This is the March 2025 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Susan, a product leader, has a big problem. One of the senior managers, Tim, often wants to know the cost (or time) required for a new feature or a new product. So he asks […]
So much of the planning I see in organizations is way overdone. Senior leaders still try to plan the project portfolio for a year. Product leaders are supposed to “commit” to year-long or longer roadmaps. And so many teams know “exactly” what they’re supposed to do for weeks, if not months at a time. We
If you use Scrum or any other iteration-based approach to your work, the team plans in batches for that next iteration. The iteration is a timebox. The batch is the amount of work the team thinks they can do in that timebox. If the batch is sufficiently small and your cycle time is sufficiently short,
Many of my middle-management and senior leadership clients want certainty about future work. That’s one of the reasons they create huge backlogs and long roadmaps. Yet, even those backlogs and roadmaps don’t offer certainty. One of these managers said, “I have so much uncertainty and ambiguity. I feel as if I can’t make a good,
Ted Williams said, “If you don’t think too good, don’t think too much.” I’ve got a bad head cold, so I’m not thinking too “good” at all. Here are three not-so-intuitive tips I use all the time, and that you might have missed: Move from “How much” to “How little” thinking. Finish something clean, every
Back in Part 1 of this series, I explained all the problems I saw with this interview question: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal, even after hours of discussion. They (the team) feel that the tasks for the sprint are too varied to manage to a single sprint goal.
Product owners have many challenges: They need to keep at least two thoughts about the product: what it needs to be in the near future, and what the organization wants it to be in the (distant) future. Some product owners think they’re supposed to fill out a complete backlog, including all the UI designs for
In How Product Goals Make it Easier to Create Sprint Goals and Reduce Feature Factories, Part 1, I started responding to Tom’s interview question. Now that we’ve dealt with the feature factory problem, it’s time to address planning time. Here’s the question again: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal,
A colleague, Tom, told me about this question he received in an interview: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal, even after hours of discussion. They (the team) feel that the tasks for the sprint are too varied to manage to a single sprint goal. What should the Scrum Master
Sherry, a middle manager in a relatively small organization, said, “We can’t plan for an entire quarter at a time. Our managers need to change what they want more often than that. But I’d like to plan for a quarter at a time and I really don’t want to ask people to multitask. What do