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 […]
Many of my management clients tell me, “time is money.” That is only partially correct. Once you decide to invest a dollar, that dollar has the same value as any other dollar. Instead of focusing on the expense of a dollar, look for the value that dollar can return. (Because no one ever knows how
Several of my clients claim they have plans. But I don’t see the elements of a plan in what they do. Instead, I see wishes that the future will unfold in a particular way. I also have wishes. But the more we confuse them with plans, the less likely we will get the future we
A colleague recently asked me how a team can deliver something useful in the next four to five weeks. “That’s all? Just four to five weeks?” I asked. Yes, that was all the time they had remaining. They’d worked on this product for a while, but that was the time they had left. This problem
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
Many of my clients have large “appetites”: they want to create ambitious products with many features. Even though I recommend they start small and iterate their way to that ambitious product, these (smart people) still say they want to start with “more.” They think the team needs to see this ambitious product vision to know
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
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
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.