If agents can execute faster than your team can reflect, the question of what to build — and for whom — becomes the only question that actually matters. Get that wrong and you're just failing at speed.
Marty Cagan's Inspired is a sustained argument against feature factories — organizations that treat product teams as execution machines handed a roadmap from above. The antidote is what Cagan calls an empowered product team: a small group with the context, the access to customers, and the authority to own outcomes rather than output. Valuable, usable, feasible, and viable are the four tests every idea has to pass, and the team's job is continuous discovery running in parallel with delivery, not sequenced before it.
The feature factory problem gets structurally worse when agents can execute overnight. A founder who wires agents directly to a backlog without a human holding the outcome question has built a very fast factory with no one watching the floor. Inspired redraws the lines: agents slot naturally into the feasibility and delivery layer, but the valuable-and-viable judgment requires a person with real customer contact and genuine authority to say no. Discovery cadence, not sprint cadence, becomes the heartbeat your studio actually needs to protect.
- Keep a human accountable for the outcome, not just the throughput
- run discovery continuously or agents will optimize confidently in the wrong direction
- feasibility is now nearly free, which makes value and viability proportionally more important to interrogate.
