Do you feel pressure to do more and more? I do. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. But sometimes, that “more and more” creates pressure on the team and the people who interact with that team. When anyone has a capacity reduction, everyone feels even more pressure. But pressure is not particularly useful. Exhorting people
Some of you are already preparing for the salary and performance review discussions at the end of the year. (Or the beginning of next year.) Good for you, for preparing this early. You have a chance of doing a great job. However, there are many problems with performance reviews and salary discussions at any time.
How does your team show progress? Do they use activity-based (cost accounting) measures? Or, do they demo running, tested features? And possibly use a product backlog burnup chart to see each feature set’s relative progress? How can we understand the costs of this progress? I am a big fan of demos and a product backlog
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
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
This is Johanna Rothman’s June 2026 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this newsletter. Most of us have worked with managers who guided our careers. But managers aren’t the only ones who can support other people’s growth. Sometimes, technical leaders who are not “people managers” can have just as much
This is Johanna Rothman’s May 2026 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this newsletter. Several colleagues recently told me their companies asked them to change roles: Steve, a Scrum Master, is now an agile project manager. Polly, a project manager, is now a product manager. And the biggest change of
This is Johanna Rothman’s April 2026 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this newsletter. During a recent conference, I was on a panel with some really smart colleagues. One of the first audience questions was, “What’s your most valuable management tool?” Some of the other panelists mentioned how they use
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
I said earlier in this series that no one cares about how “agile” your team is. Or the kind of “agile” your team professess to be. Managers do care about agility: the ability to respond quickly to a changing or changed environment. And that depends on where your team has delays. That’s why value stream