#165: Can Your Product Process Keep Up With AI with Cort Sharp

If AI is speeding up how fast we can ship, what’s slowing teams down now? Brian and returning guest Cort Sharp dig into the emerging friction between AI-assisted development and the still-slow art of product decision-making. Overview With AI accelerating software delivery, it’s no longer the developers dragging their feet. It’s the backlog that’s backing everything up. In this episode, Brian and Cort tackle the big shift: as coding becomes faster and easier, the real challenge becomes knowing what to build, why, and whether it’s worth it. They talk about feature bloat, the myth of productivity, the “good enough” curve, and why product owners are quietly becoming the most critical role on agile teams. Plus: short sprints, fake one-day sprints, and a healthy dose of “what even is a Sprint, anyway?” If you're feeling the tension between building faster and deciding smarter, this convo’s got your name on it. References and resources mentioned in the show: Cort Sharp #104: Mastering Product Ownership with Mike Cohn #3: What Makes a Great Product Owner? With Lance Dacy #164: Why Innovation Efforts Fall Flat with Tendayi Viki Get the Agile Skills Video Library Use code PODCASTSKILLS for $10 off Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [e-mail] This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Cort Sharp is the Scrum Master of the producing team and the Agile Mentors Community Manager. In addition to his love for Agile, Cort is also a serious swimmer and has been coaching swimmers for five years. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome back Agile Mentors. We're here for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you here as always, Brian Milner. And today I have back the one and only Cort Sharp with us. Welcome back Cort. Cort Sharp (00:11) Hey Brian, thanks for having me. Brian Milner (00:13) Yeah. Cort and I were chatting just in between engagements and things we were talking about going on. Cort's coaching a lot recently, and I've been coaching a lot recently as well. And so we've been kind of sharing stories and talking about kind of some of the things we've been experiencing. And you came across something really interesting recently that I thought we talked about might make a good topic. help us out. What was that that you came across? Cort Sharp (00:42) Yeah, so I've seen this idea pop up a few times actually on LinkedIn specifically, but I've seen it trickle out into other areas within the coaching that I've been doing recently, but also just in other pieces or parts of the internet as well. And it's this idea of like with AI being brought into organizations, brought into companies, helping out developers so much that AI has actually lowered that barrier. for the programming side of stuff, programming side of the development side of things, that the new blocker that is currently emerging, so the new piece that's been slowing everyone down now is actually the product management side of stuff itself, which I thought was just so fascinating because I've done a little programming, definitely more in the product management side of things now, but I kept seeing this pop up and I was like, man. I would love to just hear, you know, Brian's thoughts about this and the community as a whole, everyone's thoughts about this a little bit here too, but I have my own thoughts, but just quick little immediate reaction to that idea there, Brian. How does that make you feel? What do you think of that? Brian Milner (01:51) Yeah, I actually have been thinking this was coming for a while. I don't have this prepared, so please don't get me wrong in this. I know I always say data didn't happen. But there are three studies that I found at one point that were trying to determine the number of features in just your average software project that were rarely or never used. And it was three separate studies spread out over years. And one of them was like 48%. That was the low one, was like 48%. Then there was a middle one that was 64. And then there was another one that was more recent that said like 80%. And I mean, think about that, know, like I, even if you take the low end, And so, you know, 48, let's just round it up to 50 just to make it easier to ...