This is Johanna Rothman’s August 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Amy, a project manager, said, “With all the changes going on, no one is quite sure of their next steps. The portfolio team is stuck because they can’t predict for a year anymore. The product leader […]
Pawel Brodzinski has a terrific LinkedIn post about the value of hiring women. In his experience, they stay longer than the men. That means the investment the company makes in these people has a longer payback time. That’s an example of a safe hiring decision. That’s been my experience, too. But I didn’t just hire
For years, we’ve used several metaphors to describe software product development: People-based metaphors, such as: Man-weeks for all the humans working on a project or a product. FTE for full-time Equivalent (as in human beings!) “Resources” instead of the words: people, or human beings Construction metaphors, such as: build, which describes how we organize and
Susan, a senior leader of a 300-person department, wanted to reduce the risks of late deliveries, and respond to customers faster. Susan suspected the managers and teams were too wedded to their plans and not experimenting enough. That meant she needed an agile approach. But while she had been a part of several supposedly agile
Do you ever want to bounce ideas off someone else? Or learn the way they approach a particular problem? I’m not talking about anyone’s specific capabilities. Instead, we can enhance our abilities by working with someone else. That brings its problem: How do you choose that learning partner? I’ve worked with several partners as a
I’m reviewing experience report proposals for the XP 2023 conference. While I see potential in many of these proposals, I don’t see enough proposals that make me say, “Yes! I want to read this report! And see the speaker!” (Yes, I react in exclamation marks when I read a terrific proposal.) Experience reports allow us
I’ve been working with teams that feel a ton of pressure. On top of the pressure, a senior manager says these words: “Failure is not an option.” When managers say that, they ignore all the possibilities for success. They put their heads down, ignoring ways to manage risk. When managers don’t collaborate to manage risk, we
I’ve seen several cases of process standardization recently. Those processes don’t translate to the current context. The processes don’t have sufficient agility to deliver the necessary results. Yet, people who want to use agile approaches don’t want to apply agile thinking to their processes. Some clients want to create their custom agile process— and then
If you’re like many of the teams I meet, you’ve sort of got a handle on things. You can release. Your product mostly works. And, then Something Happens. And, your team has trouble recovering. That’s brittleness in the system. You can build resilience as a team. In this post, I’ll summarize how your team can
When I started this series about team brittleness and resilience, I expected to discuss winter weather in the Boston area. Every year, we expect several large snowstorms. And, when it snows hard and long, we should stay off the roads so the plows can clear the snow. The organization and team I wrote about in