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the whole point about a road map 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
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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 mock-up and you take
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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 add some new copier button to make it more clear and you
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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 values in the prototyping process the value isn't in your roadmap the values in the road mapping process what you're
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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
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other people on the team with customers even like anybody will 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
1:18
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 Janet basto Janna co-founded mine the
1:30
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 broadcast which makes it easy for you to do your roadmapping in this
1:43
new simpler way in art chat we talk about public speaking Community Building Road mapping vision and going from product manager to founder with that I bring you Jenna basto [Laughter] 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 new onboarding flow limit Engineers have to
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first statement that's c o d a DOT IO slash Lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollars in credit on your account Jana welcome to the podcast hi thanks so much for having me it's my pleasure just to start off and set a little context
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for folks could you give listeners a 55 second background on what you've been up to in your career yeah absolutely so I'm a product manager by background I started my career falling into product management like a lot of people do
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accidentally I worked my way up to be head of product at a startup in London and then I saw the need for product management tools because there wasn't really anything like that out there so started building prompt pad one of my
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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 to the last
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decade or so and currently you have a company maybe just mentioned that before we move on because I think it'll be important yep absolutely so that tools that I was talking about turned into prodpad which is software for product people so it's a tool that allows you to build road maps and do your okrs and capture ideas from your team and see back from your customers and just organize all your product management stuff in one space awesome so you
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mentioned buying the product and product tank which is kind of this Associated component I'm not exactly sure the difference but I know they're related one's a community component right is that right yeah yeah so you I think you
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mentioned it's probably the biggest product community in the world both online and offline and as someone that's building their own Community around the newsletter and the podcast that I have I'm always curious just to learn what
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folks have learned about building communities especially for product people so a question on my mind is what do you think has been most important in getting mine the product Community right early on and then also just maintaining
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the quality of the community 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
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with some other product people and started chatting it through we'd all learned together and so it was just a 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 and just being there whenever those tends to be there so I'm hearing is just putting in the time
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doing it consistently I imagine a big part of it was having the right sort of people involved early on that are maybe the right exemplars of the type of community you want to build is that roughly right yeah absolutely I mean you
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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
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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 awesome what's the scale of the
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community at this point 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 to handle the exact numbers
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now and it did go in flux when covet hit I know at one point in time the product tank was like 200 uh going on almost 300 cities around the world I don't know what that number is today I know that it sort of went up and then down and then
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back up again some of those are digital still some of those are back in person I know that there's thousands and thousands of product people around the world who are taking part in the community in one way shape or former the
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other and of course some people take part in the big conferences as well I imagine there were some mistakes that you made along the way building this community is there anything that stands out as a man we shouldn't have done that
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for folks that are thinking about building communities these days when 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 power art 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
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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 Caterers under delivered and we ended up having
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to get all our 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 may do with what we could and we ended up sending cash cards to our
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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 paid supplier and they make it happen it's not that simple got it okay that's a plus one for me to never run a conference something I never want to do and this is a reminder of all the pain yeah Comfort conferences are ridiculously hard I mean the thing that I've learned is when something goes
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wrong in a conference doesn't have to in the hundreds of dollars of cost to happen to the thousands of dollars of cost you know a speaker who decides they can't make it for one reason or the other a totally legitimate reason sure
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but you've already paid for their flights and their business class lights and so you've got to find another speaker last minute and get them over that's thousands of pounds in the whole you know it could be things like the printing went wrong and you found out
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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 super you know all of these things
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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 so lots of things that go wrong at that sort of level but the thing is that we built up a lot of
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Goodwill with the community and we're able to get help from people around us get suggestions from people around us and when things ended up like actually turns out we ended up with a smaller venue than we expected or this was
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slightly different or whatever else we had people forgive us right it was it worked out okay in our favor just following this topic and most curious their conference is like a good business do they make a ton of money on some
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occasions is it always just like super thin margin how does that even business work I it's not for the same Target it's hugely risky in hindsight I'm highly surprised we actually made it through some of those first ones if you can do
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it there are some amazing ways that you can monetize them but it only starts making a difference at larger figures and it takes a lot of effort to actually get to that point to somebody once asked me like oh we're struggling to sell
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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 community Meetup every month time 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
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ridiculous something like kovid comes by and it can break it it's a ridiculously hard business it's really hard to ensure against it's really hard to think of all the things that could go wrong and protect against so well there are some
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upsides it's not for the faint heart okay cool that's another plus one another friend who runs events here in San Francisco and I'm always just like how can someone be excited about running events over and over it's so stressful
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and full of risk and there's always things going wrong like you can't ever have fun at these things so it's always a different personality event organizer was or event manager or something like that was once listed as one of the most
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stressful jobs out there and you can see why it's because I all that it all just lands on you all at once and once the event is over there's the sense of on we as in like it's over and now like now what the next day you're just like hey
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like you can look at the Tweet stream everything it happened you can look back at the photos and then you're like what do we do next start preparing for next year we start prepping for next year off we go again and it's really hard work
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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 certainly
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did have a different vibe to it and was a really tough job continues to be a very tough job on the topic of conferences and speaking I've watched a bunch of your talks online before we started chatting today and a couple of things they noticed one is just an awesome speaker and you're awesome storyteller and something that comes up a lot on this podcast is just how important communication skills are to product leaders and product managers and
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storytelling and you've also seen a bunch of people do awesome talks at these conferences so I'm just curious whatever you have in mind what has helped you become a better speaker and storyteller and then also what have you seen is important to folks that are really good at storytelling and presenting at a conference let's say right yeah such a good question I mean I have learned by watching a lot of other people one of the things that I have
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been super Lucky in my career is that by being part of mind the product I've gotten to watch every last mine the product speaker top-end speakers I've been able to see every product tank London speaker and a lot of the other a
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lot of things because 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
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things that mind the product has been able to provide to speakers is a speaker coach so when I was invited to speak on behind the product stage in 2017 one of the things that they provided to me was an actual speaker coach somebody to take
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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 which I tried to turn into something and
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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
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I've you know I've turned it around and Rewritten the jokes to land a little bit better looks 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
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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
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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 where she got a large presentation a
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big presentation you've got to get up to that level if you're nervous about doing in front of a thousand people then getting to that level that you're actually willing to able to hear yourself do it and you're able to do the talk flawlessly in the
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shower and as you're walking to work and as you're doing your groceries and all that sort of stuff then it makes a big difference so one tactic that I love that you shared is record yourself watch yourself keep refining but watching your
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actual performance looking back at the lessons your coach taught you for new presentations that you do is there anything else that sticks with you just let's make sure to get XYZ nailed because that'll help make this talk better
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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 right or slides now what I now do is I start with my story points I start with my narratives I try to figure
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out what I'm actually trying to say and then I set 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 the slides fit my narrative as opposed to
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the opposite way around having a great narrative and the slides should follow more naturally what about just like the presenting the physical anxiety of presenting is there anything you've done there to get better with
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that more comfortable 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
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chemicals that really does just help boost your confidence and make you feel better as you're getting ready to stand on stage and something that me and other find the product speakers and um you know I've done behind all the big stages
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that I've done in recent years standing there with your hands on your hips and just feel better about it as opposed to sitting there following up in that that tense 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 create it there's no
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one there it's the day before it's completely empty but look up at the audience and just enjoy that sweep of 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
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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
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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 there's they're always going to be there find the people who are nodding along and smiling and going yeah
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yeah that's me that's me and just speak to them and if you find one up there or one over there one down there No One's Gonna notice that you're doing your talk just to them and just keep delivering your talk around the room to these few
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key people they're having a great time you're having a great time and you're doing a great talk as a result that's such a good advice the power pose piece you said that it's like hands on hips I think there's also like when we
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raise your hands up and you're like Superman or something I think I think there could work yeah yeah I think people are different ones also I've seen that there's like all the signs that showed that was effective and I think it
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was one of those experiments that wasn't replicatable people are kind of like worried that there's not real science backing that up but I've done that myself and it actually works and so it doesn't matter if it works for you just
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do it 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 yeah placebos like someone made this point Placebo is this magical thing that we have you know
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brains it gets to things to change by not having any anything go like you just change things it's amazing it's magical yeah placebos are as effective as the actual drug whatever I'm happy with the placebo listen don't break the placebo effect
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for me that's right that'll be fine right yeah that's right one last question on the speaking stuff how bad were you initially just because folks probably see you see somebody talking like oh my God I'm never gonna
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be this good I used to be shaky little fun 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 was only like 50 or
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so people and the second one it had a ballooned to 200 people like this is more product people than I've ever known and they were all super professional and they're all looking at me and I stood at the front of this group
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and I was supposed to just not 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
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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 Jana and welcome to product camp and I just started again and they were just totally fine with it
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honestly it was fine and this is the thing that I've learned since then is people in the audience are rooting for you like they they were totally cool with this they didn't think anything of it and they just rolled with their test
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and die and so whenever I see somebody who's struggling on stage just give them like a 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 your
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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 in is rooting for you to fall over and have a bad time everyone's rooting
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for you to finish your point and get on with it that's such a great story and it's a good example of people have this fear of like the worst case scenario everything's gonna fall apart they're gonna be seen as idiots they don't know
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what they're doing like it's all going to be revealed on stage because you screw up you know you're talking and the worst case scenario like never happens in my experience and two if it does like just you know just do exactly what you said just try to start again it's easy to say hard to do this isn't like a conscious thing that people can get over it your body's just doing crazy you're like so nervous and just rationalize it to
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like no it'll be fine but but yeah it's fine to your point people want you to be awesome and succeed they're not there to like huh you you stopped you screwed up and it's humanizing when you screw up right people don't like people who are
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perfectly perfect and don't mess up and you know 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
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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 speaking of screwing up you have some very spicy
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takes on road mapping and roadmaps and then generally like the mistakes people make in organizing the roadmap so I definitely want to spend some time here so first of all you have some strong feelings against Gantt based Road
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mapping can you talk about that yeah sure I used to do do timeline Road mapping the first version of Prague pad was actually a timeline roadmap so to take you back when I was a junior product manager a mid-level product manager I used to do
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my roadmap like everyone else was doing the road map 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 where I would take the
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features that I was working on and line them up against the due dates and I would get a little pat on the head from my boss and they'd say good job now go deliver it basically and I would do my best with delivery and I'm never quite
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be 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
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expectations and doing a roadmap slightly better but I figured that this is how everyone was doing the road maps it was just me who wasn't finishing the stuff on the the roadmap bite right and when it came to creating the first tools
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for roadmap I've envisioned something that would actually help me manage this format of a roadmap more easily which I ended up creating the very early version of broadband which was a digitized version of this where you could drag and
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drop ideas onto the roadmap instructions squeeze them and Pan the roadmap back and forth and I shared this with some early product people that I know some early users and they gave me some feedback and some of them absolutely
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loved it they're like yeah this is great now I can stop using PowerPoints or whatever tool I'm using or drawing it up and whatever I can now start using this digitize tool but one of the things that we started hearing from early customers
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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 I would just build 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
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build that so we sort of asked the five wise we dug in to why people wanted this thing and we found out that no one was actually delivering the road map in the time frame that they were saying they were so like wait if it's not just us
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who's not leaving the road map and none of these better than us roadmap product managers are building the road map on time what's the point of a road map why are we giving them a road map so that's when we sat down as myself and
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Simon my co-founder at broadpatch and we sat down and we came up with uh 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
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timeline is that as soon as you have a timeline it turns it into a math charge 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
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date or a iteration and it assumes that everything that you do has a due date and a duration just by the Format of the roadmap which is painful it's just 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 all wanted more flexibility and we knew that other product managers wanted that flexibility because we kept asking what they were up to so we decided to break down these three
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buckets and provided that as as an option and people loved it it became this first bump in our usage of broadbed because people went oh wait I can just say What's Happening Now what's happening next and what's happening
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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 forwards yeah so it's taking from the concept of the cone of uncertainty taking from the idea that
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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
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mean that we don't believe in having dates on the road map if there is a date that we have to work towards it just means not penalizing ourselves by having a date on everything on the roadmap got it okay I didn't know that you could put
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States on some of the things that's interesting because I was trying to understand exactly how this approach works we should also mention you came up with this whole idea of now next later which a lot of people use now is that
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right yeah awesome okay so as someone that's been using gam timelines his whole career I'm really curious to dig into these ideas and challenge the default assumption I'm excited to chat with my friend John Cutler from podcast sponsor amplitude
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hey John hey Lenny excited to be here John give us a behind the scenes at amplitude when most people think of amplitude they think of product analytics but now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a CDP what's the thought process there well we've always thought of amplitude as being about supporting the full product Loop think collect data inform bets ship experiments and learn that's the heart of growth to us so the big aha
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was seeing how many customers were using amplitude to analyze experiments use segments for outreach and send data to other destinations experiment in cdb came out of listening to and observing our customers and supporting growth and
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learning has always been amplitude's core Focus right yeah so amplitude tries to meet customers where they are we just launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups there's never been a more important time
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for growing absolutely agree thanks for joining us John and head to amplitude.com to get started there's two questions that this brings up and you may have answered them in part one is just without dates on things how do you make sure marketing and sales and your CEO has things that they need for promising and or at least giving a sense of when a product will come out and the other is just aligning internally with like Engineers design
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being done on certain date Engineers being done a certain date PM's being done in certain data science how do you deal with those in this format yeah so there's a couple ways that you can turn that around so one is you should still
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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
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you should probably have launch Readiness meetings so 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
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marketing and sales teams is separating your hard launch from your soft launch so you know 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
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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 or mid-october it doesn't
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really matter to the marketers because they're busy talking about the stuff that was launched in August right they've got lots of stuff to work on they're selling and marketing the stuff that's already live and out there when
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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 meetings launch steps now you've got something else to go do and it's so much better for marketing anyways because
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they're not setting up their launch steps based on something that they don't have eyes on there's nothing worse than the marketers trying to Market something based on pictures from the designers that have vastly changed by the time
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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 work working version that they can share with some customers they can start getting you know videos of it
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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 the biggest bangest launch they want they can then spend the next however
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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 isn't okay
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great 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
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marketing projects and your development projects which is where a lot of those Things Fall Apart got it so kind of the basic premise is road maps or timelines sound great and awesome everyone would love to know when things are going to be
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done and if it worked it'd be great oftentimes they're all made up they don't work you don't hit deadlines they're always missed so instead of promising dates for everything you're doing you're better off generally just
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giving a sense of like here's where we're gonna work on now here's what's coming up next and then for the things that really need a date we're going to put dates on those things and give it our best shot is that true yeah right
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yeah that's absolutely right like if something does have to have a date we don't live in la la land something has a regulatory date when gdpr came down everyone had a due date on the road map because if you didn't hit that date then
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you were going to be in trouble sometimes you might have dates that are tied to things like the Christmas rush or two 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
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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 you
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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 then you're going to miss the deadline
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um 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 big crap because you're going to be pushing it out the door last minute or you're just going to end up spending so much time
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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
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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 I'd love to pull on that thread I was thinking about the fact that you're building software for
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product teams and so you have a really unique perspective on product teams and you've seen a lot of product teams a lot more than a lot of other folks and so I was curious what percentage of teams that you see are what you'd call like
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top-notch highly functional product teams that's a good push-up don't think I've got an answer there because it's gonna be biased because we naturally attract companies who self-select our way of working we put on our sites like
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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 to timeline nowadays because we make it really clear so I would say like
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70 of them are like we want now next later and I know that's not real that's not the real estate of people of product teams out there cool so yeah that makes sense I do have a sense that it's increasing so what I have found is like years ago when we first started this thing off no one was talking this way it was a whole new concept and people like no this is crazy talk you can't do it this way and over the years it has just become the natural
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way that people are working on it people are going of course this is the way that it works like why would you work any other way it's becoming the expected way definitely changed the discourse and change the expectations of the audience
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I guess putting the now next later he's to the site for one moment I'm curious what else have you seen separates the best product teams from mediocre product teams in terms of how they execute the people they hire processes is there
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anything else that you've noticed they're just like this team when I think of teams that are functioning super well other than implementing this process you're recommending is there anything else that often comes up yeah a couple things 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
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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 the business because they're allowed to ask those
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questions less silos things what's the lasting change that a team has made that made them significantly better at Building Product is it these two things doing more Discovery and maybe more safety imagine party grants will be
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implementing this way of working of nonex later is there anything else that comes to mind wow wow this one team did this one thing and it made things so much better for them like retrospectives retrospectives make such a big
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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 you know what are we doing that's
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working what are we doing that's not working okay determine 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
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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
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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 psychological safety that was somebody hitting them down by the neck saying tell me what's going to be done and when you know psychological safety is just
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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
36:40
from the resources you have making the most of the collective intelligence that you have within your company coming back to the now next later approach you're often doing something really hard at companies which is changing their way of
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working and changing their product culture and I'm curious what you've learned about what it takes to change product development culture and product culture and the way of working at larger companies larger companies are tough
37:06
they're tougher right I think of culture as calcification so calcification being the Limestone that you know is built up as slaughtered run over and that sort of thing and in order to to fix it you can kind of chip it off over time you can't
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just fix it all in one go and so in order to fix it you've got to chip 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
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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
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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 a leader who knows what they're doing and we can take this pocket of people and go do something here and then
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they're going to teach the rest of the company they're going to teach this section and then this section and then this section right you don't have to go and change the whole company all at once but it does take buy-in from above and
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sometimes that can be really difficult to take because the incentives from above are often misaligned with the incentives that it takes to get a company moving this direction ultimately a lot of these larger companies they're 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 of order growth but if the
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company is actually under threat from startups right if you're a big Bank you're in health Tech something like that you'll certainly have startups nipping at your heels and the reality is that you probably have enough cash to
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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 of your business and leave you with the tougher parts of your business
39:06
you know take HSBC versus all the companies who are coming up with it's got a starling account here and I've got a mortgage with somebody else and I've got your savings account somewhere else right you got all these smaller startups
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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
39:30
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 what's the biggest company that
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you've implemented this new way of building and is that how you approached it you found a team within the larger company to roll out yeah this framework yeah so that's how it generally works with the way that we work with our
39:57
Enterprise rollouts is like we 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
40:10
what we'll find is that we'll get one or two sometimes three or four many 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
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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 what's the impact that you saw at that company having taken on this new way of Building Product so we're in the middle of like 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
40:49
being used for ongoing products that are being used and delivered as we speak as well as like part of a mindset shift within the business because one of the things about broadbed is that it's not just a tool to help you deliver products
41:04
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
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create a roadmap in broadpad 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
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questions thoughtful questions like what problem does this solve and why would you want to solve it and what are the outcomes and what did you get it makes it difficult to fall into a build trap with just saying here's stuff to build
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and we built it and move on to the next thing like a lot of devtools 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
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outcome of it it's about 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
42:02
better product teams and more cognizant of this sort of work if someone wanted to experiment with now next later what would be a good place to go and just start to play around with it I mean you can start a free trial in broadpad you
42:14
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
42:25
login or a credit card it's got okrs and road maps and ideas and experiments feedback you see how it all sort of fits together but honestly and now next later roadmap can be done with Post-it notes on the wall it's just about saying what
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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
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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
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strategy level so at the feature level you'd prototype by doing a design a mock-up and you 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
43:18
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 values in
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the prototyping process the value isn't in your roadmap the values 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
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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 to listen and just check that you're on the right path and if
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they say oh actually I thought that it was going to go this way this way than this way or that way then the other way and what about this problem you've actually learned something you can adjust your prototype for your strategy
44:06
you can adjust your roadmap there and your robot all of a sudden becomes stronger becomes better there for folks that are listening and they're just like nah this is never gonna work where I work it's just like two out there too radical no deadlines that's
44:19
crazy I know you're not saying no deadlines but less deadlines what are like the most powerful three bullet points you could share with listeners or just like here's why you should have confidence this might actually work at
44:31
your company 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 or your sales team isn't
44:45
asked to give exact delivery dates on their work they work in a very experimentation-led way as well we 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
44:59
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 to be able to close a million pounds worth of
45:14
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
45:24
to spend that on my account Executives my sales team they're going to pick up the phone and do a bunch of calls think of these calls as experiments these calls some of them are going to work some are going to fail they don't know
45:37
which ones are going to work and which ones are going to sell 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
45:49
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 didn't know who's going to buy then they would just call those people and not everybody else
45:58
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 Investments and you're going to spend it on your team who's going to run extra experiments right
46:12
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 we're 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
46:32
than your sales person what you should be able to do is 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
46:43
the money and what you're doing but you shouldn't be accountable for saying what is going to work before you know it's going to work yet and that's the problem with this timeline delivery magic eight ball that we're asked to
46:57
give I like that two last questions before we get to a very exciting lightning round which I didn't tell you about we'll see how that goes so one is you have an interesting framework for coming up with a product vision and I don't know if you have this in your head loaded up but I'm curious how you think about coming up with a product Vision you have this like really handy little framework Envision is always this thing that people are like
47:20
man how do I come up with a vision how do I phrase a vision how do I even visualize my team's Mission can you share that with us if you have that in your head the product Vision template you might actually recognize it from the
47:34
Jeffrey Morse 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
47:49
the statement of need or the opportunity the product name is a product category what's the reason to buy and then say unlike this alternate if our product and then say what the statement of the differentiation is so it's actually a
48:05
template that we have available on our site and you can actually sell out as part of our product canvas in broadpad so happy to share that link with you so you can link it up and send it to your audience here Lenny cool yeah we'll put
48:18
that in the students I think that's the same framework as the positioning exercise if I might be wrong but if so that's cool so basically you could use your positioning work to help figure out your vision and just like a vision it's
48:29
basically a vision statement it's not necessarily the vision for your product it's just kind of how you think about where it's going to go yeah okay cool the last question European not your founder so you moved from pm to founder
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and a lot of PMS imagined being Founders someday I'm curious if you have any advice for folks that are currently PMS that may want to be Founders in the future what do you think they should be working on focusing on skills fish
48:54
rebuilding things they should be doing to help them in that future career 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
49:08
different teams and see a lot of the underpinnings of how 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
49:23
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 ah I think I could do this yeah so on one of the things that distract me is it's not as hard as it looks and it's
49:38
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
49:52
want to do it there's lots of resource out there as long as you surround yourself with people you're always going to be able to find people to advice advise you and to help you along the way and there's always going to be bumps
50:02
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 were a product manager as well and just be ready for
50:12
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
50:23
do with this I can talk to this person when I'd 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
50:36
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 awesome okay we've reached our lightning round the
50:50
way it's gonna work I'm going to ask you five questions real quick whatever comes to mind share an answer nothing else to mind it's also cool sound good what are two or three books that you've most recommended to other people whether
51:03
they're product leaders or just generally are to profitability I thought was a really good one what's a favorite recent movie or a TV show that you watched oh Sandman oh right oh it is British yes Neil Gaiman yeah very good definitely uh not for
51:21
children thought it might be definitely not noted what's a another favorite podcast of yours other than the one you're currently on ooh startups for the rest of us wow I haven't heard of that one tell us it's for basically it's Rob
51:37
Wallings podcast and it's for startups that are either bootstrapped or alt-funded or basically you know the startups that aren't the you know one percent top and funded unicorns but the startups for the rest of us awesome
51:52
what's that favorite interview question of yours that you like to ask I like asking people what problems that they're looking to solve like why are they coming to this table very pmmy question yes who else in the industry do you most
52:07
respect as a thought leader who comes to mind 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 but she's just
52:20
got this illustrious career she's been part of so many amazing teams built some amazing things written some amazing books and it's also just an all-round amazing product version and amazing person all in one Janna this has been amazing I think we covered a lot of different topics more than we often cover in a podcast like this two final questions where can folks find you online if they'd like to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be
52:44
useful to you wonderful hi I'm Jana bestow you can find me on Twitter I'm simply bestow there or come find me on LinkedIn connect with me I'm Donna basto I'm used to find there and come check out prodpad it'd be wonderful to get
52:57
your feedback on it because we are a team of product people and we love hearing what other product people think of the product we're always open to feedback we're constantly pushing new releases so check it out try the sandbox
53:09
we'd love to hear from you amazing thank you for being here Jana of course thanks so much [Music] thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or
53:22
your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode