This is Johanna Rothman’s October 2026 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom. Are you tired of large decks of project status data? I hate them. Too often, the data is not relevant, or worse, the data actually lies. That leads people to watermelon status, where the project is green until very
How often does your team conduct a retrospective? If you’re like most of my clients, not often enough. When I ask why the team doesn’t retrospect at least once every couple of weeks, these teams tell me many reasons: They don’t finish “enough” work often enough. (If you’re part of an “agile” team and you
This is Johanna Rothman’s August 2026 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Do you feel as if you’re in the middle of too-frequent change? I do. Even though I only have manageable and relatively small projects, I can’t quite see around the various corners to predict what I
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
I started this series discussing where AI use might create bottlenecks. The more people work solo on anything, the more likely they become bottlenecks for the team. When each person works solo with AI, they reinforce resource efficiency, where everyone is busy, but the team can’t seem to finish anything when anyone wants it. Instead,
So many people (and some teams) work under mandates to “use AI.” While I am a fan of these two functions for the current LLMs: The ability to create fast prototypes for human assessment and judgment. And the ability to gain new insights into you, your team’s, or your organization’s data. (This often requires a
Most teams want to work on something useful for customers. In the same vein, most product leaders also want to offer something useful for customers. That’s how products fulfill the organization’s strategy. Yet, I see so many product leaders outsource their product thinking to LLMs. Why? Because it’s hard to discover what customers want. You
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