Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Agile Project Management: No Planning Needed?
Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.
Linda manages a large program LargeEngCo calls “Sales Order Support,” SOS. The SOS program contains four projects.
The goal is to provide to the salespeople in the field the list of what products this customer had previously ordered, and what was now available as add-ons for those products. Linda has asked Paul, her CIO, when she can expect to see the product roadmap. She’s trying to coordinate the efforts of four teams, and the teams are confused by the order of the features. One of her project managers explained, “We could have done some of the communication to the database a different way last iteration if we’d known this next feature was so important now. We’ve made more work for ourselves.”
The SOS program is critical to the company success in these uncertain economic times, so the senior management team is deciding when each feature will need to be in the product. The senior managers haven’t done enough strategic planning to know what they really want, so they can’t trust the product owner to make those decisions for them. They believe they need to make the decisions themselves, and they are late doing so--which is why they can only decide iteration by iteration. They then send that information to the product owner who works with the team.
Paul seemed confused. “Hey, this is agile. Why do you want to know …
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