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
I’ve been working with several supposedly “agile” teams and their managers. Everyone knows their project is in trouble. And they have no idea what to do about it. The team members say, “We’re on a death march. We have no predictability. Everything takes longer than we think it will.” The managers say, “We have no
This is Johanna Rothman’s August 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Amy, a project manager, said, “With all the changes going on, no one is quite sure of their next steps. The portfolio team is stuck because they can’t predict for a year anymore. The product leader
In a recent conversation, an unemployed agile coach asked, “What’s the point of a project manager, anyway?” Here’s what effective project managers do: They create the environment for the team to succeed. Here’s how effective project managers start: If the team does not yet have a project charter with the product goal, they facilitate or
This is Johanna Rothman’s July 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Mike, a new senior leader, wants to know when Engineering will deliver specific projects. He would prefer more accurate estimates, but he’s okay with relative sizing, such as: Small projects: Not more than a quarter (12
There’s all kinds of hype every single day about AI taking the place of programmers. That reasoning infers that typing is the hard part of product development. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here are the hard parts of product development: Understanding what the customers want. Often, the customers don’t know until they see