Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
I’ve spoken professionally at conferences for 25 years. I enjoy it. And, several people—all men, so far—have suggested I should “make room” for other voices. To me, that’s a solution in search of a problem. I ask them what problems they want to solve. They want speakers who are: More diverse in gender More diverse …
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During Agile 2018, Jerry Weinberg died. Shane Hastie and I had already agreed to do a recording of some sort while at the conference. We invited Esther Derby and turned our time into a lovely podcast about Remembering Jerry Weinberg. Yes, I was quite emotional. I’m human. I wrote a post about some of my …
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I had a blast with Tammy and Tim on the podcast (#88). We spoke about many topics: Consulting and marketing Women and computer science Writing and my workshops and books We spoke about writing earlier in the show, but at about minute 50, we spoke a lot more about writing. We laughed a lot!
Linda Rising gave a great talk last night at Agile New England. Her topic was problem-solving and decision-making. One of her points was to discuss the problem, out loud. When you talk, you engage a different part of your brain than when you think. For us extroverts, who speak in order to think, this might …
I’m catching up with my blog reading. Several posts caught my eye, all dealing with taking time to think: When you take time to think between sessions, the sessions may go faster. You’ll almost certainly have a better outcome. (Esther and I learned this on Behind Closed Doors.) See Ron Jeffries’ take on thinking: Shooting …
Bruce sent me a pointer to this post, There is no spoon. I have to admit, I don’t understand the spoon part. I suspect there’s a reference to a move I haven’t seen. (Fellow writers: be aware that many of your readers do not share your popular culture norms 🙂 But if you read …
Esther, in her Get out of your way! post describes a situation where by our behaviors, we cause the thing we don’t want to happen. It happened to me this week. I’ve been working on the PM book, and I’ve been struggling with the lifecycle chapter for a couple of months now. Probably longer, …
If you’re a regular reader of this blog (or the Hiring blog), you can see that I’m not shy or demure. I’m blunt and direct. And in most circumstances, I manage to straight-talk without hurting anyone, even myself. But that wasn’t the case earlier this week. I was writing the PM book, concentrating. The phone …
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One of my clients said to me, “There’s no one who doesn’t need a boss.” He meant it as “Everyone needs someone to check with, to make sure they’re headed in the right direction.” I agree.
I’m thrilled to be going back to the Softed folks (in Wellington, Auckland, and Sydney) who are doing a project management conference next March. I’m working out with them what topics I’ll be covering. I have a 3-hour workshop in the afternoon. It’s enough time to cover a couple of topics with interactions and …
Continue reading “What Would You Like in a 3-Hour PM Workshop?”