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

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. And 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, uh, strategy level. So at the feature level, you'd prototype by doing a design, a mock-up, and you'd take that mock-up and you'd share it with somebody and say, "Here's a mock-up of the feature that I'm trying to build. What do you think?" And they tell you what's right or wrong, and you'd add some new copy or button to make it more clear, and you'd 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, then 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'll listen, and just check that you're on the right path.

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing your own products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Janna Bastow. Janna co-founded Mind the Product, which I believe is the largest community of product people anywhere. She's also the inventor of the roadmapping framework Now-Next-Later and the founder of ProdPad, which makes it easy for you to do your roadmapping in this new simpler way. In our chat, we talk about public speaking, community building, roadmapping, vision, and going from product manager to founder. With that, I bring you Janna Bastow. This episode is brought to you by Formsort, the leading low-code form builder for product teams. If you work at a startup, you've probably experienced the pain of building forms. Product managers come up with an idea for a new onboarding flow, and then engineers have to build it and then maintain these flows forever. Even tiny changes to the flow can take weeks to get implemented, slowing down your team's experimentation cycle. Formsort removes the engineering bottleneck and gives product managers and marketers full control over the form building life cycle. With Formsort, anyone can build highly customizable forms, implement complex logic, and send data to destinations like Postgres, BigQuery, and Segment. Companies like GoodRx, Candid, and Balance Homes build their most important forms on Formsort. Think patient intake data, surveys, and fintech onboarding. They've seen conversion rates increase by over 30% and have saved thousands of engineering hours. I always tell startups that improving onboarding is one of the most powerful ways to optimize activation and increase retention. Formsort makes this process as easy as possible, and it's why I'm a proud investor. You can sign up for a free account on Formsort.com and use promo code LENNY for 20% off a Formsort pro plan. This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda's an all-in-one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing. It's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers, and it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast. Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life with an incredibly rich collection of templates and guides in the Coda doc gallery, including resources from many guests on this podcast, including Shreyas, Gokul, and Shishir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there, like Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Uber, use Coda to run effectively and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping-ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special limited time offer just for our startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollar credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollars in credit on your account. (instrumental music) Janna, welcome to the podcast.