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Food for Agile Thought #475: Natural Agility, Fake Product Transformations, AI Product Management, Fail a Lot!

Stefan Wolpers
Food for Agile Thought
9 min readJan 10, 2025

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TL; DR: Natural Agility — Food for Agile Thought #475

Welcome to the 475th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,812 peers. This week, Dave Snowden challenges the “Agile Industrial Complex” to move beyond rote behaviors toward fostering natural agility and strategic impact. Charles Lambdin dissects Agile’s waning influence, citing political naïveté and misaligned priorities, while Chris Matts warns of superficial “Product Transformations” in 2025, echoing past Agile missteps. Gene Gendel discusses with Andy Cleff and Jay Hrcsko how HR and finance can either constrain or enable agility. Finally, Gregor Ojstersek and Michał Poczwardowski offer actionable tips for creating meetings engineers won’t hate, emphasizing relevance and purpose.

Next, Aletheia Delivre introduces “Walk the Park” and “Customer Love Sprints,” rituals that help teams tackle UX debt and prioritize customer-focused improvements. John Cutler advocates for nuanced customer segmentation via organizational psychographics, aligning strategy and product with GTM approaches, and Marty Cagan reflects on AI’s evolving role in product management, examining its effects on discovery, creativity, and team satisfaction. Also, Jason Cohen shares actionable strategies for uncovering customer insights before building a product, emphasizing creative outreach and leveraging networks.

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Food for Agile Thought
Food for Agile Thought

Published in Food for Agile Thought

Best posts from last week on agile and lean methodologies, Scrum and product management. Manually curated, no robots involved.

Stefan Wolpers
Stefan Wolpers

Written by Stefan Wolpers

I have worked for 18-plus years as a Scrum Master, Product Owner, and agile coach. Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) with Scrum.org.

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