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 […]
Teams can flounder in the face of insufficient strategic and tactical product leadership. What problems does this product need to solve for its customers and when? How does the team know? That issue of strategy and tactics might require a Vertical Product Value team to answer. While that’s an unusual approach, it might be better
The various AI vendors want us to trust their autonomous agents. I have several problems I would love to use AI to solve. (Including updating all the tags on this site!) However, I cannot trust the agents yet. Even when I use interactive prompting, I’m not happy with the results. Those results can change (non-deterministic
This is the April 2025 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email.Early in the agile community, people referred to the Product Owner as the “single wringable neck.” Somehow, if the product owner didn’t define the stories well, or create acceptance criteria, or even represent what someone
I discussed how to calculate the Costs of Delay in the previous three posts, and then offered an example in Part 3. Notice that the example uses cycle time or how the team feels about the remaining time to think about the value in order to rank the work. (The links to all the posts
Ranking work, whether it’s for the backlog, a roadmap, or the portfolio, sometimes feels like throwing darts and hoping for the best. But especially if there’s too much work and a lot of WIP, we have a tool for clarifying that ranking—the Cost of Delay. It does require counting the number of people and easy
Ever since I was on the Troubleshooting Agile podcast, I’ve followed Squirrel and Jeffrey. (I highly recommend their podcast.) Recently, Squirrel posted something fascinating on LinkedIn: Aim for a “single source of lies” about your business. That’s quite a provocative idea, especially when many of us persist in looking for a “single source of truth.”
Recently, a newish site asked me to become part of their “editorial board.” They didn’t say what the responsibilities were, so I asked. The reply: Spend five hours a month in meetings (roughly an hour each week). Write a new, unique column each month. I asked what I would get in return. Nothing. No payment
When I saw the McKinsey report on “developer productivity,” I shuddered. First, that makes no sense in a collaborative team. Second, there’s no way to measure such a thing as developer productivity, despite what McKinsey says. (I’m not linking to the report, because the advice is so bad.) Then I read Lorin Hochstein’s brilliant assessment
Product owners have many challenges: They need to keep at least two thoughts about the product: what it needs to be in the near future, and what the organization wants it to be in the (distant) future. Some product owners think they’re supposed to fill out a complete backlog, including all the UI designs for