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
When I posted How to See Your Leading, Lagging, and Reliable Estimation Metrics last week, a colleague suggested I was not quite right. He said that Aging is actually the leading indicator for more reliable data. He is absolutely correct. However, we don’t always see the real problem. The reader who emailed me only saw
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