Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
I wrote a number of posts and newsletters over the past few weeks to help you see alternatives in this age of uncertainty. I hope you use these ideas to generate other ideas or ask more questions and create more experiments. The posts on this blog: 7 Tool Tips for Your Newly Distributed or Remote …
Continue reading “Collection of My Rapidly Remote and Managing in Uncertainty Writing”
Many people in the agile community promote a product orientation over a project orientation. That’s possible because an organization has product or feature teams. That works until you have more products than teams. That’s when you might still need projects to accomplish everything. If you keep teams together, you can still use projects in a …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 4: Product Orientation and the Role of Projects”
In an ideal agile world, the team would work directly with a customer. When you have a small product that serves maybe three types of customer (new, expert, admin for example), and that customer is down the figurative hall, you might not need any product people. You can create short feedback loops with your customer. …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 2: The Product Value Team”
We have many words for people who shepherd the business value of a product. The many words aren’t a problem, as long as we can all agree on what these various people are and they take responsibility for. When we don’t agree, we run the risk of not managing our strategy, not thinking in terms …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 1: Product Managers, Product Owners, Business Analysts”
As I work with people to use agile approaches, I see many organizational constraints. I’ve been trying to find a visualization for what I see. I don’t know if I’ve got it yet, but here is my sum-of-the-parts image. The organization’s culture drives decisions (or not!) about the strategy. Strategy, with any luck, creates clarity …
Steve Smith challenged me in a comment to the cowardly layoff/no feedback posting: “What would you have done if you were the manager who layed off these people?” I’ve written about layoffs in a previous Software Development column, but let me address the specific problem Steve described: The manager needs the paycheck. The manager (or …
Continue reading “Making Difficult Decisions: Choosing When to Lay Yourself Off”