Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Many product owners and customers believe they know the problem they want to solve. That fake certainty causes them to define solutions, instead of solving the problem at hand. John Le Drew and I pair-wrote an article describing this problem and how to solve it. See Eliminate Fake Certainty and Solve the Real Problem. Yes, I’ve …
Continue reading “Fake Certainty Article Posted on AgileConnection”
One of the big problems I see with a product orientation (as opposed to a project) is in preparing for ongoing work. You might not start the next project for this product after you complete this project. You might have to round-robin projects for various products because you don’t have enough people to do all …
Continue reading “Product Orientation Requires Technical Excellence”
I’m working on my roadmapping talk for Agile 2018. I finally had the transforming idea about how to position the talk: Roadmapping and product planning are about feedback loops. The shorter the feedback loop, the faster and more often we can learn. That feedback loop works in at least these ways: The faster we learn, …
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Agile approaches can help a team release more often. When a team releases more often, the product people can replan the product roadmaps. The project portfolio people can replan the project portfolio. Not every team releases often enough to take advantage of replanning small and often. Everyone falls prey to “too much” thinking. The product …
Continue reading “Frequent Releasing Can Lead to Short and Frequent Planning”
Sometimes, teams have trouble releasing their work, showing the value of the work they’ve completed. There are many possible reasons for this release problem: The team doesn’t have sufficient working agreements about what “done” means. I’ve written about frictionless releasing. In Create Your Successful Agile Project, I wrote about the done, done-done, and done-done-done words we …
I delivered a webinar called Agile Metrics for Team and Product Progress last week, thanks to the nice folks at Innovation Roots. I had fun and so did many of the participants. One person gave me a new saying about metrics (at the end, during the Q&A): Are you data-driven or data-informed? It’s such a great …
Back in Manage It!, I suggested that for requirements, the questions should be, “How little can we do?” and still have a great product. My argument was this: the longer the project (regardless of approach), the more risk there is. Can you reduce risk by reducing the requirements? That would allow you to release earlier …
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I’ve been coaching several teams with a problem: they like to work in iterations. And, they have milestones that are not on a milestone boundary. What should they do? (I suggested flow and you should have heard their response. Well, maybe not.) Here’s why people want these milestones: The team can’t deliver (for whatever reason) as continuous …
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Note to my dear readers: As I write, I realize this series is growing. Thank you for your understanding in advance. In Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 4: Sharing Agile Outside of Product Development, I wrote about an independent workgroup with one stream of work. I used Customer Support as an example. Support has one stream: …
Continue reading “Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 4A: Sharing Agile Outside of Product Development”
Here’s where we are so far in this discussion of what it might mean to “scale” agile approaches: Part 1: Creating Cross-Functional Feature Teams (Teams that can produce features on a regular basis) Part 2: Programs of Cross-Functional Feature Teams (Programs (multiple teams working together) that deliver features on a regular basis) Part 3: Agile Product …
Continue reading “Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 4: Sharing Agile Outside of Product Development”