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…
AI Is Not Just Another Tech Trend. It's a Paradigm Shift. Every generation or so, a technology comes along that doesn't just improve what exists. It rewrites the rules entirely. Economists have a name for this kind of technology: a General Purpose Technology, or GPT. The concept was formalized by economists Timothy Bresnahan and Manuel Trajtenberg,…
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…
In 2000, Blockbuster generated nearly $800 million from late fees. That same year, Netflix eliminated late fees entirely, walking away from revenue its competitor couldn't live without. One company adapted to what customers wanted. The other protected what its business model required. Today, Netflix's market cap exceeds $325 billion (as of February 2026). Blockbuster no longer…
Stakeholder alignment sessions often fail not because people disagree, but because the session design assumes everyone will play nice. When you have genuinely conflicting priorities, competing resource constraints, or fundamental differences in strategy, a standard meeting format won't cut it. The difference between productive disagreement and unproductive chaos comes down to structure. Without it, even skilled…
The Product Owner accountability, as originally defined, gives one person complete ownership of a product: understanding customers, defining problems worth solving, shaping solutions, and prioritizing work. They have strategic autonomy, budget authority, and accountability for outcomes. In practice, organizations use Product Owner as a catch-all title for anyone managing product work, regardless of actual authority or…
Prioritization techniques like MoSCoW and Impact/Effort (covered in Part 1) work for initial filtering, but they don't produce comparable scores across items or account for multiple factors systematically. Scoring frameworks solve this by assigning numerical values based on defined criteria, creating repeatable prioritization without requiring financial data. This guide covers three widely-used frameworks: ICE scoring, RICE…
Twenty-five years ago, seventeen software developers met at a ski resort in Utah and published a manifesto that changed how products get built. They challenged the dominant model of the time: long planning cycles, extensive documentation, rigid specifications, and change control boards. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development argued for something different: short iterations, customer collaboration,…
Three metrics reveal how the fundamentals of building and scaling companies has changed in the AI era: how quickly products reach mass adoption, how fast businesses generate significant revenue, and how much value teams can create relative to their size. The differences aren't marginal. The data shows transformative shifts in business performance. 1. Rapid User Acquisition…
Most organizational change efforts fail. Not because the ideas are bad, but because leaders underestimate how difficult it is to actually change how people work. John Kotter's 8-Step Change Management Model addresses this problem directly. It's a framework that acknowledges a basic truth: lasting change requires more than an announcement and a new process document. If…
Every product team faces the same challenge: infinite demand, finite capacity. Stakeholders believe their requests are urgent, sales wants features that close deals, engineering wants to fix technical debt, and leadership wants strategic initiatives. Everyone has a compelling case for why their work matters most. The natural response is to rely on gut feel or defer…