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How to Create Partnerships Instead of Using Stakeholders

Johanna Rothman

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.)

How To 125
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Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1

Johanna Rothman

When I work with these teams or their managers, I realize they're not demoing or retrospecting on a regular basis. Worse, these people and teams don't feel any satisfaction with their products. And all those ways require we change the culture from that of resource-efficiency thinking to flow-efficiency thinking.

Agile 88
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Unemployed Agilists: How to Increase Your Value to Get a Great Job, Part 3

Johanna Rothman

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. First, the product-based expertise. That's often product people, testers, and some UI/UX people.

Agile 81
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Possible Test for Splitting Stories and Valuable Minimums

Johanna Rothman

No one wants to demo this work, because everyone thinks the demo will wander all over the place. Worse, no one wants to demo, because they can't see the value for any user. Use the Demo to Guide Sizing. Use the Demo to Guide Sizing. Focus on the flow of work through the team, flow efficiency thinking.

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What’s Wrong With Detailed Gantt Charts and How to Make Fewer Details Work for You

Johanna Rothman

In innovative products, the interdependencies can change any day. If your product does not need much innovation, you can plan for longer and know you will meet that plan. Those are the kinds of products that do not require much, if any, innovation. In addition, I ask teams to show visual progress , such as in a demo.

How To 70
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How to Change a Workshop In-Person Game to a Remote Simulation for Effective Results

Johanna Rothman

That's an example of how insidious resource efficiency thinking is. I like to ask them to choose a challenging production support problem, or something else that's making them nuts. Show a demo of whatever you complete at the 15-minute mark. The timing: I use a 15-minute timebox, followed by not more than 5 minutes of a demo.

Agile 75
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Designing an Organization for a Product Approach, Part 2

Johanna Rothman

In this part, I’ll discuss an option for a product-oriented organization. Consider a Product-Oriented Organization. Instead of organizing by function, consider a product-oriented organization. Again, I am not saying this is the only way a product organization would look, but this is a possibility. What do you do?