The Real Value Journey — Food for Agile Thought #528

Welcome to the 528th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,758 peers. This week, John Cutler presents a five-act narrative exploring how organizations evolve from delivery-focused work toward product-centricity through a messy, iterative value journey, while Stephanie Leue identifies an “alignment tax” that slows growing organizations and requires systemic redesign. Turning to AI, Christina Wodtke explores how Claude Code enables “(product) discovery coding” through conversation. Addy Osmani offers guidance on writing AI agent specs, and Allan Kelly warns that AI coding will unleash shadow IT alongside security risks.

Next, Rich Mironov suggests executives ask whether products earn their keep by trusting engineering judgment over ticket-level ROI math. Bandan Singh proposes filters before reacting to competitors. Also, Lenny Rachitsky interviews Zevi Arnovitz on how nontechnical PMs ship products using Cursor, while Jing Hu warns that AI assistants may weaken desire by removing anticipation-building friction. Additionally, Mike Cohn proposes that soft skills persist and compound, unlike technical skills, which have a shrinking half-life.

Then, Teresa Torres demystifies how large language models work, explaining tokenization, embeddings, and attention mechanisms. David Burkus suggests effective delegation requires giving ownership rather than tasks, while Anthropic releases Claude’s new constitution, prioritizing safety, ethics, and helpfulness. Lastly, PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey reveals 56% of CEOs report no AI financial return yet, and Simon P. Couch estimates Claude Code sessions consume 138 times more energy than typical queries, calling for transparency from frontier labs.