A product leader asked me last month how to decide what parts of the job to hand off to agents now that every promotion comes with an agent mandate. The answer is simple but rarely stated: keep the judgment calls where the downside lands on people you know by name, and let the models handle the rest. Everything else is secondary. The old playbook never prepared anyone for this question.
Charlie Munger spent decades telling investors to stay inside their circle of competence. The rule was not about avoiding hard work. It was about refusing to make calls when you could not see the full set of consequences. In product work that rule now collides with live agents that produce first drafts at scale. The circle does not shrink because the tools got faster. It moves because the cost of being wrong now hits real users and real teammates before you finish reviewing the output.
The promotion the old playbook never described
The title change arrived with a new expectation. I was told the team would run on agents for initial scoping, first-pass requirements, and early user-story drafts. The headcount stayed flat, but the mandate was to ship more surface area with the same number of humans. The old promotion playbook measured scope by how many features I could personally shepherd. The new one measured it by how many decisions I could safely review after an agent had already moved them forward.
At first the arrangement felt efficient. The agents produced clean documents that looked ready for stakeholder review. Then a set of stories reached the volunteer build team for children’s ministry curriculum. The agent had optimized for completion rate metrics that made sense on paper but ignored the seven-minute volunteer who prints the lesson on Sunday morning and discovers the activity requires materials that are not in the supply closet. The error was small on screen and expensive in real rooms. That was the moment the circle of competence stopped being a theory.
Where the old playbook breaks once agents write the first draft
Munger’s test was never whether you could understand the output. It was whether you could still trace the second-order effects on the actual people who would use it. When agents write the first draft, that trace becomes harder because the draft already carries the appearance of finished work. The temptation is to treat the model’s version as the default and only edit around the edges. The boundary moves inward the moment you accept that default.
I watched the same pattern on two other teams. One handled global discipleship tools where traffic numbers are easy to celebrate. The agent suggested a flow that increased session time for logged-in users but quietly dropped first-time visitors from low-bandwidth regions. The other team managed sermon resources for pastors who prepare on Friday night. The agent optimized for search ranking and removed the plain-text print option that those pastors relied on when their internet dropped. In both cases the humans reviewing the work had never held the downstream roles themselves. The competence gap was not technical. It was relational.
The two questions the old playbook left out
Research like Harvard Business Review on AI and product roles confirms the old playbook never accounted for managing agents that draft the work.
The first question is whether I can name the three people who will feel the downside if this decision is wrong. If I cannot name them, I do not own the call. The second question is whether those same three people would recognize the failure mode inside the first five minutes of using the product. If the answer is no, the scope stays with me until I can answer both questions clearly. These two questions have become the practical edge of my circle.
Applying them has changed what I accept. I still review agent output, but I now require a short “who gets hurt” paragraph written by a human who has done the actual job the agent is modeling. The paragraph must be attached to every story that reaches review. It is not a process document. It is the minimum signal that the judgment call has not yet been outsourced.
Your Turn: Apply This Today
- Block thirty minutes this week and write down the three judgment calls you currently own that you would refuse to hand to an agent even if the output looked perfect.
- For each of those three calls, name the two people downstream who would absorb the cost if the call is wrong.
- Write one sentence for each person describing how they would first notice the failure in their actual workflow.
- Schedule a fifteen-minute conversation with one of those people and read the sentence out loud to confirm it matches their experience.
- Add a standing rule in your next planning doc that any agent-generated story must include a “who gets hurt” paragraph before it reaches review.
- Review the last five stories your team accepted from agents and mark which ones would have failed the two questions above.
The PM Who Just Inherited the Fable Agent Mandate and The Compensation Split No Playbook Prepared PMs For both trace the same boundary problem from different angles.
I consult with product leaders and ministry technology teams on agent scope decisions, judgment call ownership, and downstream user impact reviews. Let’s talk.