Food for Agile Thought #492: InfoQ Culture Trends 2025, Product Party Modes, Jerry Colonna on Leadership, Product Requirements

TL; DR: InfoQ Culture Trends 2025 — Food for Agile Thought #492

Welcome to the 492nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,631 peers. This week,

Shane Hastie

and

Charity Majors

spotlight InfoQ culture trends 2025, including AI’s dual impact on speed and collaboration, while reaffirming the importance of psychological safety and Agile-DevOps maturity.

John Cutler

introduces team “modes” like Questing and Spellcasting, reframing burnout beyond WIP.

David Pereira

shares leadership lessons for new product leads, Liam Ottley demystifies AI agents, and Zvi Mowshowitz critiques Zuckerberg’s dystopian AI ambitions.

Next,

Melissa Perri

tells Leah Tharin why AI fails at product strategy without real problem-solving, while

Rich Mironov

urges PMs to speak the language of money in a pod with

Jason Knight

.

Gary Marcus

warns of GenAI’s corrosive impact on academia, and John Pavlus captures NLP’s identity crisis. Meanwhile,

Joost Minnaar

explores how Haier’s RenDanHeYi model reinvents corporate structure through radical decentralization and entrepreneurial accountability.

Lastly, Jerry Colonna tells

Lenny Rachitsky

how self-inquiry fuels resilient leadership, while

Maarten Dalmijn

calls time on the Scrum Master role. Milan Milanović details how Google tackles tech debt at scale, and Vitaly…