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
I had a wonderful time speaking with Arin Sime on his Scaling Tech podcast. Listen to the podcast here and see all the notes: Mastering True Agility with Johanna Rothman. That page also has a link to the video on YouTube. We had a wide-ranging conversation, all about reducing cycle time so teams and organizations
Have you seen the Forbes article that has zero idea how efficient engineering teams work? They have a whole long list of “inefficiencies”. This is a quote from that article: Marking oneself as “in a meeting” on Slack Scheduling communications (Slack messages, emails, and code commits) for off-hours to appear active Blocking out private calendar
This is the November 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email.Is your “hybrid” team working? So far, most of my clients say, “No!” Managers think there’s not enough collaboration. Team members discover their meetings don’t work because the office is not sufficiently equipped with the
When I started working on projects, we thought we could use a serial/waterfall approach to project management and product development. While we were wrong, one very good thing happened in the 1970s and 1980s: We took the time at the end of each phase to do a little retrospective. Yes, even for a serial approach,