In a recent conversation, a colleague said, “That experiment did not succeed.” That is, the outcome was not what we wanted. But that’s still a successful experiment. Because the experiment offered learning. The results told us where our thinking was not correct. This particular experiment did not tell us what was wrong, only that our
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
How often does your team conduct a retrospective? If you’re like most of my clients, not often enough. When I ask why the team doesn’t retrospect at least once every couple of weeks, these teams tell me many reasons: They don’t finish “enough” work often enough. (If you’re part of an “agile” team and you
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
How does your team show progress? Do they use activity-based (cost accounting) measures? Or, do they demo running, tested features? And possibly use a product backlog burnup chart to see each feature set’s relative progress? How can we understand the costs of this progress? I am a big fan of demos and a product backlog
I started this series discussing where AI use might create bottlenecks. The more people work solo on anything, the more likely they become bottlenecks for the team. When each person works solo with AI, they reinforce resource efficiency, where everyone is busy, but the team can’t seem to finish anything when anyone wants it. Instead,
In How to Use Value Stream Maps to See Where AI Creates Bottlenecks Part 1, I described three teams that used LLMs. However, those teams only used LLMs as individuals, reinforcing resource-efficiency thinking instead of flow-efficiency thinking. (Resource efficiency makes everything take longer because of the focus on the individual. Flow efficiency allows the work
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
If you are like me, you use apps and websites to finish work every day. How often do those apps and sites break? Way too often. When possible, I report the problem. How long does it take to fix the problem? Sometimes, it takes those vendors days to fix their site. I expect only ten