Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad)
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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 value is in the road mapping 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 listen and just check that you're on the right path. 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 one experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Janet Bastow. Janet co-founded Mind The Product, which I believe is the largest community of product people anywhere. She's also the inventor of the road mapping framework now next later and the founder of Prod Cat, which makes it easy for you to do road mapping in this new, simpler way. In our chat, we talk about public speaking, community building, road mapping, vision, and going from product manager to founder. With that, I bring you Janet Bastow. This episode is brought to you by Form Sort, 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 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. Form Sort removes the engineering bottleneck and gives product managers and marketers full control over the form-building lifecycle. With Form Sort, anyone can build highly customizable forms, implement
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