Artificial intelligence is no longer a single thing. It's a collection of distinct capabilities, each solving a different class of problem. That distinction matters for product leaders. Knowing what each capability does, and what it can't do on its own, is what allows you to move from "we should use AI" to a clear answer about…
Anyone who has led organizational change has seen a predictable pattern. The change is introduced. Resistance follows. Performance drops. Teams struggle through uncertainty before things stabilize at a new normal, if they get there at all. The initiative is sound. The case for change is clear. And yet people resist and what looked straightforward on paper…
Supervised learning is the branch of machine learning behind spam filters, fraud detection systems, medical imaging tools, and large language models like ChatGPT. Understanding how it works, and where it reaches its limits, matters for anyone making decisions about building or buying AI-powered products. What Supervised Learning Actually Is Supervised learning is a method where a…
Every product investment starts with something the organization believes in. The budget gets approved, the team gets staffed, and the work begins. Then the product launches and falls flat. The postmortem reveals that customers didn't need it, didn't want it, or weren't willing to pay for it. The budget is gone, and the organization is left…
Product leaders today operate in a field shaped by AI. This is the first in a series of posts that maps that field, starting with the foundational concepts: what AI is, how machine learning works, and what distinguishes the main approaches in use today. AI vs. Machine Learning Artificial intelligence refers to systems that can perform…
Stakeholder management takes real time. The bigger the initiative, the longer the list of people who have a stake in the outcome. Most teams respond by treating everyone roughly the same: the same email, the same update cadence, the same level of access. That is where the time goes. The power/interest matrix, developed by Aubrey Mendelow…
On May 5, 2026, Fadi Stephan and Stephen Ritchie attended the Global Scrum Gathering in Vancouver, Canada, and presented The Impact of AI on Agile Engineering Practices. Below are some of the resources mentioned in the talk: Abstract AI and vibe coding is reshaping how teams build software, but what about our Agile principles and practices?…
Life is good. Sit back, chill and let AI do its thing. And probably not in an office setting, but at the pool or on the beach. If this is the state of software engineering and coding, where AI is writing the code and engineers are relaxing, do we care about quality code and agile engineering…
OpenAI has mapped out five levels of AI capability on the path to Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. It has become a useful way to understand where AI is today, what comes next, and how far the progression extends. The five levels are: Chatbots, Reasoners, Agents, Innovators, and Organizations. Each represents a meaningful increase in what…
The AI powering your credit card fraud detection, the AI drafting your team's content, and the AI researchers are working toward next represent fundamentally different levels of capability. Where a given system sits on that progression changes how you deploy it, what you invest in, and what you should realistically expect from it. Narrow AI: The…
Every generation or so, a technology comes along that doesn't just improve what exists. It rewrites the rules entirely. Economists Timothy Bresnahan and Manuel Trajtenberg coined the term General Purpose Technology, or GPT, for this kind of technology. These technologies share three defining characteristics: they spread across most sectors of the economy, they improve over time,…
Part 3 of the Prioritization Series Previously in this series: Part 1 covered foundational techniques like MoSCoW and Impact/Effort. Part 2 covered scoring frameworks: ICE, RICE, and Weighted Scoring. The scoring frameworks from Part 2 help you rank work by value, but they have no way to account for what delay costs the business. Sequencing decisions…
Ask ten people in a product organization what value means, and you will get ten different answers. The head of engineering points to reliability. The product manager points to adoption. The CFO points to margin. The customer success lead points to retention. Everyone is partially right, and the disagreement is rarely resolved because the underlying question…
On March 24, 2026, Fadi Stephan presented Building High-Performing Teams at the PMI NYC monthly chapter meeting. Below are some of the resources mentioned in the talk: Building High-Performing Team Slides High Performing Teams Canvas To learn more about how to build high-performing teams, check out the Building High Performing Teams Workshop.
Most teams know how to start a project. You write a charter, hold a kick-off, and get to work. Launching a Scrum team requires something different, and treating it like a project kick-off is one of the more common ways organizations undermine a new team before it ever ships anything. What a Traditional Project Kick-Off Actually…