My podcast this week is from the Continual Planning book. Enjoy! Note: if you read via an RSS reader, you might see a black box or white space instead of the podcast player below. If so, please click through to either the podcast or the video. Or listen to the podcast in your podcast app […]
This is Johanna Rothman’s May 2026 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this newsletter. Several colleagues recently told me their companies asked them to change roles: Steve, a Scrum Master, is now an agile project manager. Polly, a project manager, is now a product manager. And the biggest change of
My podcast this week is from the continual planning book. Enjoy! If you receive this post in an RSS feed or via email from my site, you might not see the podcast player below. If you want to listen, please open this post in a browser. The Podcast: The Transcript: This is 60 Seconds of
The more work we put into backlogs, roadmaps, and the portfolio, the more product certainty we appear to have. But can we trust that product certainty? No. There’s the Aging problem. Then, there’s the fact that we can’t tell what the future will bring. Even if a team has a relatively low and consistent cycle
My podcast this week is from the Continual Planning book. Enjoy! Note: If you receive the RSS feed for this post, you might not be able to see the embedded podcast. If you want to hear me, please click through to this post or subscribe in the podcast player of your choice. Or watch me
I said earlier in this series that no one cares about how “agile” your team is. Or the kind of “agile” your team professess to be. Managers do care about agility: the ability to respond quickly to a changing or changed environment. And that depends on where your team has delays. That’s why value stream
In Part 1, I wrote about what the value stream map looked like for expert-focused “cross-functional” teams. In Part 2, I discussed cooperative teams that have working agreements on when to do code review or make other decisions as a team. While those teams exhibit somewhat more agility, cooperative teams are still not collaborative. So
In Part 1, I wrote about what the value stream map looked like for expert-focused “cross-functional” teams. While those teams are cross-functional, they are not collaborative. However, these expertise-focused “teams” are not the only type of non-collaborative agile teams. There are also cooperative teams. Cooperative teams still tend to work sequentially, focused on each person’s
We talk about cross-functional agile “teams” as if they are the norm. That’s what I show in this image: some responsible person creates a ranked backlog that the cross-functional, collaborative team works on. That team delivers increments of value on a regular basis. At some point, the team will demo their work and retrospect on
This is Johanna Rothman’s March 2026 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Most of us have heard of—or suffered through—schedule delays. That’s when the project or program feels tremendous pressure to deliver some specific value by a specific date. To achieve those dates, we often heard lies such