a Jira migration, the Stanford AI Index 2026 will read like déjà vu: The technology is new. The failure mode, the AI spending trap, is not.
The 88 percent of organizations that have adopted AI but cannot show an EBIT impact are the same organizations that adopted Scrum without learning empiricism, adopted DevOps without changing how they fund teams, and adopted product management without giving anyone product authority.
The economic data is the evidence. The interpretation is what you already know.
Learn more: The AI Spending Trap: Why Adoption Outpaces Outcomes.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
Laura Klein (via IxDF — Interaction Design Foundation): Collaborating with Your Team for Research
Laura Klein proposes that cross-functional collaboration on research, especially involving engineers, builds deeper customer understanding across the team and surfaces technical issues early, even if some company cultures resist it.
Source: IxDF — Interaction Design Foundation: Collaborating with Your Team for Research
Author: Laura Klein
(via Measuring Usability): Can AI Detect Usability Problems Like Researchers?
Jim Lewis, Jeff Sauro, and colleagues compared AI and human usability evaluations. They found that AI catches roughly half the problems researchers identify while generating even more unverified issues that still require human review.
Source: Measuring Usability: Can AI Detect Usability Problems Like Researchers?
(via LeadDev): DORA metrics are lying to you and AI is making it worse
Paul LaPosta proposes that AI-generated code inflates DORA metrics by boosting delivery speed while eroding system understanding, creating false confidence. He urges leaders to supplement DORA with scope notes, incident narratives, and legibility checks.
Source: LeadDev: DORA metrics are lying to you and AI is making it worse
📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events 2026
Upcoming classes and events:
🖥 💯 🇩🇪 May 19–20, 2026 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 May 28-June 25, 2026 — Live Virtual Cohort: AI for Agile BootCamp #7 (English)
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 1 — Self-Paced Online Course: Claude Cowork: Stop Prompting. Start Delegating. (English; Self-paced Online Course)
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 10-July 2, 2026 — Live Virtual Cohort: Claude Cowork BootCamp #2 (English)
🖥 💯 🇩🇪 June 30-July 1, 2026 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 July 1 — Self-Paced Online Course: AI 4 Agile Course v3 — Master AI for Agile Practitioners (English; Self-paced Online Course)
👉 See all upcoming classes here
🗞️ The Previous Food for Agile Thought Edition
📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on YouTube
Now available on the Age-of-Product YouTube channel to improve learning, for example, about AI’s Labor Market Impact:
Stop Writing Prompts. Let AI Do It for You — Hack #01, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
Check Your AI’s Plan Before — Hack #7, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
From Product Requirements to Experiments to Learnings — Supported by Generative AI.
Never Accept an LLM’s First Offer — Improve GenAI’s Usefulness w/ Feedback Loops and Challenges.
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