Guest: Johanna Rothman, The "Pragmatic Manager" & Author of 20+ Books
Host: Kumar Dattatreyan
Episode Date: October 21, 2025
Duration: ~41 minutes
Watch on YouTube

Ever look around your "agile" organization and wonder why nothing's getting faster? Got all the JIRA boards, daily stand-ups, and sticky notes but teams still can't ship?

Johanna Rothman calls this the "Agile Veneer." And she doesn't hold back.

She drops truth bombs like "performance management is theater applied to cost of goods sold" and "stand-ups are a crutch." She's not here to make you comfortable—she's here to make you effective.

You've got it when managers focus on "who's the expert" and "who's doing what" for performance reviews. That individual focus kills agility.

The fix? Johanna doesn't care if you use Scrum, Kanban, or something you invented last Tuesday. What matters: Can your team release something useful every day or two? That's real agility.

Wait time in organizations outweighs work time. Managers spend forever getting estimates for unstarted work. Teams stop to create ballpark numbers. Then more meetings to decide priorities.

Johanna's solution? Measure how long from thinking about a decision to actually making it. Most managers have no clue.

Johanna got stuck at 90% done on her first job. Then 92%. Then 93%. Her manager taught her "inch pebbles"—one or two day tasks that are either done or not done. She's used them for 30 years. Today they're one or two day stories.

Johanna wants AI to auto-tag 30 years of website content and reconcile multi-currency spreadsheets. Practical stuff.

But vibe coding? Creates messes programmers have to clean up. Her question: Why not vibe code with a human, use test-driven development, and include AI as a partner?

Myth #1: Everyone must work at 100% utilization
Wrong. You need peak effectiveness, not peak efficiency.

Myth #2: If you're not typing, you're not working
Programming is mostly reading code, understanding problems, designing, testing. Typing is the smallest piece.

Direct quote: "Performance management is theater applied to cost of goods sold."

People need feedback, not evaluation. Not stack ranking. Want better performance? Fix the environment. Want to reduce costs? Reduce wait time between process steps.

"The more a manager focuses on an individual, the less agile the team can be."

"Managers do not have to manage with cost accounting."

"A stand-up is a crutch."

If your agile transformation is all show and no results, this conversation explains why—and what to do about it.

This is 30 years of consulting, 20+ books, and what actually works versus what just looks good.

Bottom line: Leaders who focus on feedback loops, team collaboration, and effectiveness over efficiency will have an unfair advantage.

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Trust us: This 44-minute conversation will change how you think about agile, management, and real organizational effectiveness.

P.S. If you've ever been frustrated by fake agile theater, you need to hear this episode.