Three Secrets to Add More Value and Be More Effective for Any Team

This is Johanna Rothman's August 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email.

Amy, a project manager, said, “With all the changes going on, no one is quite sure of their next steps. The portfolio team is stuck because they can't predict for a year anymore. The product leader is supposed to create a long roadmap, but none of the product people has a crystal ball. That means my team suffers from a lack of a product vision. How can I help any of these people be more effective?”

We discussed her options. Afterward, she:

Showed the portfolio team the ideas in Why Minimize Management Decision Time and suggested they could plan for just six weeks. Then, they could adjust the plan. (See Manage Your Project Portfolio for details.)
Worked with the product leader and discussed the ideas in Consider Product Options with Minimum Outcomes and lean roadmapping as in Alternatives for Agile and Lean Roadmapping: Part 3, Flow-Based Roadmapping.

That would make Amy's work easier. But she still wanted her team to think about how to add more value and be more effective. So we discussed how the team could learn together with “See one, Do one, Teach one.”

That's where a person sees something useful, “See One,” that adds value or makes people more effective. Once they see it, they can't unsee it. If they can learn and practice that added value, they “Do One.” After enough practice, the person can “Teach One.”

However, that depends on the speed of individual learning. That's why Amy applied the idea of collaboration to See One, Do One, Teach One.

The Secret Sauce of Collaborative See One, Do One, Teach One

Here's how Amy and her team worked:

Everyone would generate one idea for something the team wanted to learn. (There were plenty of options, from using AI to prototype, to addressing what they called technical debt, to feedback skills.) That's the See One. They generated nine ideas, one for each person on the team.
Then, the team ranked each idea. With nine people, they could only work on the first three ideas.
For each idea, the team asked for volunteers to collaborate on the learning and teaching for their idea.

The team ranked the “technical debt” problem first. (I would not call it purposeful debt. Instead, it was unfinished work and cruft.) However, the three people analyzed several of their patterns. Second was the AI issue for prototyping. The last was their ability to offer and receive feedback from each other.

Since the team worked on their product, they knew that any time they spent would make them more effective.

The team spent two days on each of these problems. However, they did not “see” how to solve their technical debt or AI prototyping problems. They decided to combine the two problems.

The third sub-team joined in as they learned to prompt to assess their code base. That was one instance of the “See One” action. (Note: They had access to a private LLM, so all of their code remained private.)

While their LLM led them down a few wrong paths, they were able to see their team-based patterns. Then, they could experiment with how to fix those problems. (I would describe their work as partly swarming and partly mobbing.) Those experiments were examples of “Do One.” The doing included seeing their progress to their goal.

By the end of the week, the entire team had learned how to collaborate as humans, with some assistance from their LLM. (Teach One.)

While See One, Do One, Teach One was an effective model for the team, that was not their secret.

The Retrospective Uncovered the Secrets

Everyone expected that they would learn quickly as collaborative subteams. But even they were surprised by how fast they learned together. And by how easy it was to fix many of their debt problems.

When Amy summarized the retrospective results, she said this: “See One, Do One, Teach One was helpful. But what really helped was a focus on a small goal that allowed the team to move forward in the face of uncertainty. That goal helped the team stay in their experimental mode. That allowed them to finish faster than they expected—and make much more progress on what the product needs to be.”

The three secrets:

Effective collaboration
In service to a meaningful goal
Where people can see their progress.

While I've used the example of a product or feature team, these ideas work for the project portfolio team and the product value team. Few of us can work alone and complete the desired outcomes. Instead, help your team look for opportunities to collaborate, focused on a goal, and see their progress as they go.

This newsletter touches on several of my books:

Learn With Johanna

I have finished the first round of indexing for Effective Public Speaking. After this, I'll finish the back cover, get the proofs, and offer my Kickstarter. I'll send you the link so you can decide if you want to back it.

If you are part of the agile community, consider checking out The Agile Network. Also, don’t miss out on discounted membership options. Use Discount Code: ROTHMANPMC33 to get 33% OFF all memberships.

Links of Interest

New to the newsletter? See previous issues. (I post these newsletters to my YouTube Channel a few days after I send them.)

Here are other links you might find useful:

Managing Product Development Blog. (Yes, I offer an RSS feed so you can read everything in a newsreader.)
Create an Adaptable Life Blog to see the weekly question of the week.
My Books. You can also buy my self-published ebooks and audiobooks on my store.
My Workshops
Johanna’s Fiction

See you next month,
Johanna

The Secret Sauce of Collaborative See One, Do One, Teach One

The Retrospective Uncovered the Secrets

Read More:

Learn With Johanna

Links of Interest

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