You might be readier than you think
Why the rename
This newsletter has been "Product Leadership" for 3 years. I know you have seen the growing volume of AI-related posts over the year. That's cause I've been fully immersed in making that come true at scale.
Product leadership hasn't gone away in my head. It is just not priority 1 for my company.
Being ready for the future is priority 1. So I rename.
You might be readier for the future than you think
The agentic world as it is unfolding is vast and complex. I see that most of us are struggling. I remember that feeling as that was my feeling 18 months ago. You just know that something is coming. But you cannot just take a part of the thing and pull. That pull feels like an unending path that might not lead you anywhere. So: where do you even start? Then people tell you that things change so fast that this field is just very hard to follow.
But you also know that you should. Because that future starts to be evident.
If you've tried Claude Code, Copilot, or any agentic tool — you've started. Most companies I talk to are further along than they believe. They've done experiments. People are using things. The problem isn't starting — it's knowing what you're building toward.
Anything that you learned from the agile transformation will be relevant. Anything your brain has wired about great product leadership is foundational. Two things happened to me. First: strong agile knowledge allowed me to understand and tame the non-deterministic nature of the LLM. Second: the sense of product leadership, outcome-orientation and strategic thinking allowed to look at this change from broad perspective.
You can dance with non-determinism, ultra-speed and broad shifts. You may be readier than you realise.
The word "strategy" is doing the heavy lifting - Do the work - Build your movement
Everyone talks about AI tools. Agents. Models. Prompts. Almost nobody talks about what it means for how your company competes.
"Agentic strategy" = the decisions you make about how agents change your business. Agentic strategy = the fabric of the company on how it operates and creates value. Not which model to pick. Not how to prompt. What to become. This is a CTO/CPO-level conversation, not a developer one.
The trouble is your brain can't yet see it. Sit down for 2 hours. You still can't see it. Your brain cannot summon the target state how ever much you want.
I know you know: Strategy is 50% insights. 50% of just hard work. It is repetition and messaging.
The best strategies emerge out of iteration. They start as hunch. They get tested.
We've trained 200+ people in the last year. The pattern is consistent. Week 2: scepticism, curiosity, first working agent. Week 3: unprompted building. People discover their own high-value processes. Nobody told them to — they could suddenly see it. The curiosity was always there before. The practical "how" was the gap.
The infrastructure gaps surface organically. Not from an assessment. From people trying to do real things. Doing the work is not the preparation for strategy. Doing the work IS the strategy.
After 3 months of doing the work "right", you have created your initial memory muscle to see where this is all headed. There is no secret shortcut to re-wiring your imagination.
You take your people with you. All of a sudden you have a movement.
Compound every week. Compound every month. That is the agentic way.
Strong AI Strategy emerges from action and skill. Can't do it vice-versa.
The intuitive sequence to strategising is assess → strategise → plan → execute. The agentic sequence is reversed: build → discover → strategise.
You cannot envision what agents do for your business if you haven't built an agent before. If you do not viscerally feel what an LLM can and cannot process now and in 3 months, then you cannot imagine. This is different from every previous transformation. Digital, agile, cloud — a leader could govern from above. We just knew better a priori. (Note: of course we did not. We just felt like we did). Not with this one. Agentic competence is the prerequisite for vision.
The leaders I've seen get this right and who I'm tracking did the work first. Strategy followed.
What this newsletter will be about
How agent competence changes what companies can envision and execute.
What's practices, platforms and tools actually working pre-chasm and just crossing (evidence-graded, not marketing stories).
The organisational shifts that make agentic transformation stick — not just the tech.
Lessons from companies that are doing this now, not planning to do it later.
Ai-native teams, ai-native organisations
Let's go
If you're a product leader, a CTO, or anyone responsible for "what are we doing with AI?" — this is for you.
Welcome to Agentic Strategy.