I subscribe to HBR’s Management Tip of the Day. A recent tip was “Train Employees on Skills That Evolve with AI.” That’s a lovely sentiment. And totally wrong-headed and insufficient for any workforce, never mind people who might need to learn how to use AI. Yes, I agree that people need training to use AI
This is Johanna Rothman’s September 2026 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. One of my trusted advisor clients, Gary, told me he was worried about how their organization used their LLMs. “I feel as if no one takes responsibility for their thoughts or their actions. They blindly trust
All organizations use cost accounting to report on their revenue, including profit and loss. We are so accustomed to using cost accounting that we don’t realize how it hides the truth about our progress. Worse, cost accounting creates and reinforces a culture of resource efficiency thinking. (In resource efficiency, the person is the unit of
I’ve been writing professionally since 1997. While you might not agree with my stances on anything I write, you can tell I wrote it. Even in my early writing, my author voice shines through. And I love my em-dashes and commas. (Part of me would like to believe the LLMs stole so much of my
This is Johanna Rothman’s July 2026 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this newsletter. (Looking for the video? I post the video within a few days of publication on my YouTube channel.) Are you drowning in work? While I mostly speak with project and program managers, or “people” managers, everyone
I started this series discussing where AI use might create bottlenecks. The more people work solo on anything, the more likely they become bottlenecks for the team. When each person works solo with AI, they reinforce resource efficiency, where everyone is busy, but the team can’t seem to finish anything when anyone wants it. Instead,
So many people (and some teams) work under mandates to “use AI.” While I am a fan of these two functions for the current LLMs: The ability to create fast prototypes for human assessment and judgment. And the ability to gain new insights into you, your team’s, or your organization’s data. (This often requires a
Most teams want to work on something useful for customers. In the same vein, most product leaders also want to offer something useful for customers. That’s how products fulfill the organization’s strategy. Yet, I see so many product leaders outsource their product thinking to LLMs. Why? Because it’s hard to discover what customers want. You
I’ve been thinking and experimenting a lot about how to use the various LLMs, both in my work and with my clients. I keep seeing a familiar trap: that managers think the gating factor in product development is the speed of coding. But that’s not true. The gating factor is the speed of understanding the
Let’s assume that your team does have a definition of Ready. And that they (possibly with a product leader) have shaped the work. But the team still says they don’t know how to start—they don’t have the right people to think through the problem and finish it. If you have component teams, the team is