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
The more work we put into backlogs, roadmaps, and the portfolio, the more product certainty we appear to have. But can we trust that product certainty? No. There’s the Aging problem. Then, there’s the fact that we can’t tell what the future will bring. Even if a team has a relatively low and consistent cycle
A reader asked me these questions about reliable estimation metrics: Would you explain leading and lagging indicators? Can I use a burndown chart to see accurate progress? Is that burndown chart useful if the team has not yet finished grooming the work? These are great questions because too many of us think the answers are
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
I’ve been thinking and experimenting a lot about how to use the various LLMs, both in my work and with my clients. I keep seeing a familiar trap: that managers think the gating factor in product development is the speed of coding. But that’s not true. The gating factor is the speed of understanding the
Many of my management clients tell me, “time is money.” That is only partially correct. Once you decide to invest a dollar, that dollar has the same value as any other dollar. Instead of focusing on the expense of a dollar, look for the value that dollar can return. (Because no one ever knows how