Hamza Farooq and Jaya Rajwani, who teach two of the most highly-rated courses on building AI agents, share a practical framework for categorizing and prioritizing your agent initiatives. Drawing on over 50 hours of research and work with Fortune 500 companies, including Jack in the Box, Tripadvisor, and The Home Depot, they explain why most teams get stuck when building agents—and how a three-category taxonomy transforms a confusing backlog into a clear, sequenced roadmap.

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In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why prioritizing AI agent initiatives is so hard, and why familiar planning tools like impact-effort matrices break down

• The three architectural categories every agent falls into

• How to choose the right platform for each category

• Success metrics and ROI frameworks tailored to each architectural type

• How to quickly course-correct when you’ve picked the wrong architecture

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References

• Agent Engineering Bootcamp: https://maven.com/hamza-farooq/agent-engineering-bootcamp

• Agentic AI for PMs: https://maven.com/

• AutoGen: https://microsoft.github.io/autogen/

• Claude Code: https://claude.ai/code

• CrewAI: https://crewai.com

• Google ADK: https://google.github.io/adk-docs/

• Google A2A Protocol: https://google.github.io/A2A/

• Gumloop: https://gumloop.com

• Hamza Farooq: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamzafarooq/

• Jaya Rajwani: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayarajwani/

• LangGraph: https://langchain-ai.github.io/langgraph/

• Lindy: https://lindy.ai

• Make.com: https://make.com

• n8n: https://n8n.io

• OpenAI AgentKit: https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/

• OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai

• Zapier: https://zapier.com

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About

Welcome to Lenny's Reads, where every week you'll find a fresh audio version of my newsletter about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career, read to you by the soothing voice of Lennybot.

To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com

Listen: Not all AI agents are created equal

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