I am so pleased to announce that my newest book, Effective Public Speaking: How to Use Content Marketing With Stories to Show Your Value, is out everywhere. If you write books or consult as part of your income, this is the book you need to up your content marketing game. I wrote this book because […]
I had a wonderful time with Nigel Rawlins on his Wisepreneur podcast: Johanna Rothman Independent Consulting: Principles That Outlast Every Trend. We had a wide-ranging conversation about many aspects of consulting. But I seemed to intrigue him the most with the ideas in the image above. (Yes, that’s in Successful Independent Consulting and I offered
My podcast this week is from the Continual Planning book. Enjoy! Note: if you read via an RSS reader, you might see a black box or white space instead of the podcast player below. If so, please click through to either the podcast or the video. Or listen to the podcast in your podcast app
Have you ever negotiated a consulting proposal or a new job? If so, you might have heard the (untrue) problem that there is not enough money for your proposal or what you want for salary. There is almost always enough money. (Self-funded startups might not have enough money, but those companies rarely want to hire
Most teams want to work on something useful for customers. In the same vein, most product leaders also want to offer something useful for customers. That’s how products fulfill the organization’s strategy. Yet, I see so many product leaders outsource their product thinking to LLMs. Why? Because it’s hard to discover what customers want. You
My podcast this week is from the Continual Planning book. Enjoy! Note: if you read via an RSS reader, you might see a black box or white space instead of the podcast player below. If so, please click through to either the podcast or the video. Or listen to the podcast in your podcast app
This is Johanna Rothman’s May 2026 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this newsletter. Several colleagues recently told me their companies asked them to change roles: Steve, a Scrum Master, is now an agile project manager. Polly, a project manager, is now a product manager. And the biggest change of
Maybe you’ve had this conversation with a manager: You want to do something that costs some money. Maybe go to a conference, bring in some training, or something a little out of the ordinary. The manager says, “No, that costs too much.” Or, as a consultant, a manager says, “Your proposal is too much for
My podcast this week is from the continual planning book. Enjoy! If you receive this post in an RSS feed or via email from my site, you might not see the podcast player below. If you want to listen, please open this post in a browser. The Podcast: The Transcript: This is 60 Seconds of
The more work we put into backlogs, roadmaps, and the portfolio, the more product certainty we appear to have. But can we trust that product certainty? No. There’s the Aging problem. Then, there’s the fact that we can’t tell what the future will bring. Even if a team has a relatively low and consistent cycle