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Bastow: Discovery and psychological safety separate the best product teams from mediocre ones

Janna Bastow · Building better roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · Oct 16, 2022 · at 34:37

Janna Bastow, CEO of ProdPad and co-founder of Mind the Product, discusses what distinguishes top-performing product organizations beyond roadmapping frameworks.

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“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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