Johanna Rothman > Quotes

“Budgets may count Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs), but great teams count on people.”
― Johanna Rothman, Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management

“The problem is you are working on projects. Service-level response times interfere with project work and cause multitasking. Maybe someone has to do that work, but maybe not you. Or, if you do have to do it, someone else can rank-order the work, and you can work in short timeboxes so you have a chance of completing the necessary-to-the-organization work without multitasking.”
― Johanna Rothman, Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects

“Don’t worry about selling the company. If you ask great questions, your interviews will do that for you.”
― Johanna Rothman, Hiring Geeks That Fit

“Create an opening to deliver feedback. Describe the behavior or result in a way that the person can hear. State the impact using “I” language. Make a request for continued or changed behavior.”
― Johanna Rothman, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver

“as an organization, you incur capability debt, because people (managers and technical staff) can’t improve their capabilities when they’re overburdened with too much work to do.”
― Johanna Rothman, Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects

“Questions such as “Where do you want to be in five years?” or “If you could change just one thing, what would it be?” are irrelevant because they do not directly relate to the qualifications required for the job.”
― Johanna Rothman, Hiring Geeks That Fit

“Instead of failing fast, consider learning early. I find that learning early creates a different mindset for me. I now create small, safe-to-fail experiments. I manage my ambiguity around the entire deliverable by creating small steps.”
― Johanna Rothman, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver

“The product managers now meet together as a group. They think about what they can accomplish together to meet their group performance. Now,”
― Johanna Rothman, Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects

“You can’t go faster when you avoid technical excellence.”
― Johanna Rothman, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver

“Software is nothing like construction. Software is innovation. Innovation is difficult—if not impossible—to predict.”
― Johanna Rothman, Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Cost or Schedule

“Unless your open position demands that your candidate will solve puzzles or riddles, do not use puzzles or riddles, instead of auditions.”
― Johanna Rothman, Hiring Geeks That Fit

“People learn together by working together. Don’t waste time on fake team-building activities such as anything physical. Those activities might be fun for some people, but they don’t help people learn how to work together at work.”
― Johanna Rothman, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver

“One of the best ways to create team safety is to create an environment in which team members feel safe to take risks.”
― Johanna Rothman, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver

“Irrelevant questions focus on the person rather than on the person’s qualifications for the open job.”
― Johanna Rothman, Hiring Geeks That Fit

“Great managers perform leveraging work—work that allows other people to succeed—rather than perform the actual work itself.”
― Johanna Rothman, Hiring Geeks That Fit