I have revamped my writing workshops (finally). The Q1 workshops are now available. See Writing Non-Fiction Workshop 1: Free Your Inner Writer (Q1 session starts Jan 1, 2019) Writing Non-Fiction Workshop 2: Secrets of Successful Non-Fiction Writers (Q1 Session starts Jan 2, 2019) If you are ready to learn to write better and faster, take Writing Workshop […]
When we manage product development for organizations, we work for hire. The company hires you, pays you a wage, and in return, your intellectual property belongs to them. When you’re creating a product larger than one person can create, this is an excellent proposition. While “one person” may have had the original idea, we need
Back at Agile 2018, I had a chance to record a podcast with Bob Payne. The recording is Johanna Rothman – Agile 2018. We discussed my experience report with Mark Kilby, the geographically distributed agile teams book with Mark, and my roadmapping session. I’ve known Bob forever. I think of him as a friend and as
Last August, back at the Agile 2018 conference, I had a chance to record a podcast with Howard Sublett. Howard is a terrific interviewer and a good friend and colleague. We spoke about Making Roadmaps More Agile. We had a blast. Several times, I surprised him with some of my thinking and experience. (Since I’m
Many product owners and customers believe they know the problem they want to solve. That fake certainty causes them to define solutions, instead of solving the problem at hand. John Le Drew and I pair-wrote an article describing this problem and how to solve it. See Eliminate Fake Certainty and Solve the Real Problem. Yes, I’ve
I’m catching up on my podcasts and just listened to Seth Godin’s Akimbo episode about honest signals. (Do listen.) It’s about the signals we send that are honest or dishonest and why we might choose one, the other, or both. I started to think about the management signals we send, especially in an agile transformation.
I’ve been pair-writing a book with Mark Kilby, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver. We hit a big milestone today: We published the first complete draft today. We’ve been working on this book for a year. It’s much better because of our collaboration. We reflected a little on our success to
I’ve been thinking about my clients who’ve had success moving from a project-based/resource-efficiency organization to a product-based/flow efficiency organization. They had these things in common: A senior person made it safe for the managers to create experiments. They created very small experiments (either managers or teams, or together). The senior manager often asked a question
How do we move from a project-based organization towards a product organization? There are at least two systems of work we need to change: The management system and the culture of management How the teams work and their team culture. I’m not sure it’s that simple to explain. There might be more systems I don’t
How could we organize if we want flow efficiency? We would reward managers by their span of service instead of control, part 3, stop organizing by function, and move to something that looks like a product-based organization? My transforming idea for this question was to think about the organization as legacy code. We understand how to