This is Johanna Rothman’s June 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. All my clients are dabbling with AI. They’re using it to think about more, such as generating more features in a backlog so each person can do more. Or more code with vibe coding. Or even […]
Does your organization use a PMO as a way to manage the various P functions: project, program, and portfolio management? Plenty of organizations do use PMOs. However, I rarely see them as effective in furthering the organization’s operational excellence or the strategy. Instead, I too often see them as yet another function that creates delays
I’ve been working with a new-to-the-organization senior leader, Steve, who struggles with this challenge: He wants to capitalize some operational expenses. (That’s a move from OpEx to CapEx.) He is convinced that will give him some freedom to change things while everyone is still working hard. So they’ve asked all the technical people to fill
Your managers want to measure all kinds of interesting pieces of data to run the company well. Much of that is reflected in your organization’s Profit and Loss (P&L) statement. (There’s a great site with an explanation of a P&L statement.) Notice any organization’s three big numbers: Revenue, all the operating expenses, and net earnings.
This is the April 2025 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email.Early in the agile community, people referred to the Product Owner as the “single wringable neck.” Somehow, if the product owner didn’t define the stories well, or create acceptance criteria, or even represent what someone
This is the March 2025 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Susan, a product leader, has a big problem. One of the senior managers, Tim, often wants to know the cost (or time) required for a new feature or a new product. So he asks
In my first post, Why We Have Too Much Pressure and Planning & Too Little Delivery, I discussed the issue of too much planning and how that reduced delivery. In this post, I’ll address how to increase delivery by planning less. (I have a draft post of the system view of how too much planning reduces
I work with many teams that have extensive product backlogs. Each iteration has a backlog of more items than the team can typically finish. Worse, some organizations want many quarters’ worth of backlogs, as in the image in this post. There are several problems with long and extensive backlogs: They tend to be wishlists of
Too many of my clients confuse two specific terms: rank order and prioritization. Too often, that means the team works on too many items at the same time. That leads to high WIP, low cycle time, and low throughput. So here are some visuals and an explanation. See the image labeled “Rank Order.” When we
This is the February 2025 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Last month, I wrote about technical leadership micromanagement and the technical leadership overwhelm. (See One Secret to Free Yourself from the Overwhelm of Leadership Work for that post.) I heard from several product managers.