Product Model Failures — Food for Agile Thought #525

🎉 Happy 2026 and welcome to the 525th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,782 peers.

This week, John Cutler warns of product operating model failures when artifacts replace enabling conditions, while Stephanie Leue shows how reactive overload blocks real product work. Itamar Gilad critiques Google’s drift toward output over learning. Andrej Karpathy tracks 2025 LLM shifts reshaping who builds software, and Janelle Teng Wade examines AI’s power-law economics and fragile bets. Also, Mike Fisher uses Nokia to show how relentless change overwhelms the capacity for absorption and judgment.