Janna Bastow

What are some different ways, maybe not traditional ways, but different ways that a product manager can bring value and create impact for an organization?

I think one of the key things is making sure that the product is tied closely to what the value of the business requires. I think there's historically been a disconnect between the product and the business. I think a lot of times, or certainly back in my cohort of product people when we were starting, the product manager's job was closely tied to what the development team was doing.

I think a lot of companies are still getting themselves out of that habit and trying to reconcile good product management with how it can make an impact on the business, which is product management should be tied to getting those outcomes for the business itself. So you're not just building things for the customers. You're building things for the customers because those customers, if pleased, will pay money, which adds value to the business's bottom line.

What kind of things do you see showing up for a product leader or a product manager as they have to make this shift towards a sales and marketing conversation or even sitting in the middle between product development and sales?

It's not even that you're more aligned with sales and marketing. Backing up on why the work was very aligned with development in the first place is where the product spent its time for a while. Product was reporting before there were CPOs, there were CTOs and products reported into those.

But it's not necessarily that product managers need to be more sales and marketing-focused now. They need to be more business-focused. So, they need to listen to the business's goals and then orchestrate that across the different business units. Sometimes, that means solving technical problems; sometimes, it means solving problems resulting from what the sales team is asking for.

Where would you start, one, two, three, in trying to think about how you could affect and impact the business's objectives as a product leader?

I would start with discovery. If you were entering a business and you were a product manager coming from one industry to a completely new industry, it might be kind of terrifying, but you'd get over it because you'd have access to your users and you would talk to them. You'd do discovery, and you'd learn what you need to know about their problems.

You go talk to them and you interview them. You say to them going, hey, well, how do you measure success? What are your measurements? What sort of things do you look at? What does good look like? What are your guardrails? What does bad look like? Get an understanding as to what sort of figures and numbers and facts and other things that keep them awake at night. And you'll learn a ton about the business.

How now does your Now-Next-Later framework help this alignment? Like, what is your thought process? What is the approach?

Think of your roadmap as being a prototype for your strategy. Think of your roadmap as, as I said, a prototype. And it sort of frees you from making the perfect roadmap. Because when you're doing a prototype as a designer or as a non-designer even, right?

Well, roadmapping should be similar, but instead of your feature level, you're doing this at the strategic level where you're saying, well, I think we're going this direction. And you've got this information from, you know, your initial first guesses based on conversations you've had and what you think your strategy is. Don't overthink it, just put down, I think we're going here, then here, then here. Problem one, two, three, now next later.