Discovery Is Still the Job
Cagan insists that shipping features without validating value is the original sin of product development. With agents, founders can ship faster than ever, which means they can be wrong faster than ever. The answer is to build evaluation harnesses before building the agents themselves — red cases first, so that the definition of success precedes the work. An agent that clears all the wrong evals at speed is still a product that failed discovery.
Output Without Measurement Is Noise
Inspired draws a hard line between teams that measure impact and teams that count deliverables. An agent that completes tasks is generating output; whether that output is valuable depends on whether you designed the eval to capture what users actually need. Workflow-first thinking enforces this discipline: fixing the path before granting autonomy forces you to articulate what done means, which is exactly the discovery question Cagan demands teams answer before they build.
Viability Means the Human Can Own It
Cagan's viability constraint asks whether the business can actually support a solution — legal, ethical, operational. In an agentic company this maps directly onto human judgment: someone must be able to own the outcome, explain the tradeoff, and answer for a failure. Designing agents with scoped tools, tight permissions, and clear context is not just engineering hygiene; it is how you keep viability in scope and accountability legible.
