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 […]
All organizations use cost accounting to report on their revenue, including profit and loss. We are so accustomed to using cost accounting that we don’t realize how it hides the truth about our progress. Worse, cost accounting creates and reinforces a culture of resource efficiency thinking. (In resource efficiency, the person is the unit of
This is Johanna Rothman’s July 2026 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this newsletter. (Looking for the video? I post the video within a few days of publication on my YouTube channel.) Are you drowning in work? While I mostly speak with project and program managers, or “people” managers, everyone
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
So many people (and some teams) work under mandates to “use AI.” While I am a fan of these two functions for the current LLMs: The ability to create fast prototypes for human assessment and judgment. And the ability to gain new insights into you, your team’s, or your organization’s data. (This often requires a
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
When I posted How to See Your Leading, Lagging, and Reliable Estimation Metrics last week, a colleague suggested I was not quite right. He said that Aging is actually the leading indicator for more reliable data. He is absolutely correct. However, we don’t always see the real problem. The reader who emailed me only saw
A reader asked me these questions about reliable estimation metrics: Would you explain leading and lagging indicators? Can I use a burndown chart to see accurate progress? Is that burndown chart useful if the team has not yet finished grooming the work? These are great questions because too many of us think the answers are
I’ve been thinking and experimenting a lot about how to use the various LLMs, both in my work and with my clients. I keep seeing a familiar trap: that managers think the gating factor in product development is the speed of coding. But that’s not true. The gating factor is the speed of understanding the
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