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Why Managers Believe Multitasking Works: Long Decision Wait Times

When I teach any sort of product/project/portfolio management, I ask, “Who believes multitasking works?” Always, at least several managers raise their hands. They believe multitasking works because they multitask all the time. Why? Because the managers have short work-time and long decision-wait time. If you are a manager, your time for any given decision looks …

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Podcast about the Business of Writing and Consulting

Consultants and writers share a common problem: we are business owners. That means we manage our businesses. Yes, I manage my own product development and my business. The great Joanna Penn interviewed me and the podcast is now live: Strategy And Business Plans For Authors With Johanna Rothman. If you write and self-publish, you should listen …

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Knowing When You Release Value

Sometimes, teams have trouble releasing their work, showing the value of the work they’ve completed. There are many possible reasons for this release problem: The team doesn’t have sufficient working agreements about what “done” means. I’ve written about frictionless releasing. In Create Your Successful Agile Project, I wrote about the done, done-done, and done-done-done words we …

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Alternatives for Agile and Lean Roadmapping: Part 7, Summary

Let me summarize what I’ve been talking about in these posts. The problem I’m seeing is that too many teams and organizations plan too much in too much detail too soon. Instead of architectural BDUF (Big Design Up Front), it’s project planning as BDUF. They expect one single person (a product manager or a product …

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Alternatives for Agile and Lean Roadmapping: Part 6, Managers Want Commitments

You’ve started thinking in feature sets. Maybe you’ve experimented with  rolling wave plans inside one quarter, so you can change and replan as you need to support your project or program. You’ve discussed flow-based roadmapping as a way to create MVPs and MVEs, release smaller value more often so you can make better decisions. You …

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Alternatives for Agile and Lean Roadmapping: Part 5, the Product Value Team

If you need to plan more often than once a quarter, how do you know how to replan? Instead of incurring the time and cost when you bring everyone together,  consider the Product Value Team. (In past writing and presentations, I’ve called this the Product Owner Value Team. I am trying to change my term …

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Alternatives for Agile and Lean Roadmapping: Part 4, Resilience, Prediction, & Feedback

One of my clients was trying—valiantly—to make their quarterly planning sessions work. They prepared, getting the big hotel room. They had plenty of supplies. The planning even went well. However, within two weeks, their plan had no relation to reality. That meant that for the next ten weeks, the product owners were “on their own.” …

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