YouSaid · the spoken record

Janna Bastow

lines on the record: 58
first: 2022-10-16
most recent: 2022-10-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Wonderful. Hi, I'm Jan Avasto. You can find me on Twitter. I'm simplybasto there. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. Connect with me. I'm Dada Basto. I'm easy to find there. And come check out PradPad. It'd be wonderful to get your feedback on it because we are a team of products. Love to hear from”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got to give a shout out to Christina Wodka. I had a great conversation with her yesterday, and I've had a chance to chat with her a number of times over the years. She's just got this illustrious career. She's been part of so many amazing teams, built some amazing things, written some amazing books. And there's also just an all-around amazing product person and amazing person all in one.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's for basically it's Rob Walling's podcast and it's for startups that are either bootstrapped or alt funded or basically the startups that aren't the 1% top end funded unicorns, but the startups for the rest of us.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's like a British show, right? Oh, it is British, yes. Neil Gaiman. Yeah, very good. Definitely not for children. Thought it might be. Definitely not.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resource out there as long as you surround yourself with people, you're always going to be able to find people to advise you and to help you along the way. And there's always going to be bumps. Like you don't know what they're going to be yet. There's always going to be things that are going to come by and sideswipe you, but that's always the case that you had when you are a product manager as well. And just be ready for those and be ready to take it on the chin and deal with them as they come. Best thing you can do is surround yourself with people so that you've got somebody to go to for each thing going oh when i run into a problem that has to do with this i can talk to this person when i run into a problem that has to do with this i talk to one of these people and figure it out as you go take each thing a day at a time certainly don't stop yourself from starting a business or starting your own thing just because you don't think that you know how to do it yet you will figure it out as you go ahead people less capable than you have figured it out”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being a PM actually provides you with a lot of the skills and background to be a founder, to be a CEO. It gives you a lot of chance to work with a lot of the different teams and see a lot of the underpinnings of how a business works. I was really lucky in previous roles where I got to work very closely with leadership in a few different roles before I took the step up to take on my own thing. So I felt as if I'd seen it in a few different ways, done well and done badly. And so I got a chance to sort of say, I think I could do this. Yeah, go on. One of the things that struck me is it's not as hard as it looks. And it's also harder than it looks. There's things that you get started and you go, oh, no one's going to stop you from doing this, right? You've got lots of leeway. You can just do it and you've got lots of freedom to run your business how you want to do it. There's lots of”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The product vision template, you might actually recognize it from the Jeffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm book. It's the elevator pitch template, but I like it because it answers the same sort of questions that you need to answer for a product vision template. So it asks things like for your target customer, who the statement of need or the opportunity, product name is a product category, what's the reason to buy and then say unlike this alternative our product and then say what the statement of differentiation is. So it's actually a template that we have available on our site and you can actually sell out as part of our product canvas in BrontPad. So happy to share that link with you so you can link it up and send it to your audience here, Lenny.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 accountable for saying what is going to work before you know what's going to work yet. And that's the problem with this timeline delivery agic eight ball that we're asked to give.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're going to pick up the phone and do a bunch of. What they do know is that by using a script and by picking up the phone and calling people, some are going to work and by the end of the quarter, someone's going to buy. And they know this because last quarter someone bought and the quarter before that someone bought. They just don't know who's going to buy. If they did know who's going to buy, then they would just call those people and not everybody else. Same thing. You're not asking for any more leeway than your sales team. You're saying that you want a quarter million dollars worth of investment and you're going to spend it on your team who's going to run experiments right it's going to be trying this change on the interface or that tweak to the pricing or that change to the positioning or whatever you're going to do. Some of these experiments are going to fail and some are going to succeed. You don't know which ones, but that's okay. You know that by the end of the quarter, enough are going to succeed that you're probably going to move the right numbers in the right direction. So you're not asking for any more leeway than your salesperson. What you should be able to do.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other teams are already working this way. Like product people are the only ones who seem to be pinned down to be required to give concrete dates as to when things are going to be delivered in this way. Your sales team isn't asked to give exact delivery dates on their work. They work in a very experimentation-led way as well. You are VP sales or VP revenue or whoever doesn't go to a board meeting and say, we're going to close the ACME deal at the end of October for a million pounds. They don't know that. What they do know is that they have a process by which they're going to fill a pipeline and almost certainly they're going to be able to close a million pounds worth of or a million dollars worth of sales, but they can't tell you who it's going to come from or how that's going to work. What they're going to say is give me a quarter million dollars worth of investment into my team, which I'm going to spend that on my account executives, my sales team.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This problem, you've actually learned something, you can adjust your prototype for your strategy, you can adjust your roadmap there, and your roadmap all of a sudden becomes stronger, becomes better there.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at the feature level, you'd prototype by doing a design, a mockup. And you'd take that mock-up and you'd share it with somebody and say, here's a mockup of a feature that I'm trying to build. What do you think? And they'd tell you what's right or wrong and you add some new copy or 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 value is in the prototyping process. The value isn't in your roadmap. The value is in the roadmapping process. What you're actually doing is laying out your assumptions of the problems that you're solving. So you're saying, I think we have this problem and this problem. What do you think? The whole point is that you just 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. And if they say, oh, actually, I thought that it was going to go this way, this way, then this way, or that way, then the other way. And what about?”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you can start a free trial in ProdPad. You can start playing around with it. We even have a sandbox mode. You just go to sandbox.prodpad.com where it's got example versions of roadmaps, best practice roadmaps that you can just start playing with. You don't even need a login or a credit card. It's got OKRs and roadmaps and ideas and experiments, feedback. You see how it all sort of fits together. But honestly, a now next later roadmap can be done with post-it notes on the wall. It's just about saying what problems do you have? Let's lay them out in order and just check them with other people. 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 checking your assumptions. Generally, we think about it in terms of a design or like a model, but think about it, a strategy level.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are the outcomes, and what did you get? So it makes it difficult to fall into a build trap with just saying here's stuff to build and we built it and move on to the next thing. Like a lot of dev tools are designed to do because it has spaces in there to say, did you measure success and was it successful or not successful? This roadmap thing is completed. What was the outcome of it? So by creating all these spaces, it creates all these reminders for the team to go back and think about this stuff before they do work and after they do work. So it actually actively helps them become better product teams and more cognizant of this sort of work.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're in the middle of a key tool, in the middle of transformations right now, which is fascinating to see. These are multi-year pieces of work where you're seeing it being used for ongoing products that are being used and delivered as we speak, as well as part of a mindset shift within the business. Because one of the things about ProdBad is that it's not just a tool to help you deliver products. It's actually a tool that helps you become a better product manager. Like it sets in stone better product management practices. Like once you start using it, it makes it difficult to go back to bad product management practices. When you create a roadmap and product pad, it makes it difficult to add features and dates to the roadmap. It makes it difficult to make a timeline-based roadmap. It makes it difficult to add ideas to the backlog that are not thought through because it asks questions, thoughtful questions, like, what problem does this solve? And why would you want to solve it?”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's how it generally works with the way that we work with our enterprise rollouts is like we've worked with large enterprises of governments as well. It generally starts with an advocate, somebody who gets the way that we're working, a division, a department, and then it starts from there. Sometimes what we'll find is that we'll get one or two, sometimes three or four mini groups starting, and then they'll start banding together and saying, hey, no, we're starting a thing here. Once that starts happening, it's easier to start that conversation saying, okay, yeah, we've got a whole thing going here. Let's talk to the person who is the BP strategy or who owns the tech area. And then we can have a bigger conversation.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smaller startups nipping at their heels. These companies are going to nip away at these larger businesses and at these larger companies don't actually do something with it. They're actually going to end up losing this ability to innovate themselves. And so these companies are essentially stuck in this pattern where they want to continue growing and yet they're not going to. They're going to end up not being willing to take the dip to move upwards.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“people Ultimately, a lot of these larger companies that are incentivized to keep the company as stable as possible, to keep the company just growing quarter on quarter, which is great for the stock market, right? They love that stability. They love that quarter and quarter growth. But if the company is actually under threat from startups, right? If you're a big bank, you're in health tech, something like that, you almost certainly have startups niffing at your heels. And the reality is that you probably have enough cash to make it for the next 20 years or so. But over time, it's going to get bitten away at and you've got smaller startups who are going to take the juicier, more interesting parts to your business and leave you with the tougher parts of your business. Take HSBC versus all the companies who are coming up with got a Starling account here and I've got a mortgage with somebody else and I've got your savings account somewhere else. You got all these.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Larger companies are tough. They're tougher, right? I think of culture as calcification. So calcification being the limestone that is built up as water run over and that sort of thing. And in order to fix it, to kind of chip it off over time, you can't just fix it all in one go. And so in order to fix it, you've got to ship away at it. You've got to find a small pocket somewhere. You've got to make use of the tools that you've got. So sometimes it might be finding a small subset of the company and saying, hey, here's the startup lab within the business. Let's let them run off and go do something because changing the mindset of the whole company is just too difficult, right? It's set in stone and it's stuck where it is and can't change them all at once. But we can change this one little space right here because we've got shithot leader who knows what they're doing and we can take this pocket of.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Psychological safety that was somebody pitting them down by the neck saying, tell me what's going to be done and when. Psychological safety is just saying, hey, tell me as much information as you know and then do discovery to learn as much as you can so that we can move forward with this. You know, it's all about just talking to your teammates and getting the most information as you can from the resources you have, making the most of the collective intelligence that you have within your company.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Retrospectives make such a big difference because they are indicative of psychological safety, which underpins so much, right? Once you start building in this psychological safety, the ability to ask questions and to start saying, what are we doing that's working? What are we doing that's not working? Okay, determine that something doesn't work. Are we allowed to go change it? Okay, we are allowed to go change it. Okay, this is a team who's now changing their situation. They're talking to each other. They're learning from each other and they're making a concerted effort to do so. And so these are the teams who are constantly learning, iterating, and moving forward. And they naturally move towards things like now, next later. They naturally move towards things like doing discovery because these are just, I don't know, they're kind of common sense. They're not setting in stone expectations of what's going to be done and when, because that was really only done because some head honcho wanted to see that information. That wasn't.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, a couple things 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 the good sense of what's going on across their business because they're allowed to ask those questions. less silos things.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do have a sense that it's increasing. So, what I have found is years ago when we first started this thing off, no one was talking this way. It was a whole new concept of people like, no, this is crazy talk. You can't do it this way. And over the years, it has just become the natural way that people are working on it. People are going, of course, this is the way that it works. Like, why would it work any other way? It's becoming the expected way. Definitely change the discourse and change the expectations of the audience, I guess.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good question. I don't think I've got an answer there because it's going to be biased because we naturally attract companies who self-select our way of working. We put on our site like no timelines come for the now next later. So it's going to be a much higher percentage. People don't sign up for demos with us if they know that they want a timeline nowadays to make it really clear. So I would say like 70% of them are like we want now next later. And I know that's not real. I know that's not the real state of people, of product teams out there.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“pushing it out the door last minute or you're just going to end up spending so much time trying to plan things to the nth degree that you're just going to move super slow this is why you end up with teams who are really big but can't deliver worth anything right where compared to these tiny teams who are just out delivering them and just spinning things out the door they're the ones who aren't spending all their time going are we certain this is going to deliver and how many hours is this going to take you and let me go talk to this person find out how many days it's going to take him and back and forth and back and forth they're just building and it goes faster”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Like if something does have to have a date, we don't live in La La Land, if something has a regulatory date. When GDPR came down, everyone had a due date on the roadmap because if you didn't hit that date, then you were going to be in trouble. Sometimes you might have dates that are tied to things like the Christmas rush or to, you know, if you're in education, it might be like has to be out by the school year, at which point, in order to reach something by that date, you have to put in more project planning work, as in you have to plan out ahead of time. You have to put in more buffer time to do that. And generally, you have to plan to get that thing done well before so that you can have a soft launch before and make sure it works and do some iteration and fix it before the actual full-on launch happens. Because if you leave it too late, it's going to go wrong and you're going to miss the deadline. If you did that for all of your launches, you're just going to end up either cutting quality because everything's just going to be crap.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest bangest launch they want. Can then spend the next however long they want to launch their hard launch. And then that goes out. And in that period that they're doing that hard launch, development is cracking on with their next thing. And by the time that they're done that, marketing is unequal. What have you built? We're ready to work on the next thing. So you're just separating soft launch from hard launch so that you don't have this stress of trying to line up two completely different types of projects, your marketing projects and your development projects, which is where a lot of those things fall apart.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the stuff that was launched in August. They've got lots of stuff to work on. They're selling and marketing the stuff that's already live and out there. When this new thing comes out, that's a soft launch. As soon as that soft launch is out, great, let's kick off this launch meeting, this launch steps. Now you've got something else to go do. And it's so much better for marketing anyways because they're not setting up their launch steps based on something that they don't have eyes on. There's nothing worse than the marketer is trying to market something based on pictures from the designers that have vastly changed by the time they go out or that they don't know whether it's going to come out on the right day or not. So they've actually got a functional working version that they can share with some customers. They can start getting videos of it working. They can get testimonials from early beta users. And then they can spend, you know, whether it's two days or six days or six weeks or six months planning.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's a couple ways that you can turn that around. So, one is you should still be having regular communication so they can still see what's coming up in the now column. So they have a sense of what the order of things are and that things that are in the now column are probably weeks away, not months and months away. You should probably have launch readiness meetings so that people understand like this is the stuff that's going through testing and that's likely to be coming out now. But one of the other things that you can be doing for your marketing and sales teams is separating your hard launch from your soft launch. So what you should be doing is basically saying your developers are able to launch something on a particular date and it's the date that's convenient for them, right? Let's say they think that they can get something out for end of September. Now that might be pushed to mid October because things go wrong. Now at that point whether it's end of September mid-October, it doesn't really matter to the marketers because they're busy talking.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Flexibility. We knew that other product managers wanted that flexibility because we kept asking what they were up to. So we decided to break it down into these three buckets and provided that as an option. And people loved it. It became this first bump in our usage of broadband because people went, oh, wait, I can just say what's happening now, what's happening next, and what's happening later. And if I want to, I can add a date to the specific thing, but I don't have to. And I can be less and less granular about that as I go forward. Yeah. So taking from the concept of the cone of uncertainty, taking from the idea that things get less certain as they get further away, which is, you know, kind of how reality works. So, you know, the whole beef with the timeline roadmap is just taking apart the concept of the timeline. It doesn't mean we live in La La Land. It doesn't mean that we don't believe in having dates on the roadmap if there is a date that”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the point of a roadmap? Why are we giving them a roadmap? So that's when we sat down, as myself and Simon, my co-founder at ProdPad, and we sat down and we came up with a three column roadmap, current, near-term future, which we came now, next later. And it took away the simple concept of a timeline at the top. 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 due date or a iteration. And it seems that everything that you do has a due date to nervation just by the format of the roadmap, which is painful. This is wrong because we don't have that. The further out you plan, the more you're making it up. We know this. And so we wanted more.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now I can stop using PowerPoint or whatever tool I'm using or drawing it up and whenever I can now start using this digitized tool. But one of the things that we started hearing from early customers is about a month later, they said, great, but I want to take this and move all these things here over by a month in the field. Like, oh, that's interesting. We've heard that from a bunch of other people too. Now, why is that? Because had we just asked our customers, how we just built what our customers wanted, we would have just ended up with a multi-select drag and drop. But this is all built in jQuery and it was a little bit difficult to build that. So we sort of asked the five Ys. We dug in to why people wanted this thing and we found out that no one was actually delivering the roadmap in the timeframe that they were saying they were. So we're like, wait, if it's not just us who's not delivering the roadmap and none of these better than us roadmap product managers are building the roadmap on time.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good job. Now go deliver it, basically. And I would do my best with delivery. And I'm never quite able to deliver everything. Like something would always get in the way. But I sort of assumed that was my fault. Like I just wasn't great at delivery and I just had to get a little bit better at adding enough buffer and setting expectations and doing a roadmap slightly better. But I figured that this is how everyone was doing the roadmaps. It was just me who wasn't finishing the stuff on the roadmap quite right. And when it came to creating the first tools for roadmap, I've envisioned something that would actually help me manage this format of a roadmap more easily, which I ended up creating very early version of ProdPad, which was a digitized version of this where you could drag and drop ideas onto the roadmap and stretch and squeeze them and pan the roadmap back and forth. And I shared this with some early product people that I knew, some early users, and they gave me some feedback and some of them absolutely loved it. They're like, yeah, this is great.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. I used to do timeline roadmapping. The first version of Prague Pad was actually a timeline roadmap. So to take you back when I was a junior product manager, mid-level product manager, I used to do my roadmap like everyone else was doing the roadmap. As in I looked up what a roadmap was and it looked like a colorful Gantt chart. I knew what a Gantt chart was. And so I started putting one together, which is where I'd take the features that I was working on and line them up against the due dates. And I would get a little pat on the head.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Screwed up, and it's humanizing when you screw up, right? People don't like people who are perfectly perfect and don't mess up and makes them feel like they can't go up and go do their talk. I mean, I think that right there showed everybody else that they could go up on the little product tank stages, started the product camp stages that day and go do their own talks and they certainly wouldn't be any worse than that. Like as long as they just remembered their name, they'd be fine. Crack on. They got it.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People in the audience are rooting for you, like they were totally cool with this. They didn't think anything of it. And they just rolled with it as did I. And so whenever I see somebody who's struggling on stage, just give them a nod, a smile, clap them along, give them reassuring looks. And hopefully they'll just pull through. And if you ever feel like you're shaking, you're corpsing on stage, you're falling apart. Honestly, just take a deep breath and just pick out where you last remembered you were and just keep going, honestly. No one is rooting for you to fall over and have a bad time. Everyone's rooting for you to finish your point and get on with it.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to be shaky little fawn, shaky voice, terrified at the front. Okay, so it was one of the first ever product camp events that we were running. And the first one, I think I did okay at, but it was a smaller group. It was only like 50 or so people. And the second one, it had ballooned to 200 people. Like this is more product people than I'd ever known. And they were all super professional and they're all looking at me. And I stood at the front of this group and I was supposed to just, I don't know, tell them what they were supposed to be doing that day. And I've had a little half written down. And I started talking and then I sort of just tripped up over what I was saying and forgot everything and blanked. And I just looked up and I went, I'm really sorry everybody. I'm just going to start again. And I started again. I said, hi, everybody. I'm Janna. And welcome to Product Camp. And I just started again. And they were just totally fine with it. Honestly, it was fine. And this is the thing that I've learned since then.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“magical placebos are as effective as the actual drug whatever i'm happy with placebo yeah just just don't break the placebo effect for me right yeah that's right”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if it's a placebo, hey, don't tell me that. It works. Honestly, I feel better at the end of it and get on stage and do a better job.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The audience and just get used to it and imagine it full of people. Don't imagine them naked. That doesn't matter, but just imagine them there so that when you actually do see them the next day, it's not so stressful. What are the other things I try to do is find the people in the audience who are your fans. And you'll find them in the course of your talk. There's always going to be some people in the audience who just look forward and they're on your phone. Just ignore them. They're always going to be there. Find the people who are nodding along and smiling and going, yeah, yeah, that's me. That's me. and just speak to them and if you find one up there or one over there and one down there no one's going to notice that you're doing your talk just to them and just keep delivering your talk around the room to these few key people they're having a great time you're having a great time and you're doing a great talk as a result”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things that actually really does work is the Power Pose standing with your hands on your hips, and it really does. I'm not sure if it's adrenaline or endorphins or something. It releases some sort of chemicals that really does just help boost your confidence and make you feel better as you're getting ready to stand on stage. Something that me and other mine the product speakers. And, you know, I've done behind all the big states that I've done in recent years. stand there with your hands on your hips and just feel better about it as opposed to sitting there falling up in that tenth pile of stress. One of the other things that I always do if I get a chance to is get out onto the stage sooner rather than later. So when they do the tech check, just walk out onto the stage and just wander back and forth and look out to the audience and greet it. There's no one there. It's the day before. It's completely empty. But look up at the audience and just enjoy that sweep of.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that I've stopped doing is I used to sit down with a PowerPoint and start writing my deck in PowerPoint or slides now. What I now do is I start with my story points. I start with my narratives. I try to figure out what I'm actually trying to say. And then I fit it into the deck. Because what I was doing before, I would get stuck in this mode of the presentation mode and trying to make the presentation of the slides fit. My narrative as opposed to the opposite way around having a great narrative and the slides should follow more naturally.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Presentation, you've got to get up to that. Able to hear yourself do it and you're able to do the talk flawlessly in the shower and as you're walking to work and as you're doing your groceries and all this sort of stuff, then it makes a big difference.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I tried to turn into something. And I think it was probably six hours worth of content. And I brought this to the speaker coach. And I had a vague script idea of what I wanted to say. And she said to me, one of the first things, she said, well, I've taken your script and I've, you know, I've turned it around, I've rewritten the jokes to land a little bit better. I was like, that's great. I had jokes. And she helped turn the stories around so that they carried through. She helped with posture. She helped with delivery. She helped with even just phrasing of words just making sure that everything landed in particular ways. And one of the things she did was make me listen to it and play it back, which I had not done before. And I still hate doing to this day, but I'm now more used to it than before. And I don't think anybody likes listening to the sound of their own voice. I don't think anybody likes doing that, but it does help with it when you've got a large presentation, a big.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, such a good question. I mean, I have learned by watching a lot of other people. One of the things that I have been super lucky in my careers that by being part of Mind the Product, I've gotten to watch every last Mind the Product speaker, top end speakers. I've been able to see every product tank London speaker and a lot of the other product tank speakers around the world. We don't see what people react to, what works, what doesn't work. So I've been able to sort of develop a taste for a good talk and a good presentation and that sort of thing. but also one of the things that mind the product has been able to provide to speakers is a speaker coach. So when I was invited to speak on mind the product stage in 2017, one of the things that they provided to me was an actual speaker coach, somebody to take my talk and improve on it. And it was really nerve-wracking, taking my half-written talk, which I started months and months before. It started off with just post-it notes scattered along the wall.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start prepping for next year. Off we go again, and it's really hard work. Yeah, but there again, product management was also listed as one of the toughest jobs, one of the hardest jobs out there. I'm not sure if that still stands, but I know product management as it stood 10 years ago, five, ten years ago. I certainly did have a different vibe to it and was a really tough job.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Event organizer was or event manager or something like that was once listed as one of the most stressful jobs out there. And you can see why it's because all just lands on you all at once. And once the event is over, there's the sense of enui, as in like, it's over. And now Now, what the next day you're just like, you can look at the tweet stream, everything had happened. You can look back at the photos. And then you're like, what do we do next? Start prepping for next year.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not for the fainthearted, it's hugely risky in hindsight. I'm highly surprised we actually made it through some of those first ones. If you can, do it. There are some amazing Ways that you can monetize them, but it only starts making a difference at larger. And it takes a lot of effort to actually get to that point. If somebody once asked me, like, oh, we're struggling to sell tickets. How do you sell all those tickets? Well, start a community several years before and invite people and run a thing, some sort of human meetup every month, time and time again beforehand. And that's your marketing. Just if you undersell tickets to a conference, for example, it can absolutely break it. And you see sometimes conferences, they run one and they don't have enough people turning up and it's gone. That can just break it. It's ridiculous. Something like COVID comes by and it can break it. It's a ridiculously hard business. It's really hard to insure against. It's really hard to think of all the things that could go wrong and protect against. So while there are some upsides, it's not for the faint heart.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of these things. Yeah, that's what we said. Super. What are we supposed to do? We ended up having to just make do and found somewhere else and roll with it. There's lots of things that go wrong at that sort of level. But the thing is that we built up a lot of goodwill with the community and were able to get help from people around us, get suggestions from people around us. And when things ended up, like actually it turns out we ended up with a smaller venue than we expected or this was slightly different or whatever else. We had people forgive us, right? It was worked out okay in our favor.”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conferences are ridiculously hard. I mean, the thing that I've learned is when something goes wrong in a conference doesn't happen in the hundreds of dollars of cost, it happens in the thousands of dollars of cost, you know, a speaker who, besides they can't make it for one reason or the other, totally legitimate reason, sure, but you've already paid for their flights and their business class flights. And so you've got to find another speaker last minute and get them over. That's thousands of pounds in the hole. You know, it could be things like the printing went wrong and you found out the day before that's more dollars gone right there's lots of things that could go wrong our venue once went bust the after party venue once went bust three weeks before the conference that was year one um”
2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source