Imagine this scenario: You’re a project or program manager. You suspect things are not going swimmingly well. But no one has told you any bad news. Not yet. What do you do? As a facilitative leader, such as a project, program, or agile project manager (Scrum Master), it’s your job to seek out that bad
This is Johanna Rothman’s October 2026 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom. Are you tired of large decks of project status data? I hate them. Too often, the data is not relevant, or worse, the data actually lies. That leads people to watermelon status, where the project is green until very
This is Johanna Rothman’s August 2026 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Do you feel as if you’re in the middle of too-frequent change? I do. Even though I only have manageable and relatively small projects, I can’t quite see around the various corners to predict what I
This is Johanna Rothman’s June 2026 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this newsletter. Most of us have worked with managers who guided our careers. But managers aren’t the only ones who can support other people’s growth. Sometimes, technical leaders who are not “people managers” can have just as much
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
If your company is similar to my clients, they want agility. That agility will allow their organizations to learn and deliver faster. That has all kinds of wonderful effects, such as capitalizing software earlier. But, too few teams have enough access to real product leadership, where a single product leader can make all the various
So far, this series has focused on smaller efforts, such as one or two products or one or two teams. But what if you have a larger effort, where several teams need to collaborate to deliver the business value? That’s a program. (I wrote Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization to
This is Johanna Rothman’s December 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. In the first part of inviting culture change, I wrote about Stephanie, a senior leader who wants more organizational agility. She’s used the flow metrics to invite that culture change. So far, she’s succeeded with the
I started this series bemoaning the fact that we have too few product managers. That leads to no product leaders for a team. Worse, some teams have either strategic product thinkers or tactical thinkers—but not both. Instead, we can consider several possible product value teams to prevent insufficient product leadership. I already discussed the Vertical
The various AI vendors want us to trust their autonomous agents. I have several problems I would love to use AI to solve. (Including updating all the tags on this site!) However, I cannot trust the agents yet. Even when I use interactive prompting, I’m not happy with the results. Those results can change (non-deterministic