There’s all kinds of hype every single day about AI taking the place of programmers. That reasoning infers that typing is the hard part of product development. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here are the hard parts of product development: Understanding what the customers want. Often, the customers don’t know until they see […]
This is Johanna Rothman’s May 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Have you noticed that some teams seem to be more effective than others? Most of the time, they manage their WIP (Work in Progress). They learn together. Often, they collaborate across the organization. But the big
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
I’m a huge fan of team-based collaboration to complete small stories through the architecture. (The image above shows three small stories implemented through the architecture.) More collaboration means lower WIP (Work in Progress). That lower WIP allows the team to increase their throughput (finished features) and lower cycle time (release something useful faster). (See how
This is the April 2025 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email.Early in the agile community, people referred to the Product Owner as the “single wringable neck.” Somehow, if the product owner didn’t define the stories well, or create acceptance criteria, or even represent what someone
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
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
I keep seeing too much micromanagement in organizations. That’s where managers decide for the people they lead and serve, not with the people they lead and serve. Micromanagement creates several problems: People stop learning how to solve problems because the manager steps in to tell them what to do. That leads to much lower throughput,
This is the September 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. After reading last month’s newsletter about sneaky problems that reappear, a savvy project manager, Eric, sent me this question. “My problems don’t reappear because I solved part of them. I can’t solve anything at all.