Hamza Farooq and Jaya Rajwani, instructors behind two of Maven's highest-rated AI courses, spent 50 hours building a practical framework for product teams deciding where to invest in agents. The core claim: most roadmaps contain 5 to 10 agent initiatives and teams have no principled way to prioritize them. This guide gives them one, built around three distinct agent types with specific tools, platforms, and real-world examples mapped to each.
The piece is worth reading for the prioritization logic, not just the taxonomy. Farooq and Rajwani draw on 30+ conversations with AI leaders who showed up with the same backlog: a PM assistant, a RAG copilot, a customer support system, a code review agent, a voice shopping assistant. The framework tells you which of those to kill, which to pilot, and which to fund. It also names the failure modes that kill agent projects before they ship.
The broader argument is that agent hype is outrunning agent strategy. Teams are building before they understand what category of problem they are solving. The original piece covers how to map initiatives to agent types, how to evaluate build-versus-buy, and how to set realistic expectations for autonomous systems operating in production. If your team has agents on the roadmap and no framework for sequencing them, this is required reading.
[READ ORIGINAL →]