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

**Janna Bastow** (0:00)
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 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'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 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 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:11)
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.
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