Definitely, Maybe Agile

AI can push software delivery to machine speed, but your customers, approvals and decisions still move at human speed. That gap decides what AI really changes. Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock look at the AI software delivery lifecycle through clock speed. Code generation is getting close to machine speed. Customer behavior, product discovery and the approvals needed before anything gets built sti...

AI in the software delivery lifecycle is moving faster than any process you can write down. A model that works today may be wrong in a month or two. Dave Sharrock and Peter Maddison unpack what AI is really doing to the SDLC, from ideation and design through build, release, and operations. They start with Anthropic’s recent paper on an AI-native SDLC. Peter has spoken with its authors and sees use...

AI can now produce output faster than most organizations can absorb it. Mik Kersten explains why the move from output to outcome has become a leadership job. Mik, author of Project to Product and his new book Output to Outcome, joins Peter and Dave to talk about what happens when coding stops being the bottleneck. For years, business teams fought to get their feature into the next plan because del...

Spec-driven development with AI is getting a lot of attention. Peter and Dave ask when that structure actually helps you, and when it slows you down. They start with the AI SDLC white paper Anthropic recently published. It lays out a structured, spec-driven approach built for consistency. Peter sees it working best on large legacy systems, the kind with millions of lines of code written over 15 ye...

AI agents will tell you everything works. Here is how to validate AI output when the mistakes are ones no human would ever make. Peter and Dave compare notes from building software, training material, and presentations with AI. The problems they keep running into are strange ones: the wrong database ID dropped into a system, 236 passing tests that test nothing, and five layers of abstraction added...

Giving AI agents names and a spot on the org chart makes people feel less accountable for the work, and it squeezes the agent into a role it doesn't need. Dave Sharrock and Peter Maddison dig into new research from the September/October 2026 issue of Harvard Business Review on what happens when organizations add named AI agents to the org chart. When people use AI as a tool, they own the resu...

AI speeds up building. It doesn't speed up deciding. The real bottleneck has moved to management, and organizations don't see it yet. In this episode, Peter and Dave talk with Bernie Maloney about why AI adoption is exposing a critical gap in organizational leadership. AI is accelerating delivery and implementation. But the pressure for deciding what's worth building has moved upstr...

Don't abandon Agile for AI. The real bottleneck isn't speed of delivery, it's organizational decision-making and clarity about value. Dave West, CEO of Scrum.org, warns that organizations adopting AI are making a critical mistake. They're abandoning foundational Agile practices, sprint planning, daily standups, retrospectives-  under the assumption that AI's speed removes...

The Scrum Master role hasn't disappeared. It's been diluted, pushed outside the organization, or absorbed into everyone's job description. Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock dig into what's actually happened to the Scrum Master and agile coach role as AI reshapes how teams work. They trace how a role that once had real impact got watered down as two-day certifications flooded the...

AI vendors are shifting from flat-fee pricing to consumption-based billing, and most organizations have no idea what their token spend is actually producing. Dave Sharrock and Peter Maddison break down what's driving the shift to AI token economics, why the old "$20 per user" budget model is breaking down, and why usage alone is the wrong thing to optimize for. They dig into the pat...

Giving an AI agent real autonomy means accepting it will fail early and often before it gets good, the same curve organizations hit during any real change. Peter Maddison brings a stuck OAuth problem to the table: an AI agent that kept going in circles and couldn't find its way through. That leads into a conversation from Dave Sharrock's local AI meetup about an AlphaGo-style approach to...

AI can write code faster than ever, but Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock argue that coding was never the actual bottleneck in software delivery. In this conversation about AI software delivery, Peter and Dave dig into why faster coding hasn't solved the two problems that always mattered: knowing whether what you built is actually valuable, and knowing what to build in the first place. They co...

Organizational change resistance isn't dysfunction, it's a system doing exactly what it was built to do. Peter and Dave break down why structures, incentives, and leadership behavior create that resistance, and how AI is now exposing it faster than ever. Dave and Peter dig into what they call the organizational immune system: the structures, incentives, and habits that keep a company sta...

Organizational honesty starts with information: can your team actually see what's happening, and can they say it without fear of pushback? Dave and Peter dig into why teams shade the truth when a deadline is on the line, and what actually creates room for honesty instead. They talk about the difference between activity data and real information, why cheap, near real-time visual management bea...

AI is making it faster and cheaper to ship features. That doesn't mean you should ship more of them at once. Peter and Dave dig into a pattern they're both starting to see: organizations using AI-assisted development as a reason to bring back big upfront planning and large project releases. The logic makes a certain kind of sense. If AI can build faster, why not design bigger? But that r...

Tommy Cotter is Director of Data Products at Benzinga, a financial media company building the data infrastructure that sits behind trading platforms and investment apps used by millions of people daily. He's been navigating the shift to AI-assisted workflows in a space where speed and accuracy aren't just nice to have - getting it wrong has real consequences. In this episode, Peter and D...

Royce Sin spent a decade at HSBC automating things nobody asked him to automate. He didn't ask for permission. He just did it, showed people the results, and let the time savings speak for itself. That instinct, to question why things are done a certain way and then actually do something about it, is what eventually led him into the AI space. In this episode, Peter and Dave sit down with Royc...

As AI handles more of the foundational work, entry-level engineering roles are disappearing. Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock examine why that trend is short-sighted, what junior developers actually contribute to team growth and AI adoption, and how organizations that skip early-career hiring may be trading long-term capability for short-term convenience. This week's takeaways: Labeling the n...

Conference season is back, and so are the real conversations. In this episode, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock catch up after a busy stretch of travel and dig into something Dave has been road-testing at conferences: why most people given access to AI tools freeze up, and what actually helps them move past that. Dave ran a workshop at the Global Scrum Gathering in Vancouver for non-technical role...

Most organizations think they're doing AI. They've bought the licenses, rolled out the tools, and told the team to start using Copilot. But adding AI on top of a 40-year-old process isn't transformation. It's decoration.  Andre Kaminski, Director of Advanced Technology Solutions at WorkSafeBC and author of "The AI-Native Software Development Lifecycle," joins Peter an...

Agreeing on an idea doesn't mean you both understood the same thing. Dave Sharrock and Peter Maddison dig into why shared context breaks down in practice, and how AI makes that problem harder to ignore. This week's takeaways: Intent is always imperfect. Define how you'll validate it, not just what it is. Ambiguity in context isn't a bug. It's necessary. Validation is how y...

It doesn't happen all at once. A great idea comes out of a strategy session. Someone turns it into a PowerPoint. Another person summarizes that PowerPoint with AI. By the time it reaches the team building it, the sharp edges are gone and nobody quite remembers what made the idea worth pursuing in the first place. Peter and Dave dig into a problem that's older than AI but getting harder t...

Most organizations think they have a capacity problem. They usually don't. What they have is a work-in-progress problem. And those two things call for very different solutions. In this episode, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock dig into one of the most persistent headaches in organizational management: capacity tracking. Why does the instinct to measure utilization backfire? Why does loading p...

AI is changing how products get built. That part isn't news. But it's also changing who needs to do what - and that's a conversation most organizations haven't had yet. In this episode, Peter and Dave dig into one of the more interesting tensions emerging in 2026: as coding agents take on more of the actual development work, the thing that drives quality output isn't just...

A lot of organizations are betting that AI will make their teams faster. Some of them are right. Most are solving the wrong problem. AJ Bubb, founder of MxP Studio and host of Facing Disruption, joins Peter and Dave to talk about what actually happens when AI lands in a development team without fixing the system around it. If engineers can't get approvals, can't get access, and spend hal...