Hey folks, Jeff here. A few weeks ago, AI-Native SAFe landed in my feed (now with a stop on the train for, yep, Sense & Respond). I wrote about it on LinkedIn, and I'll say the same thing here: I wanted to be wrong. I wanted to see a real rethink. What I saw instead was AI bolted onto the same rigid framework. New ceremonies, new roles, new guidance layered on top of a structure built to do the one thing AI product work cannot tolerate: lock the plan in advance and coordinate everyone around...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, Jeff here this week. I wrote this week's blog post over on the Sense & Respond Learning blog, AI agents across the product lifecycle solve the wrong problem, because the pitch making the rounds right now is "put an AI agent in every step of your product lifecycle," and it makes for a great demo. It's also a solution to something most product teams don't struggle with. Teams were never slow at producing outputs. Putting an agent in every step just makes an already-fast factory...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, Last Thursday I (Josh) had the pleasure of running the Q&A while my colleague Jeff Gothelf hosted our friend Ben Yoskovitz for a Sense & Respond Learning webinar. The topic was metrics, which I know does not sound thrilling, but stay with me. I came away with more questions than I walked in with, and honestly that is how I know a session was a good one. Here is what I am still chewing on. Sitting in the Q&A seat My job on this webinar was to watch the questions roll in and decide...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, It's been a tough few months for layoffs. It seems every day you fire up LinkedIn and there's another headline of mass layoffs at some company or another. In this week's newsletter we wanted to offer a bit of good news on this front. Rather than fire a bunch of people that AI helped make more efficient, IKEA took part in some good old fashioned product discovery work and identified a new business opportunity. That new business line is now generating $1BB per year. Yep, you read...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, A couple of weeks ago, in our Outcome-Centered AI webinar, we discussed a tension many teams are feeling right now. AI makes it easier than ever to generate output. And that can feel like progress right up until you realize you are still missing the harder question: is any of this actually working? One of the most useful questions that came up in the session got right to the heart of that. When an AI-supported tactic is not clearly delivering the outcome you wanted, how do you know...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Hey folks, If you’re working through AI transformation on your team, you may already have some kind of lightweight evaluation loop in place. A way to build intuition for how to use AI on work that matters, and where to focus your review and refinement energy before you roll that AI initiative out more broadly. A popular workflow for this is the Delegation-Diligence loop (or 4D Loop). The idea is that you do not scale delegation until you understand what works, what fails and what kind of...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hey folks, It’s getting easier to walk into a meeting looking prepared. AI can help anyone put together a summary, a chart, a recommendation and a few smart-sounding slides in no time. That means the old signals of product expertise do not mean what they used to. If you lead product work, that changes what sets you apart. Having the insight is still important. But now you also have to make people understand why it matters, trust where it came from and see what to do next. In other words, you...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Hey folks, You’ve probably heard the phrase, the tail shouldn’t wag the dog. If you haven’t, it’s a small thing that should not end up controlling the bigger, more important one. And that is what happens when a two-week sprint starts dictating how you do user research. You feel this even more now because AI has made it cheaper and easier to produce ideas, concepts and plans at speed. When output becomes easier, the risk is letting the mechanics of delivery drive the work rather than staying...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Hey folks, Q2 has a way of exposing fuzzy thinking. By now, plans have met reality and teams are starting to see what is actually worth focusing on. AI makes that harder in a new way. It has dramatically reduced the cost of producing ideas, which means more people can generate more goals, plans and concepts faster than ever. That is powerful. It is also overwhelming. More output does not automatically mean more clarity or better judgment. So how do you bring focus, clarity and judgment back...
5 months ago • 4 min read