Product Management Webinar: Incentive System

About this webinar

Most product teams know what good product practice looks like. They invest in discovery. They talk to customers. They bring evidence to leadership. And yet, time and again, decisions still default to short-term pressure, fear-driven leadership, or the loudest internal voice in the room.

In this session, Janna Bastow, Co-Founder of ProdPad and creator of the Now-Next-Later roadmap, is joined by Ronnie Varghese to explore what’s really happening beneath the surface. Together, they examine how incentive systems, power dynamics, and organizational fear shape product decisions far more than most teams realize.

Rather than offering another framework to memorize, this conversation helps product leaders understand the environment they’re operating in and how to respond more realistically. From transformation efforts that never quite transform, to B2B teams pulled into reactive delivery, to practitioners quietly burning out under impossible expectations, this session names the tensions product people face every day.

You’ll hear why throwing more rationality at irrational systems doesn’t work, how misaligned incentives quietly derail strategy, and what product leaders can actually do when they don’t control the system but still want to do meaningful work.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• Why good discovery often fails inside modern organizations
• How incentive systems shape product decisions more than evidence does
• The hidden dynamics behind stalled transformations and leadership overrides
• What mid-level product leaders can influence and what they can’t
• How to create pockets of healthy product practice inside imperfect systems
• When staying and fighting makes sense, and when it doesn’t