Janna Bastow, CEO of ProdPad and co-founder of Mind the Product, discusses what distinguishes top-performing product organizations beyond roadmapping frameworks.
“A focus on discovery. So this ability to spend time in discovery and asking questions of customers and constantly being able to iterate based on that and psychological safety. So teams who are able to question each other, speak up when they see that things are wrong, question what's going on at the senior level, question what's going on at different team levels, and generally just have a good sense of what's going on across their business because they're allowed to ask those questions.”
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More from Janna Bastow
Opinion
Bastow: Timeline-based roadmaps artificially force due dates onto software initiatives
“Now, the problem with the timeline is that as soon as you have a timeline, it turns it into a math chart sort of thing, right? Where you've got time on the x-axis and things to do on the y-axis. And you basically end up with everything underneath is assigned a…”
Bastow: Product roadmaps are strategy prototypes, not execution plans
“So the whole point about a roadmap is that it's not designed to be your plan. I think about it as being a prototype for your strategy. What I mean by that is we talk about prototyping all the time in the lean world, and a prototype is essentially a way of chec…”
Bastow: PMs should be held accountable for experiments, not upfront predictions
“You should be able to do is point at how many experiments you ran the previous quarter and what numbers moved in the right direction. You should be accountable for your experiments and how you're spending the money and what you're doing, but you shouldn't be a…”
Bastow: Organizing conferences is fundamentally anti-lean
“When running a conference, it's one of the most expensive and un-leanest things you can possibly do. It's really difficult as a product person to pull that off because it pulls at your part. You want to do something that's lean and iterative, but you can't, ri…”
Bastow: Deliver Stage Presentations to Engaged, Nodding Audience Members
“Find the people who are nodding along and smiling and going, yeah, that's me, and just speak to them. And if you find one up there, one over there, one down there, no one's going to notice that you're doing your talk just to them. And just keep delivering your…”
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