Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Especially when we use agile approaches, we want to be close to our customer. If you’ve ever had a chance to sit with a customer, you’ve learned how effectively (and fast!) the team and the customer learn from each other. And, too few teams have any access to any customers. Most of their customer information …
Continue reading “Seeing the Close-to-the-Customer Conundrum”
Some of my clients have struggled with their project governance as they move to agile approaches. In the past, they’ve asked for estimates and costs—by requirement—and then tracked the variance for those estimates and costs. The governance people do not record assumptions. They only record estimates and actuals. They want to “measure” the project success …
Continue reading “Cost vs Value Measurements for Agile Approaches”
Your customers can’t take your product more often than once or twice a year. Because the product doesn’t need to leave the building, the teams don’t release internally. Nor do the teams demo on a regular basis. The teams miss the feedback loops so critical for an agile approach. Their agile transformation falls apart. Rethink Your Definition …
I’ve been working with several managers at organizations large and small, who want to capitalize their software “earlier.” These managers have some strongly-held beliefs about the people: People are resources Resources can multitask on several projects at a time If “headquarters” does the difficult work, you can move the “grunt” work to lower wage areas …
I had a wonderful time on the Agile Uprising podcast The Future of Agile. I had such a blast. Listen for the “expletive deleted” phrases. Yes, I actually said the words, “expletive deleted.” I said many other things that might feel contrarian to you. I thank Georgina Hughes, David Sabine for our discussion and Jay Hrcsko for …
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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 …
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 …
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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 …
Continue reading “Starting a Product Organization Transformation, Part 6”