Food for Agile Thought #485: Agile Coach Bubble Origins, Outcomes Are Bl**dy Hard, Product Team Anti-Patterns, Running Major Projects

TL; DR: Agile Coach Bubble Origins — Food for Agile Thought #485

Welcome to the 485th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,652 peers. This week, Viktor Cessan explores the origin of the Agile Coach bubble, which was inflated by cheap capital. Marty Cagan and Felipe Castro stress that outcomes over outputs remain elusive without adopting the product model. Maarten Dalmijn identifies systemic dysfunction — not poor PMs — as the real challenge and proposes CACAO as a remedy. David Pereira urges teams to treat the backlog as a strategic tool, not a dumping ground. Also, Lenny Rachitsky interviews Anton Osika on how Lovable hit $10M ARR in 60 days by letting users describe apps in plain language — AI handles the rest.

Next, Ben Thompson interviews Sam Altman on OpenAI’s evolution from research lab to consumer tech giant, unpacking ChatGPT, AGI, and pursuing “the next Facebook.” Klaudia Jazwinska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar expose how AI search engines misattribute and fabricate news content, damaging trust and publisher economics. Peter Yang offers 12 grounded rules for building real apps with AI — especially for non-coders, while Charity Majors dismantles the 10x engineer myth, advocating for resilient, inclusive teams where “normal” engineers thrive. And Andy Cleff makes a case for self-selection…