This is Johanna Rothman’s October 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. I happened to see a recent review of Practical Ways to Manage Yourself that made me giggle. (I don’t normally read book reviews because once I put the book out into the world, that book is […]
Do you use schedule or tracking tools to predict the future? None of them can predict the future. Worse, too many of them hide the past, especially the recent past. A schedule or tracking tool can only predict one thing: the first possible date you cannot prove you cannot finish the project/story by. Let me
This week’s podcast is an excerpt from a romantic suspense spy story. Enjoy! The Podcast: The Transcript: This is 60 Seconds of Writing in Public with Johanna Rothman for October 24, 2025, where I read an excerpt of just a minute of some writing in progress. This is part of an espionage, spy, short story.
So far, I’ve addressed how a project charter can help a team start a project fast and well. That’s why the project charter must clarify product vision, the various project risks, and product risks. And, it’s equally important to know what done means. If the team does not know how little they can do to
This week’s podcast is from the opening of a romantic suspense short story. Enjoy! (Update on Monday: I forgot to publish this because I was so focused on finishing the story!) The Podcast: The Transcript: This is 60 Seconds of Writing in Public with Johanna Rothman for October 17, 2025, where I read an excerpt
The various AI vendors want us to trust their autonomous agents. I have several problems I would love to use AI to solve. (Including updating all the tags on this site!) However, I cannot trust the agents yet. Even when I use interactive prompting, I’m not happy with the results. Those results can change (non-deterministic
This week, my podcast is the opening of a short story, a portal fantasy. Enjoy! The Podcast: The Transcript: This is 60 Seconds of Writing in Public with Johanna Rothman for October 10, 2025, where I read an excerpt of just a minute of some writing in progress. This is the opening of a (hopefully)
In Project Charter Part 2: Clarify the Project Driver, Boundaries, and Constraints for This Project, I explained how project risks can affect the team’s approach to the work. But project risks are not the same as product risks. Product risks are about the need for product innovation. The more innovation this product needs, the more
Let me set the context for this post about the project charter: By now, the team knows what it has to accomplish because they have a product vision. The next question is: How will the team manage their risks to achieve those outcomes? That’s where I recommend a team define its project driver, up to
My podcast this week is from a fiction story. After I wrote this part, I realized I started in the wrong place. So you get the benefit of reading something I will definitely change later today. Yes, I write fiction exactly the same way I write nonfiction. I start where I think the piece starts.