Since I started to see people use AI to build digital products something has always rubbed me the wrong way. It is like we are forgetting value, outcomes or impact and just keep clapping for the output. Token-maxing is real and I often have a hard time reaching through to people with this message, just because we are so happy that we close more (and bigger) pull requests.

Let’s not forget that. Let’s bring a value-obsessed, outcome measured and impact focused way of working back. Right now we are wasting the human capacity on keeping the agents busy.

I’ve written a few posts now on flow in the age of AI and to be honest, the other posts have been a setup to this post that is like the main idea (or itch I needed to scratch). Let me bring you up to speed with a short summary of...

I’ve written a few posts on AI and how it changes the flow of value, looking at it using my Theory of Constraints glasses, you can find them here, if you want:

• What is throughput in our domain
• Theory of constrains in an AI world
• AI as robots - haven’t I been here before?

But I had a few more things that I wanted to get out of my system. The first is the fact that with automation, such as robots, the workers moved up in the value chain. This is happening again now, as AI is being used to do much of the writing, creation and generation.

But are we really moving up in the value chain or is it actually deskilling and we end up baby-sitting an AI robot?

The revolution, well paradigm shift rather, we are experiencing in AI has a likening with how industrial robots made a paradigm shift in the manufacturing industry in the 80-ies. Both when it comes to how it was introduced, the fears it raised, the mistakes “we” did utilizing the power and how the winners ended up using them.

Now, I’m old but in the 1980-ies I was 10 years old and more interested in playing games on my Vic 20, soccer and riding my bike (yes, it was a simpler life). But I have read a lot about this topic since this was when Toyota started to blow the competition out of the water. Also, my all time favorite book The Goal (by Dr Eliyahu Goldratt) has the robot revolution as part of the driver of the story and the problem picture.

In this post I wanted to dive a...

AI is arguably one of the biggest paradigm shifts in the digital product development industry ever. Even if it stopped right now with Fable 5, we still would have changed so much that the before feel like a distant past. Writing the code by hand? Please...

A discussion with a friend, that works in manufacturing industry, made me reflect over this paradigm shift. It reminds me a lot about the advent of industrial robots in the manufacturing industry. This was 1970-80 circa and these robots was also perceived as something that would make “ALL WORKERS REDUNDANT” and visions of fully automated factories was envisioned.

Early on the outcome was hard to forecast too; the industry robots did a lot of the manual work that humans used to do and did it much more reliable and better than humans. Also - the human interaction was now higher up in...

The world of digital product development has changed forever with the advent of AI models like Opus (that was the first to make me realize this). In fact, many other industries have also changed, but I’m going to stick with what I know.

And ever since I started to realize that code will be written by agents that instruct I immediately got a sense that we (the industry) are making age-old mistakes that we and other industries have made, fixed and now comes back to.

We are focusing a lot on the things that rubs me the wrong way; output, efficiency, velocity and productivity. None of those are bad per se but without knowing the goal, something about the value, stating effects impact etc… They become productivity theater

I realized that I hadn’t thought this through properly and decided to write a few post on it. This is...

Over the years I have grown tired of the tightness in how we talk about our jobs, achievements and careers in general at LinkedIn. I poked a bit of fun to it by writing a different type of profile section.

Being a Swede I find it really embarrassing toothing my own horn, so I made up a story about two friends that talks about me instead. And then another story where I was at trial before a judge. And then one where my grand grand grand children talked about me after the AI lords had taken over.

Now that last one, feels a bit dated so I decided to change it to a one where two sport commentator reads out my achievements and jobs.

All of these are handcrafted, non-AI-generated, text. Like we did back in the days.

Some serious reflection

I am amazingly...

I have been thinking a lot about faster feedback my entire life. In short, this is one of the drivers behind just about anything related to agile software development, product-led development.

Changing our ways of working to enable faster flow is the guiding star for continuous improvement in Lean, the grandmother of agile principles. Over the years we, the software development community, have implemented all kinds of changes to get feedback faster in software development. Off the top of my head — sprints, standups, continuous integration, pair programming, TDD and TCR are all examples of practices that give us feedback faster and faster.

Interesting enough — we seem to have forgotten most of this, so far, in the AI code generation revolution and just been focused on creating a lot of code.

But don’t worry — what is good for a human is good for the AI too, as it...

I have been using an agentic workflow for most of my work these last couple of months. Especially, but not exclusively when it comes to coding. Being all about the effectiveness in software development I have also read, viewed and listened A LOT to what is going on in the larger AI world.

There are 4 trends that worry me. I don’t think there’s value in following these trends, and I think that humans will suffer in the short and long run. Finally I think we are, once again, mixing up effectiveness with efficiency, usefulness with busyness or valuable work with productivity.

The trends are:

• hailing context switching as Good stuff (tm)
• we’re only doing high-level thinking - no easy tasks left
• pressure to produce faster
• typing is not, and has never been, the constraint

Paradigm shift. Pretty cool to be part of another, huh? But also; scary, lots of big unknowns and the rate of change is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.

Yes - I’m talking about AI. But this post will be about some ideas how to navigate this change, trying to calm ourselves a bit and, quite frankly, give some comfort. Hopefully.

Someone asked me a question just as I left the office this Friday. The question was really good and the person showed genuine worry. I’m sure that person was not the only one. At least one more share the feelings. Me.

I wanted to share my response, a bit embroidered, here. The question was basically this, but better formulated:

Marcus, how do you stay positive in the light of all potential downsides of AI?

Now that we are using agents to help us with a lot of daily tasks I realize how much information I have put in speaker notes. I have books worth of information in there, due to my bad memory. I knew it would pay off, someday.

And they are really tricky to share with in an AI chat, like (we’re not using Chat GPT anymore, since this morning - right?) … well you choose. I’m going with Claude.

Uploading some of my presentations to an agent means 50+ Mb file, when I’m really just interested in the text in my speaker notes.

Over the years I have been going back and forth between different presenting softwares and hence I have a bit of a problem getting hold of the speaker notes.

But I’ve solved this now. Let me share it with you. And then let me share how I...