I said earlier in this series that no one cares about how “agile” your team is. Or the kind of “agile” your team professess to be. Managers do care about agility: the ability to respond quickly to a changing or changed environment. And that depends on where your team has delays. That’s why value stream […]
In Part 1, I wrote about what the value stream map looked like for expert-focused “cross-functional” teams. In Part 2, I discussed cooperative teams that have working agreements on when to do code review or make other decisions as a team. While those teams exhibit somewhat more agility, cooperative teams are still not collaborative. So
In Part 1, I wrote about what the value stream map looked like for expert-focused “cross-functional” teams. While those teams are cross-functional, they are not collaborative. However, these expertise-focused “teams” are not the only type of non-collaborative agile teams. There are also cooperative teams. Cooperative teams still tend to work sequentially, focused on each person’s
Some of the writers who take my writing workshop tell me they have writer’s block. But they can write me long emails, so it’s not literally writer’s block. However, they are stuck on something—something that prevents them from writing something useful. So they call it writer’s block. Instead, I suspect they have project block, where
So far, I’ve addressed how a project charter can help a team start a project fast and well. That’s why the project charter must clarify product vision, the various project risks, and product risks. And, it’s equally important to know what done means. If the team does not know how little they can do to
In Project Charter Part 2: Clarify the Project Driver, Boundaries, and Constraints for This Project, I explained how project risks can affect the team’s approach to the work. But project risks are not the same as product risks. Product risks are about the need for product innovation. The more innovation this product needs, the more
Let me set the context for this post about the project charter: By now, the team knows what it has to accomplish because they have a product vision. The next question is: How will the team manage their risks to achieve those outcomes? That’s where I recommend a team define its project driver, up to
I have options for all kinds of work I want to do today: The creative work, which includes a wide variety of writing (articles, blog posts, and yes, more books) and more workshops Paperwork. Yes, I have accounting and all kinds of spreadsheet reconciliation. Client preparation work for when they return from their summer vacations.
There’s all kinds of hype every single day about AI taking the place of programmers. That reasoning infers that typing is the hard part of product development. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here are the hard parts of product development: Understanding what the customers want. Often, the customers don’t know until they see
This is Johanna Rothman’s June 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. All my clients are dabbling with AI. They’re using it to think about more, such as generating more features in a backlog so each person can do more. Or more code with vibe coding. Or even