Johanna Rothman

NOVEMBER 27, 2023

I have a new book: Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility. I wrote it because I'm concerned about what I see in too many supposedly agile teams: Crazy-long backlogs and roadmaps. Worse, sometimes the team doesn't demo or deliver. The post Tired of Fake Agility?

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Epicflow

FEBRUARY 20, 2025

By providing real-time insights and streamlining complex workflows, project portfolio management tools empower organizations to handle diverse initiatives with precision and agility. It prevents overloading or underutilizing team members, increasing productivity and employee satisfaction.

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Johanna Rothman

JANUARY 31, 2024

In Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1 , I said that real agile approaches require cultural change to focus on flow efficiency, where we focus on watching the work, not the people. If you and your team have been practicing real agility, you might say these ideas barely show any agility at all. That's fine.

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Johanna Rothman

MARCH 6, 2024

In Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1 , I said that real agile approaches require cultural change to focus on flow efficiency , where we watch the flow of the work , not the people doing tasks. Can you create an agile culture for your team even if you can't change how the organization works? 1,2 and so on.

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Agile Culture Efficiency Metrics 81

Johanna Rothman

DECEMBER 11, 2019

We had (and still have) too many products to keep the same teams on them for a long time. For programs, the team stayed together and moved to a different feature set/internal product until the program finished. We could move to a new product and/or a new team. My job was to smooth the way for people to deliver products.

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Johanna Rothman

FEBRUARY 14, 2020

They've started to use agile approaches. Capitalization for Agile Work. Let me walk you through an example of a 5-person agile team. Let's assume everyone works together, on one project (product, if you prefer). I would add demoing in as value creation, but I'm not sure how accountants categorize feedback loops.

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Johanna Rothman

JANUARY 6, 2020

In Costs of an Agile Approach for Hardware Products , I suggested that an iteration-based approach for hardware was too expensive. Agile software teams are cross-functional and interdependent. Many agile software teams have somewhere between four and seven people. This hardware team swarms on a product.

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Johanna Rothman

FEBRUARY 6, 2023

Strategy and Product Feedback Loops About 20 years ago, I taught a project management workshop to IT people. Their products and services did not ship outside the building—their products and services enabled the organization to make money. See Customers, Internal Delivery, And Trust for a recent post about demos and trust.)

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Johanna Rothman

MARCH 28, 2019

You've got interdependencies across the organization for a given project or program to release a product. You can see demos. You need enough insight or prediction to start the marketing campaign or to create training videos or product documentation. Release criteria tells you when a product is done.

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Johanna Rothman

JUNE 28, 2018

Many new-to-agile teams use some form of iteration-based agile approach. Back in Time You Spend in Agile Meetings (near the bottom of the post), I enumerated all the possible meetings. I mentioned how you could integrate the demo work into an iteration if you create a column for the demo.

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Johanna Rothman

OCTOBER 20, 2020

I discussed the origins of the agile approaches in Part 5. In this post, I'll discuss how you can create an agile approach that fits your context. Why should you create your own agile approach? Because your context is unique to you, your team, project, product, and culture. Remember, an agile approach starts with a team.

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Johanna Rothman

MARCH 18, 2024

That part discusses why managers see agile coaches and Scrum Masters as staff positions, not line jobs. I assume you have some sort of functional product development expertise. If not, why are you in technical product development? This post is about your deep domain expertise, first in product, then in agility.

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Johanna Rothman

SEPTEMBER 28, 2018

In Part 1 , I suggested that when we organize by function, the recognition and rewards might prevent a successful agile transformation. In this part, I’ll discuss an option for a product-oriented organization. Consider a Product-Oriented Organization. That includes product ownership. How Many Managers Do You Need?

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Productivity Agile Efficiency Management 65

Johanna Rothman

AUGUST 21, 2019

I started asking if you actually need an agile approach in Part 1 and noted the 4 big problems I see. Part 2 was why we need managers in an agile transformation. Part 4 was about how “Agile” is meaningless and “agile” is an adjective that needs to be applied to something. That would be resilient.

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Johanna Rothman

APRIL 6, 2022

A colleague unfamiliar with lifecycles or agility asked, “How can we use sprints in this approach?” Every sprint delivers working product.” Not the thinking and learning that go into the deliverables where you end up with something demo-able, if not usable.” They do have product goals.

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Johanna Rothman

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

I started this series with many specific concerns about a particular interview question: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal, even after hours of discussion. Instead, I see assumptions that reveal a divide-and-conquer, and possibly a command-and-control culture, not an agile culture.

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Johanna Rothman

MARCH 30, 2020

If you're creating products of any kind—especially software products—you've got a team sport. Successful software product development is about how well the team learns together. The better the team learns together, the better the product is. See Product Orientation Requires Technical Excellence ).

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Epicflow

JANUARY 21, 2022

global chip shortage), and the need for reducing production costs add to the above-mentioned difficulties. . In addition, to stay competitive on the market, business owners will struggle to deliver their products faster and produce more (e.g. The need to shorten the time for product development. Dealing with uncertainty.

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Johanna Rothman

JANUARY 16, 2019

Many of my clients are trying to use short feedback loops in agile approaches. High Need for Product Innovation and Change. The more need for product innovation and change, the shorter the feedback loops need to be. I wrote about this in Create Your Successful Agile Project.)

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Johanna Rothman

AUGUST 28, 2019

You have an agile roadmap to see where you're headed. Your team hates having to translate the agile planning into more traditional planning. If you're in this pickle, your manager might think your agile team doesn't replan very often. That manager might assume your team uses an agile approach only as a way to deliver.

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Harvard Business

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

And at Greycroft, a venture capital firm, investor Teddy Citrin has laid out a veritable map for the further disruption of every consumer products category. Plug-and-play e-commerce technology, search engine optimization, and other distribution solutions are making it ever easier for products to directly reach consumers.

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Johanna Rothman

APRIL 3, 2020

That leads to people using agile approaches to focus on delivery. You might have hypotheses about your market, your customers, or how your current product(s) can offer value. Normally, I like to ask the teams who deliver the product to also do the discovery. After you gather the results, what does the data tell you?

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Johanna Rothman

JULY 27, 2022

So they ask the product or project leaders to write a business case for each effort. Because experiments manage risk, we need people with these perspectives to create the experiments: A product leader: someone who can see where the company wants to head with this product. Regardless of the product results for that experiment.

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Johanna Rothman

JULY 27, 2023

In addition, a product leader might approve the feature. Finally, the team, a product leader, or the customer(!) might demo the feature. That defect escaped all your checklists, approvals, and demos. See What Lifecycle or Agile Approach Fits Your Context? It's time to measure and learn from defect escapes.

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Johanna Rothman

SEPTEMBER 26, 2017

You know you need more feedback and resilience in your project/program, so you’ve created a product value team to reassess the roadmap on a regular basis. They need to plan on revenue from products and services. If you work at a place new to agile approaches, work on streamlining the releases so you always release once a month.

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Johanna Rothman

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

If you took an agile workshop sometime in the past 15 years, you probably played the “ ball game.” Especially since they've probably suffered through way too many “agile” workshops with more and more games. Show a demo of whatever you complete at the 15-minute mark. Why do I have to play a game?”

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Johanna Rothman

SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

Back in Part 1 of this series, I explained all the problems I saw with this interview question: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal, even after hours of discussion. In Create Your Successful Agile Project , I recommend the team end an iteration in the middle of a week. What should the Scrum Master do?”

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Johanna Rothman

NOVEMBER 4, 2022

But there are several problems with all this planning: These plans require prediction at all levels, from strategy to product to what the team delivers. However, too often, the managers prevent product innovations or strategy changes because they planned so much. Does this sound a lot like what agile teams do? It does to me.

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Johanna Rothman

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

Your customers can't take your product more often than once or twice a year. Because the product doesn't need to leave the building, the teams don't release internally. Nor do the teams demo on a regular basis. The teams miss the feedback loops so critical for an agile approach. Their agile transformation falls apart.

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Johanna Rothman

SEPTEMBER 4, 2017

Because features change in value and because some feature sets need to deliver value on a more regular basis, the real roadmap looks more like this graphic, “When the Agile Roadmap Changes.” The product owners got together and created the first month worth of detail. Part 5: Product Value Team. Part 7: Summary.

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Johanna Rothman

AUGUST 25, 2023

By product, where they assign a team to a product for a long period of time. By person, where they take one person from here and one person from there, etc, to create enough people to work on the product. Every time the team delivers, the leaders can reassess the ongoing value of the project or product.

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How To Productivity Agile Management 78

Johanna Rothman

OCTOBER 2, 2023

The first is that Brooks strongly suggested the idea of a “surgical team” That hierarchical team was a feature- or product-based team. Ten people, seven of them professionals, are at work on the problem, but the system is the product of one mind–or at most two, acting uno animo.”

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Johanna Rothman

JUNE 17, 2021

I see too much micromanagement, even in supposedly agile organizations. ” When we have insufficient trust, morale and the products deteriorate. Instead, we can extend trust and keep innovating for morale and the products. ” Or, when a manager imposes a “standard” agile approach.

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Leadership Agile Management Training 75

Johanna Rothman

AUGUST 28, 2023

In Part 2 , I suggested the product leader/team/some combination, have a conversation to understand the context for the request. The longer the backlog, the less agile you can be, because no one's incorporating learning into the work. That's analogous to your team having production support or other questions for the team.

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Johanna Rothman

OCTOBER 7, 2019

Many of my clients use an iteration-based agile approach. They have to manage extra work—work they had not estimated—in the form of an emergency or production support. Why are you using an agile approach? I see these problems a lot when the product owner has feature-itis. Still too much?

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Johanna Rothman

MARCH 30, 2020

If you're creating products of any kind—especially software products—you've got a team sport. Successful software product development is about how well the team learns together. The better the team learns together, the better the product is. See Product Orientation Requires Technical Excellence ).

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Management Agile Metrics Video 52

Johanna Rothman

JUNE 5, 2018

Agile approaches can help a team release more often. When a team releases more often, the product people can replan the product roadmaps. The product people don’t create MVEs or MVPs —they need the entire feature set. We all use bloated products that make our lives miserable every day.

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