Ep. 30 - Janna Bestow - ProdPad, building a Product Management Tool

Stories Connecting Dots with Markus Andrezak

The star of this episode is Janna Bastow. You might know Janna from her role in setting up “Mind The Product” or as one of the business owners of the company running ProdPad, a specalized, really cool tool supporting smart work of Product Managers and Owners. But there’s always more to the story of a person showing outcomes like these. In the episode, we follow Janna making her way from Canada to the UK. There she finds her self in a product management role, trying to figure out what that actually means. The role is not hat clear yet on our industry. Trying to figure that out, Janna is calling for action. She organizes community events for product people in a similar situations, which ultimately is the root of building the Mind The Product community. The rest of that is history. It grew to more than a community basically becoming a product minded media house. At that stage, Janna decided to seek the next challenge and follow and idea she had for some time: Building a tool that really focuses on the work of product people and only devoted to this. None of the tools on the market went far enough. So, together with Simon Cast, she went at it. Knowing the complex and multi faceted work of a Product Manager, she built the tool she would have liked to have when she started off. The tool is different in that it draws from all kinds of data sources that already exist in your environment and builds on those. You can build and configure very individual views. One main point is that all data which you base your decisions on can be seen and shared and thus, discussions can be based on that date. E.g. discussions on features in a spring and how why they are important or not can be based on the underlying data from customer interviews over inpur from support, any existing research data or stakeholder input. All is simply revealed without having to invest work. Another example is how PMs are supported in creating roadmaps based on existing data. A fun side story is how Janna was always depressed that she is obviously the only PM never being able to deliver on her roadmap “promises”. Until she realized in her conversations in the meetups that led to “Mind The Product” that actually no PM ever delivers on these promises. Roadmaps were simply too static. She picked up on the “Now, Next, Later” concept and implemented in ProdPad to huge success and that is one of the main sources of “Now, Next, Later” being so huge these days. Of course, being loaded with data, the current topic of Janna and ProdPod is how can we enhance the tool with the right level and UseCases of AI? The aim is getting rid of the boring work and digging through statistics in the background and giving you hints, rather than doing the work that humans do best. Janna invites you to try the tool and suggest use cases for AI that would help you in your everyday PM life. See the links below for trial and contact information. For me, the underlying backstory of this episode is how the role of the PM was hugely under-defined even ca. 15 years ago while now being hugely over defined. The problem over the last 15 years has switched from having too little information to now having information overflow, but still clarity is hard to find. It’s still not a clear cut role. But maybe that’s just the nature of the game. Thanks a ton, Janna for this open exchange about your personal journey. You don’t know me as a huge fan of tools, but I am impressed by the unique way that ProdPad is doing things well and different. It helps you define your own PM workflow or that of your organization. The way you configure the tool is the documentation of that flow at the same time. Also, it can help in managing up as well as in managing your stakeholders and help lead the right discussions by always exposing the right data for the discussion. It always helps to make sense of your assets and prevents you form simply filling out a “form” by asking the right questions. Thanks Janna for this great conversation! I can only invite you to have a look into ProdPad and see for yourself. Follow and / or contact Janna on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jannabastow/ How to access a ProdPad Demo: https://www.prodpad.com/demo/ ProdPad on their stance on AI: https://www.prodpad.com/features/ai-for-product-managers/ 00:00:00 Intro 00:03:12 Janna’s Background 00:08:06 Erste Schritte im Produktmanagement 00:18:09 Social Web: From Meetups to Mind The Product 00:29:14 Mind the Product: Growth 00:34:06 Start-Up surprises and embracing serendipity 00:40:47 Initial triggers of ProdPad 00:55:21 Eureka and Now, Next, Later 00:57:07 Exposure and Daring 01:00:53 Continuous Feedback and validation 01:03:58 What Problem are you trying to solve? 01:07:11 Supporting Transparency and Collaboration in Product Management 01:10:06 Potential of AI in Prod Management and ProdPad 01:14:11 Invitation to help with AI in ProdPad 01:18:10 What's next in Product Management? 01:26:09 Outro