#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
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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 t