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Lead and Serve Others as an Excellent Technical Leader
PRESENTED BY
Johanna Rothman
Speaker, Consultant, Author for managing product development
Do you ever feel caught between what your manager wants and what your team needs? Too much of what passes for management or leadership pushes people away instead of creating an engaging environment.
You can create an environment that frees people to do their best work with your leadership:
- Clarify your team’s purpose and the value it brings to the organization.
- How to create empathy with a team and how to know if they’re BS-ing you.
- How to teach feedback and coaching as part of the work so the team builds a safe environment.
- How to delegate problems and outcomes, not tasks.
- How to help the team create small, safe-to-fail experiments and learn from them. 6. How to help the team see its successes and acknowledge them.
- How to exercise your value-based integrity in the face of organizational craziness.
Johanna Rothman
Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams learn to see simple and reasonable things that might work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.
With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. She’s written these books:
- Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility
- Become a Successful Independent Consultant
- Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer
- Modern Management Made Easy series: Practical Ways to Manage Yourself; Practical Ways to Lead and Serve (Manage) Others; Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization
- Write a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts
- From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby)
- Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver
- Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization
- Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd edition
- Project Portfolio Tips: Twelve Ideas for Focusing on the Work You Need to Start & Finish
- Diving for Hidden Treasures: Finding the Value in Your Project Portfolio (with Jutta Eckstein)
- Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Project Schedule or Cost
- Manage Your Job Search
- Hiring Geeks That Fit
- The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)
In addition to articles and columns on various sites, Johanna writes the Managing Product Development blog on her website, jrothman.com, as well as a personal blog on createadaptablelife.com.
More from Johanna
ALL SESSIONS ↗Become an Excellent Technical Leader by Managing Yourself
Modern work practices demand management excellence. And, you might never have seen management excellence—certainly not applied to you. If you can’t manage yourself, you can manage or lead others.
Extend your Technical Leadership to Lead an Innovative Organization
Have you ever thought, “If I could just avoid all this bureaucracy, I could get things done?” You’re right. Too many organizations think they’re helping the teams when those very practices make work more difficult to accomplish. Sometimes, all you need to do is stop demotivating people from doing the work. Innovative organizations don’t just innovate their products—they innovate their processes.
Modern Management: Adapt How You Lead for Agile Success
Agile approaches have downplayed the role of management. Too many people say, “We don’t need no stinkin’ managers.” On the contrary. We need managers to create and refine the agile culture and create leadership capability across the organization. Without modern management, any agile transformation dies a quick and ugly death. Instead, it’s time to invite managers to change their behaviors to transform to an agile culture.
The Five Agile Metrics Tech Leaders Need
Are you trying to assess project progress with story points or velocity? That data might help the team—it doesn't help managers assess progress. Instead, in addition to demos, you can use feature charts, the product backlog burnup chart, what’s working and not released, cycle time and the effects of delays, and cumulative flow. Gain insight to your teams outcomes, not their daily work.
Two and a half days with the people writing the playbook.
Insightful sessions, inspiring ideas, and meeting your peers — the skills and methods that take your organization to the next level.