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.
This is the January 2025 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Several of my leadership clients have this problem: they feel overwhelmed by all of their work. Here’s how one technical leader, Peter, describes his problem: “I’m in the middle of all the work. Because
When I wrote Manage It!, I included an idea called a Hudson Bay Start. I wrote an article about that later, in How to Use Iteration Zero—Or Not. Hudson Bay Starts are not a new idea. However, you might not know what they are. Here’s the idea: the team chooses one item from their backlog.
This is the December 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. I have the same problems as many of you do: I start something and then I realize it’s much larger than I expected. That occurred with this month’s newsletter. The problem I tried to