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
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
Does your team have an overarching goal for its work—a product vision? Too many teams do not. The whole point of a project is to deliver a useful product that satisfies its customers. I like to think about projects as a container of some product value. That means that a given release does not need
This is Johanna Rothman’s August 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Amy, a project manager, said, “With all the changes going on, no one is quite sure of their next steps. The portfolio team is stuck because they can’t predict for a year anymore. The product leader
This is the February 2025 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Last month, I wrote about technical leadership micromanagement and the technical leadership overwhelm. (See One Secret to Free Yourself from the Overwhelm of Leadership Work for that post.) I heard from several product managers.
During a sunset sail last week (see the image), I had a lovely conversation with a guy who said he did “accounting” type stuff. I asked him more, and it turns out he works for a three-letter acronym organization. No, I don’t know which one, even though I asked. He’s trying to organize a project
Up until now, when thinking about risks, I defaulted to the risks in the project pyramid. That’s because each project offers different value over the product’s lifetime. (See Product Roles, Part 4: Product Orientation and the Role of Projects for images of why we want ever-increasing product value, but why we might space the projects