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

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  1. “Running a conference, it's one of the most expensive and unleanest things you can possibly do. It's really difficult as a product person to pull that off because it pulls at your heart. You want to do something that's lean iterative, but you can't, right? If something screws up with the lunch order, for example, like you can't fix it. You have to wait until the next year and you just have to pull out whatever you can to make it good enough for that particular year. There was a year once when we ordered food and it didn't turn out to be enough because the caterer's under delivered and we ended up having to get all of volunteers to go to the local sandwich shops and buy all the food up and bring it in and stuff like that that was difficult at the time, but we made deal with what we could and we ended up sending cash cards to our attendees saying, here, let's make it up to you. Stuff like that, that just becomes logistically, really, really difficult when you're just thinking, oh, we just pay a supplier and they make it happen.”

    2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “That's a good question. I don't have the exact number, what you might not know, or what you might know is that mine, the product was actually sold earlier this year, so I don't have a handle on the exact numbers now. And it did go in flux when COVID hit. I know at one point in time the product tank was like 200.”

    2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Absolutely. I mean, you know, surround yourself with the people who are going to help you continue that community and are going to help you with that consistency and going to help you surround you with more and more of the right people. You know, one of the things we learned really early on was that we only had so wide of a network. And so being able to get other people to help us curate and bring in other smart people to help find other speakers outside of our network and help find people to write on the blog when we run out of things to rant about, you know, similar to what you do, Lenny. You've got people from all over your community helping to contribute to the wider picture.”

    2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Honestly, it wasn't so much that we set out to build a community, it was that we got together with some product people with the idea that we didn't know what we were doing. And so we figured if we got together with some other product people and started chatting it through, we'd all learn together. And so it was just the sense of sharing and collaborating and learning from each other and just keeping it as grassroots as possible as it grew and consistency as well, like just always being there every month holding a product tank, every year holding an event, but just being there whenever there was a chance to be there.”

    2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yep, absolutely so. That tool that I was talking about turned into PronPad, which is software for product people. So it's a tool that allows you to build roadmaps and do your OKRs and capture ideas from your team and feedback from your customer and just organize all your product entrance stuff in one space.”

    2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a product manager by background. I started my career falling into product management like a lot of people do accidentally. I work my way up to be head of product at a startup in London and then saw the need for product management tools because there wasn't really anything like that out there. So started building product. One of my co-founders who I also happened to start mine the product with and mine the product turned into the world's largest community of product managers. So I ended up founding two things at the same time and that's what kept me busy for the last decade or so.”

    2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “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 who listen and just check that you're on the right path.”

    2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “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 at the strategy level. So at the feature level, you'd prototype by doing a design, a mockup, and you take that mockup and you'd share it with somebody and say, here's a mockup of the feature that I'm trying to build. 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 value is in the prototyping process. The value isn't in your roadmap. The values in the roadmapping process. What you're actually doing is laying out your assumptions of the problem.”

    2022-10-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source