Speakers of the 9th edition (2024)

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your complex problems. She helps leaders and teams learn to see practical alternatives that help them achieve more business agility. With that knowledge, they can choose how to adapt their product development.

For almost three decades, Johanna has helped her clients experiment with agile and lean alternatives for every piece of their product development. As a result, her clients create more management agility which translates to better business results.

A prolific writer, Johanna is the author of 18 books and hundreds of articles about many aspects of product development. She uses her trademark practicality and humor to focus on what people can do—and not take herself too seriously.

She’s written these books:

• 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, 2^nd 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)

Find the Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter, and her blogs at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com.