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
This week’s podcast is an early part of the Continual Planning book. I thought this was the Introduction when I wrote it. Maybe, maybe not. (Insert laughter here.) The Podcast: The Transcript: This is 60 Seconds of Writing in Public with Johanna Rothman for March 13, 2026, where I read an excerpt of just a
Maybe your team does have Ready criteria for their backlog. But they look at the backlog item, and they say, “Oh, this is way too big. We have no idea how to start.” That “no idea” often means the work is too large, unclear, or not based on a specific customer with a specific need.
The Writing in Public podcast returns! Life, including many travel changes, etc, interrupted my normal schedule. But I’m back and starting a new nonfiction book about continual planning. Enjoy! The Podcast: The Transcript: This is 60 Seconds of Writing in Public with Johanna Rothman for March 6, 2026, where I read an excerpt of just