Janna Bastow
Janna Bastow is a former product manager, and currently the CEO and co-founder of ProdPad. She also co-founded Mind the Product, a community for PMs, which has grown to 300,000 members across the world.
Career Skills
Product management is an excellent training ground for entrepreneurship because it exposes you to cross-functional business operations.
"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 different teams and see a lot of the under..."
Communication Skills
Professional coaching and self-review are essential for elevating a presentation to a high standard.
"One of the things that Mind the Product has been able to provide to speakers is a speaker coach... She helped with posture. She helped with delivery. She helped with even just phrasing of words. Just..."
Develop the narrative and story points before opening slide software to ensure the deck supports the message rather than dictating it.
"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 or Slides, now. What I now do is I start with my story points. I start with my..."
Physical preparation, such as power posing and stage familiarization, can significantly reduce performance anxiety.
"One of the other things that actually really does work is the power pose, standing with your hands on your hips and it really does... help boost your confidence and make you feel better as you're gett..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Company culture is resistant to sudden change; it must be transformed incrementally by starting with small, successful pockets.
"I think of culture as calcification. So calcification being the limestone that is built up as watered run over and that sort of thing. And in order to fix it, you can kind of chip it off over time. Yo..."
Leadership Skills
Product development should be framed like a sales pipeline: an investment in a process of experiments where individual failures are expected but the aggregate moves the needle.
"You're saying that you want a quarter million dollars worth of investment, and you're going to spend it on your team who's going to run experiments... Some of these experiments are going to fail and s..."
Retrospectives are a primary tool for fostering psychological safety and continuous improvement within a team.
"Retrospectives make such a big 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..."
Marketing Skills
Decoupling the technical release (soft launch) from the marketing event (hard launch) reduces stress and improves marketing quality.
"But one of the other things that you can be doing for your marketing and sales teams is separating your hard launch from your soft launch. So what you should be doing is basically saying your develope..."
Successful communities often start as grassroots efforts focused on mutual learning and consistent presence.
"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..."
Product Management Skills
A structured template helps clarify the target customer, the problem, and the unique differentiation of the product.
"The product vision template, you might actually recognize it from the Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm book. It's the elevator pitch template... It asks things like, for your target customer, who t..."
A roadmap should be treated as a prototype for strategy to test assumptions rather than a fixed execution plan.
"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..."
The Now, Next, Later framework replaces rigid timelines with buckets that reflect the 'cone of uncertainty.'
"So we sat down and we came up with a three column roadmap, current, near term, future, which became now, next, later. And it took away the simple concept of a timeline at the top."
Effective goal setting requires closing the loop by measuring outcomes after a feature is shipped, rather than just focusing on the build.
"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 outcome of it?' So by creating all these spaces,..."