Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Janna Bastow is a former product manager, and currently the CEO and co-founder of ProdPad. She also co-founded Mind the Product, a community for PMs, which has grown to 300,000 members across the world. In today’s podcast, Janna discusses the limitations of timeline-based Gantt charts and her “Now/Next/Later” framework. She also shares stories about hosting conferences and gives some great tips on how to improve your presentation skills and cope with performance anxiety.

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Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/building-better-product-roadmaps-janna-bastow-mind-the-product-prodpad/#transcript

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Where to find Janna Bastow:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/simplybastow

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jannabastow

• The ProdPad newsletter: https://www.prodpad.com/newsletter/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Formsort: https://formsort.com/lenny

• Coda: http://coda.io/lenny

• Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/

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Referenced:

• Mind the Product: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/

• The Trouble with Traditional Roadmaps: https://www.prodpad.com/resources/guides/ditch-the-timeline-roadmap/the-trouble-with-traditional-timeline-roadmaps/

• ProdPad’s Sandbox: https://www.prodpad.com/sandbox/

• Geoffrey Moore’s product vision template: https://www.prodpad.com/blog/product-vision-template/

• The Art of Profitability: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Profitability-Adrian-Slywotzky/dp/0446692271

• The Sandman on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81150303

• Startups for the Rest of Us podcast: https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/

• Christina Wodtke on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cwodtke

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In this episode, we cover:

(01:10) Janna’s background

(05:28) How the community evolved at Mind the Product

(08:22) The tricky logistics of putting together a conference

(10:48) Are conferences profitable?

(13:00) How Janna developed her storytelling and presentation skills

(16:44) How to fight performance anxiety

(19:25) Mistakes are humanizing—how to power through and deliver your presentation

(22:11) The limitations of traditional timeline roadmaps

(25:00) Janna’s Now/Next/Later framework

(28:08) How to work without the structure of dated timelines, and why soft launches are important

(32:57) What great product teams are doing well

(35:05) The importance of retrospectives

(36:45) How to shift the culture at larger companies

(39:43) How ProdPad creates better product management practices

(42:04) How to learn the Now/Next/Later framework

(46:59) Geoffrey Moore’s product vision template

(48:36) Lessons for PMs interested in becoming founders

(50:48) Lightning round

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The whole point about a roadmap is that it's not designed to be your plan.
0:05.0	I think about it as being a prototype for your strategy.
0:08.0	What I mean by that is we talk about prototyping all the time in the mean world,
0:12.0	and a prototype is essentially a way of checking your
0:14.9	assumptions. Generally we think about it in terms of a design or like a model but think about it at the strategy
0:21.5	level. So at the feature level you'd prototype by doing a design, a mock-up, and you'd take that
0:28.0	mock-up and you'd share it with somebody and say, here's a mock-up with a feature that I'm trying to build,
0:31.6	what do you think? And they tell you what's right or wrong, and you add some new copier button to make it more clear, and you throw out the original prototype because it wasn't very good, and you make a new one. So the value isn't the prototype, the
0:45.2	values in the prototyping process. The value isn't in your roadmap, the value is
0:49.3	in the road mapping process. What you're actually doing is laying out your assumptions of the problems that you're
0:55.2	solving. So you're saying, I think we have this problem than this problem. What do you think? The whole point is that you just
1:01.1	share your early assumptions with other people on the team, with customers even, like anybody will listen and just check that you're on the right path.
1:11.0	Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the
1:16.7	craft of building and growing your own products. I interview world-class
1:20.3	product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences
1:24.0	building and scaling today's most successful companies.
1:27.0	Today, my guest is Janet Basto.
1:29.4	Janet co-founded mine the product, which I believe is the largest community of product people anywhere.
1:34.1	She's also the inventor of the Road mapping framework Now Next Later, and the founder of ProdCat, which makes it easy for you to do
1:41.9	your road mapping in this new simpler way.
1:44.0	In our chat we talk about public speaking, community building, road mapping, vision,
1:49.0	and going from product manager to founder.
	...

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