A reader asked me these questions about reliable estimation metrics: Would you explain leading and lagging indicators? Can I use a burndown chart to see accurate progress? Is that burndown chart useful if the team has not yet finished grooming the work? These are great questions because too many of us think the answers are […]
If you are like me, you use apps and websites to finish work every day. How often do those apps and sites break? Way too often. When possible, I report the problem. How long does it take to fix the problem? Sometimes, it takes those vendors days to fix their site. I expect only ten
My podcast this week is from the Continual Planning book. Enjoy! Note: If you receive the RSS feed for this post, you might not be able to see the embedded podcast. If you want to hear me, please click through to this post or subscribe in the podcast player of your choice. Or watch me
I’ve been thinking and experimenting a lot about how to use the various LLMs, both in my work and with my clients. I keep seeing a familiar trap: that managers think the gating factor in product development is the speed of coding. But that’s not true. The gating factor is the speed of understanding the
This is Johanna Rothman’s April 2026 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this newsletter. During a recent conference, I was on a panel with some really smart colleagues. One of the first audience questions was, “What’s your most valuable management tool?” Some of the other panelists mentioned how they use
This week’s podcast is from the Writing Secrets book. My plans have changed for this book. Instead of being part of a bundle, I’ll be launching a Kickstarter for this book. (Why not practice my Kickstartering?) So keep an eye out for that. (Yes, I will learn how to share a link before next week’s
Many of my management clients tell me, “time is money.” That is only partially correct. Once you decide to invest a dollar, that dollar has the same value as any other dollar. Instead of focusing on the expense of a dollar, look for the value that dollar can return. (Because no one ever knows how
This week’s podcast is from the Writing Secrets book, specifically, part of the Preface. A funny thing happened on the way to this recording. I felt as if the words were not quite right. They didn’t sound like me. So I cycled until they did sound like me. Then I realized what had happened. I
I said earlier in this series that no one cares about how “agile” your team is. Or the kind of “agile” your team professess to be. Managers do care about agility: the ability to respond quickly to a changing or changed environment. And that depends on where your team has delays. That’s why value stream
In Part 1, I wrote about what the value stream map looked like for expert-focused “cross-functional” teams. In Part 2, I discussed cooperative teams that have working agreements on when to do code review or make other decisions as a team. While those teams exhibit somewhat more agility, cooperative teams are still not collaborative. So