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 […]
If you are like me, you use apps and websites to finish work every day. How often do those apps and sites break? Way too often. When possible, I report the problem. How long does it take to fix the problem? Sometimes, it takes those vendors days to fix their site. I expect only ten
If your company is similar to my clients, they want agility. That agility will allow their organizations to learn and deliver faster. That has all kinds of wonderful effects, such as capitalizing software earlier. But, too few teams have enough access to real product leadership, where a single product leader can make all the various
So far, this series has focused on smaller efforts, such as one or two products or one or two teams. But what if you have a larger effort, where several teams need to collaborate to deliver the business value? That’s a program. (I wrote Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization to
I started this series bemoaning the fact that we have too few product managers. That leads to no product leaders for a team. Worse, some teams have either strategic product thinkers or tactical thinkers—but not both. Instead, we can consider several possible product value teams to prevent insufficient product leadership. I already discussed the Vertical
Teams can flounder in the face of insufficient strategic and tactical product leadership. What problems does this product need to solve for its customers and when? How does the team know? That issue of strategy and tactics might require a Vertical Product Value team to answer. While that’s an unusual approach, it might be better
The whole point of product management is to increase the product capabilities over time. Those capabilities will expand the customer base by offering new value. More customers means more revenue. That’s why the product vision for this release is so critical. That product vision requires strategic product leadership. The backlog is the tactical implementation of
In my recent project charter series, I said we need a product vision to drive the project charter effort so the customers can get this container of value. Who creates that product vision? The product leader. However, too many supposedly agile teams lack an effective product leader. Here’s what I’ve seen: A part-time product manager
As far as I can tell, all organizations have the appetite for more work than they have people or time to do that work. It does not matter if the organization is one person or thousands. We all want to accomplish more than we have people. That’s why we need a product vision to drive
I started this series by saying a team can create a useful project charter in less time than you think. So what prevents teams from doing so? Too often, the project is not ready. The team might be ready, but the project is not. In effect, the project starts with scarcity. (I used to think