Quotes from Johanna Rothman

Budgets may count Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs), but great teams count on people.

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.

Software is nothing like construction. Software is innovation. Innovation is difficult—if not impossible—to predict.

One of the best ways to create team safety is to create an environment in which team members feel safe to take risks.

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.

You can't go faster when you avoid technical excellence.

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.

The product managers now meet together as a group. They think about what they can accomplish together to meet their group performance. Now

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.

Don't worry about selling the company. If you ask great questions, your interviews will do that for you.

Unless your open position demands that your candidate will solve puzzles or riddles, do not use puzzles or riddles, instead of auditions.

Irrelevant questions focus on the person rather than on the person's qualifications for the open job.

Great managers perform leveraging work—work that allows other people to succeed—rather than perform the actual work itself.