This is Johanna Rothman’s April 2026 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this newsletter. During a recent conference, I was on a panel with some really smart colleagues. One of the first audience questions was, “What’s your most valuable management tool?” Some of the other panelists mentioned how they use […]
This is Johanna Rothman’s February 2026 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Jim, one of my trusted advisor clients, was all gung-ho on AI last year. He told me that his AI work allowed their senior management team to define their strategy, “once and for all.” That strategy was
This is Johanna Rothman’s September 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Humans excel at seeing problem signals—the signs that we have a problem. However, we often have blind spots about the root causes of those problems. Our beliefs and/or insufficient or irrelevant data reinforce those blind spots.
This is the August 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Problems. They’re always there, just waiting to pop up and say, “Surprise! Gotcha!” I don’t mind new problems, but the sneaky problems, the ones that reappear after I thought I fixed them? I really
On the ANE panel last night, an agile coach asked, “What’s my path forward as an agile coach? What do I do next?” That’s a great question and one each coach might ask, to make sure they continue to add value to the client. (Internal or external, all coaches have clients.) I said that if
Part of what makes an agile transformation difficult is the cultural change required. That’s what makes an agile transformation a journey. A client said to me, “I want the agile. The agile is good stuff: faster delivery of smaller stuff that we can get revenue for. I want it now. How fast can I get
I’ve been thinking more about possible measurements in an agile transformation journey. The first Possible Measurements post focuses on product throughput measurements. This post will focus on measurements you might see when the culture changes with an agile transformation. Again, do start with your why. Without knowing why you want to use agile approaches throughout the organization,
“What should I measure???” is one of the questions I see when I work with people going through an agile transformation. Too often, managers measure people as individuals. (Traditional measurements focus on resource efficiency instead of flow efficiency.) Resource efficiency measures don’t measure what the organization delivers or what prevents the organization from delivering. This
If you read my scaling agile series, you can see that becoming an agile organization requires seeing your organization as a system with a culture. You can start with teams, move to programs and the product part of the organization. If you don’t also address the cultural problems of rewards, you won’t continue with your
To summarize: your agile transformation is stuck. You’ve thought about your why, as in Becoming an Agile Leader, Part 1: Define Your Why. You’ve started to measure possibilities. You have an idea of who you might talk with as in Becoming an Agile Leader, Part 2: Who to Approach. You’ve considered who you need as allies and how to enlist them