Coffee with Janna Bastow

This week, we’re getting coffee with Janna Bastow. Janna is the co-founder & CEO of ProdPad and co-founder of Mind the Product — the product community with events and conferences worldwide.

How did you get into product management?

My first job out of college was as a customer support rep — helping people over the phone who were stuck using our product. One day, my boss — who I’d been begging for a project management role — said that I’d been getting great reviews from the tech team. They said I was good at reporting bugs and they liked the way I called bullshit when I saw it.

My boss said “I’d like to make you a junior product manager.” I said “That’s great…what is it?” I rushed back to my desk and Googled “What is a product manager?” At that time, there wasn’t much in the way of resources, tools or guidance on how to be a good product manager.

Fast forward a few years, I’d cut my teeth as a junior product manager at this company and moved to London in 2009 to take a role as a product manager at a tech startup. This broke me into the tech-startup world. I worked with that company for a year, then another company for another couple of years before I left to work on ProdPad.

One of the most challenging things was coming to the realization that there’s no right way of doing product management

How did ProdPad come about?

The seed was planted when I became a junior product manager. The first thing I did was look up “What does a roadmap look like?”; I thought maybe there’s a tool to help me do this. I knew there were tools for project managers but nothing existed for product managers. I started sketching ideas of what would help me do my job. Over time, I realized I had a series of ideas and sketches but no way to build them.

One fateful summer in 2010, I met my cofounder-to-be, Simon Cast. I was talking to him about my sketches — he was a fellow product manager and we ran a couple of events for product managers together — I said “I’ve had this idea about a tool for product people; here’s what I think it could look like and what it could do.” He gave me some honest feedback and as the conversation got going he said “This would be easy to build — I could build the back-end.” and I said “Well, I can build the front-end.” And here we are six years later!

We used ProdPad (before it had a name) within our own teams for 2 years before we decided that what we had was worth putting out there and quitting our jobs for. The turning point was that as the team grew, I stopped telling people that I had built this thing. It was when people started saying “This is really cool, where did you find this?” that we knew we were on to something. I decided that if I can sell my team on it then I can probably sell other people on it.

I shared it with other product managers and created a landing page with a “Buy now” button, wondering whether anyone would try to buy it. It took 20 clicks before I quit my job and started working on ProdPad full-time.

What’s been your biggest lesson as a product manager?

With ProdPad, we learned early that we are not our market. By building something for internal use only, we built a tool that was useful for two companies — Simon’s and mine. It wasn’t universally useful for product managers; we had too many things that were unique to the way that we were working.

We built a version of a roadmap that was basically a glorified Gantt chart. It was cool in concept but in reality we realized the format failed. We spent months building this thing, launched it, and then realized it wasn’t the reality of how product people were building their roadmaps. We had to throw that out completely. We rebuilt a very simple version that sticks with us today.

Product management isn’t about having the right answers, it’s about asking the right questions.

What’s been your biggest challenge that’s made you the product person you are today?

One of the most challenging things was coming to the realization that there’s no right way of doing product management — there’s no process or structure to follow. There are frameworks but ultimately it comes down to soft skills — you have to learn to be a leader, to work with different teams, and manage stakeholders.

The reality of that is that every time you come to a new team or a new product, you’re starting over. You have to figure out the best way to communicate with your new team, your new customers, your new boss.

People ask me what key things they should learn — honestly, it’s to be empathetic; to learn to communicate, to lead, to say no without actually saying no, and to keep people on your side without having any actual power. That’s the hardest thing — to learn the soft skills and flex them.

What do you consider the traits of a great product manager?

Somebody who is incessantly curious and not shy about asking questions.

Product management isn’t about having the right answers, it’s about asking the right questions. The answers come from the experts on your team — you’ve got people who are great at development, who work with customers, and who know the market . It’s up to you — as the product manager — to tease that knowledge out of them and combine that knowledge into creating something.

What books do you recommend to product managers?

• “Badass: Making Users Awesome” by Kathy Sierra — I’m constantly referring back to this book.
• “The Lean Product Playbook” by Dan Olsen — this is a practical application of how to use Lean Startup methodologies to build products.

After speaking with Janna, this quote stuck with me: Product management isn’t about having the right answers, it’s about asking the right questions. I left coffee with Janna inspired to let go of trying to have the right answers and to focus on always asking the right questions.

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