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Product Management Webinar: Better Product Manager

The Path to Becoming a Better Product Manager

What sets apart the good product managers from the great? Find out in this webinar with special guest Petra Wille, product leadership coach and author of “STRONG Product People”, and host Janna Bastow.

Petra Wille

About Petra Wille

Petra Wille, is a product leadership coach and author of “STRONG Product People”.

Petra has been helping product teams boost their skill sets and up their game since 2013. Alongside her freelance work, Petra co-organizes and curates Mind the Product Engage Hamburg, Germany.

Key take aways

• A solid definition of what it takes to be a competent product manager
• People development for product people
• Frameworks to help you take control of your product journey
• And more!

[00:00:00] Megan Saker: Hello folks. Welcome to our webinar today on convincing your stakeholders that Now-Next-Later works best. I’ll just introduce myself very quickly. I’m Megan. I’m the CMO here at ProdPad. And yeah, what we’re going to cover today is how to go about winning buy in from your stakeholders, from your team, to make the move to the Now-Next-Later roadmapping approach.

How to get everyone convinced that it is the right decision for your organization. But first Just a bit of housekeeping. We are going to make sure there is time at the end for a Q& A. So please, whenever you think of a question whilst Jana is talking, please pop it in the Q& A box. So you’ll see across from the chat.

There’s a box there specifically for those questions. So throw them in at any point during the webinar. We’ll make sure there’s time at the end. We’ll come back to them and go through them on. Janet will answer them. Also, just to say that this webinar is just one hour. Apologies to any of you that have a daunting 19 minute slot there in your diary.

It’s not. We’re going to keep this to an hour. Obviously feel free to use the chat at any point. We will, after this webinar, send you a recording and the content that Jana is going to be sharing today is actually a slide deck that you can download yourselves as a template and use it, edit it, adapt it, do whatever you want, use it with your own stakeholders.

So let me introduce you to Janna Bastow. Many of you will be regular ProdPad webinar attendees and know Janna. Jana is a product management guru. She’s in fact, along with her co-founder of ProdPad Simon Cast, the inventor of the now next later roadmap. She’s co-founder of Mind the product.

So today, as I say, she’s going to walk you through all the arguments you’ll need to present to your team and your stakeholders to win their buy in, to move to agile roadmapping, and then our next later format. As I say, Jenna is going to take you through a ready made presentation slide deck that you’ll be able to download.

Edit and use yourself and we will email that link to you at the end, but you’ll also see a QR code that you can snap at the end. Without further ado, I will hand you over to Janna. 

[00:02:32] Janna Bastow: Excellent. Hey, thanks so much, Megan. And hey, everybody. Thanks for coming along today. Reason why we chose this subject is because it’s the one that vexes product people the most.

We talk about now and X later until the cows come home and product people get it. But when they try to bring it. Into their teams. This is where they start hitting objections and friction. Now we have coached literally thousands of teams, helped so many teams move from timeline roadmapping to now next later, we’ve got a few tricks and ways that you can start, bringing them on board with this. So we’re going to share that with you today. And as Megan said, we’re going to be using a particular part of the slide deck that you can take for yourself to use in house to convince your product people or your, the rest of your team. Sorry, not the product people, the everybody else that now next later is the way to go.

So let’s jump in. But before we get too far, I just want to introduce you to ProdPad. Some of you are already using it, which is great. Thank you so much for your support. Some of you, this might be new to you. ProdPad is a tool that was built by myself and my co founder, Simon, back when we were product managers ourselves.

Basically because we needed tools to do our own job. We needed something to keep track of all those experiments and all that customer feedback and to create a roadmap that would show people on the team where we’re going. So we built something. And so what we realized is that ProdPad was something that was going to give us control and help us organize our work and provide transparency into the product management space.

So people stopped wondering what us product people were up to and why we kept making decisions like we do. And what it does, it helps you create a single source of truth for your product decisions, for your product work. So nowadays it’s used by thousands of teams around the world. It’s a tool that you can try for free.

We have a free trial. You can jump in and start using it right away. And we also have a sandbox mode in ProdPad. That’s basically a version of ProdPad that’s preloaded with example data, like lean roadmaps and OKRs and feedback and experiments and all this other stuff. Sat in one place so you can move it around.

You can try it out and you can see how it’s going to work for you. And our team is made up of product people. So it was founded by a couple of product people and we’ve got product people throughout the team as well. And so we are constantly looking to learn and iterate and adjust. So we’d love to hear your feedback, jump in, give it a try and let us know.

And I also want to highlight some really cool stuff that we’ve been working on, right? We’re constantly iterating ProdPad, as I said but one of the really interesting areas that we dove into. Last year was AI, right? We got our hands on the the GPT API and started playing around. And we realized that we could enable product managers to reduce so much of their grunt work by making it easy to generate ideas and to flesh those ideas out, have it answer questions like how you might measure target outcomes or whether this idea is actually any good, you can compare those ideas to your vision.

You’ve got your objectives. You probably, a lot of you are probably working on your OKRs right now. You’ve got your high level objectives. This will help you brainstorm key results and not just any key results, but we’ve tweaked it to be to give you results that are outcome focused and leading metrics to measure your objectives by.

And it gives you feedback on stuff, right? We didn’t just want something that generates stuff. We wanted something that can be like your sidekick, like your coach. And so you can take things like your product vision, which you’ve gotten product pad, and it’ll give feedback on it and tell you how to strengthen that vision and iterate on it.

And we’ve also built out, this is the newest piece of it, a chat bot that you can talk to and get product insights, product advice, but also it knows what’s going on in your product pad account. So you can ask it questions like. Hey what should we work on based on what our customers have been asking for?

Or can you help me give, can you give me feedback on this roadmap? Or can you help me identify things that we could put on the roadmap that would match with our objectives? So it has this sort of insight and it’s available for you to jump in and give it a try. So we’d love your feedback on that.

 And ProdPad is a tool that you can start a free trial for. So jump in, give it a try and let us know what you think. Now on that note, I want to start talking you through how to get people over to the now, next, later format of ProdPad, right? Because of a roadmap, which is the format that we use within ProdPad.

Um. The thing is that you’ve got to think about who you’re presenting to, who is it you’re actually trying to get on board. You’re going to have a lot of people often within your company who don’t want to move away from a timeline roadmap for various different reasons. And so we’re going to look at how to get your exec leadership team on board, show them the benefits of Why you should be working in an agile roadmapping format, like now next later, as opposed to the timeline that you’ve been using for the last few years.

But also we’re going to help you get other departments on board with this, right? So let’s say it’s your sales team who is holding onto that, that timeline roadmap and those delivery dates that you, they used to promise. And what about your marketing team, or what about your customer facing teams?

So there’s different stakeholders within your business who might have different reasons why they object. To moving away. And so we’re going to give you some tips on objection handling. So really you need to understand who it is you’re going to appeal to, who it is in your particular company, like who is your tricky stakeholder and you might have more than one.

And from there we can start looking at ways to successfully win them over. So before we craft our arguments on to persuade these stakeholders let’s try and understand the reasons why. They’ve got preferences for timelines. What is it that they think timelines give them? What makes them think that they’re necessary?

Let’s start at the top here. The, your big bosses, bosses, your exec team, they like deadlines. Deadlines give them a sense of control or at least a sense of security that everything’s going to go according to plan and timeline blankets are like a security blanket for them. They’re a comfort blanket.

They reassure them that everything is working. In some organizations, you can find that the business leadership will lack trust that any department is not explicitly commercial, so your sales and marketing teams that they don’t trust that they have a mature enough appreciation for the commercial imperatives of the business.

They think it’s necessary for the non commercial teams, those who don’t have enough revenue, who don’t focus enough on revenue to appreciate the urgency to have deadlines and dates. So those people who do understand this urgency can push them and drive that pace. So this is how leadership can easily enforce pace and help them clearly see when it’s not being delivered.

But it’s also important to understand that sometimes leadership, especially in organizations who are transitioning from that traditional business model to more of a platform or SaaS model can have a mindset. That’s a bit of a hang up. From the days of selling individual one off project products or instances of a product to individual customers, right?

They’re doing custom work. so It’s not uncommon to have deadline expectations coming from your exec team as a hangover from that, I call it the agency trap, right? When companies are working in more of a an IT project or agency model. And put it this way, software agencies need dates and deadlines because they’re running with a very defined.

Project right? A client gives them a scope and a time and a cost and they deliver to that. They have billable hours and a specific quote to meet. And these are paying customers waiting for delivery of the product by a certain date and possibly contractual obligations to meet. But if you’re not an agency, this isn’t how you should operate.

It’s what I call the agency trap when product companies act like agencies taking on custom work, and it takes away the time that they have to spend in discovery work. So we’re going to address that one. Um, also bear in mind that some of the pressure you might be feeling from leadership. Is actually transferred pressure, right?

It’s from outside forces. They might have stakeholders of their own. It might be investors or customers who are pushing on them to get these dates. So you’ll need to show the execs how they can manage investor or board reporting, or, manage other teams around these dates as well. So this is why getting your execs on board is so important.

Now, sales teams are the. Other particularly vocal stakeholder group when it comes to ditching the timeline, right? This is the other group that’s going to give you problems. And why is that? What is their problems? tHey might run into fears. They might have fears like they’re no longer able to make commitments to their prospects, which screws up their plans on how they’re going to close deals.

This is particularly. Painful if the company is running in that sort of agency style mode, as opposed to thinking about themselves being a product company. They’re worried that delivery is going to slow down if there’s no deadline pressures. So similar to what your execs sometimes think. And.

They’re also sometimes afraid that they might look foolish if the road map pivots, if you change something that’s on the road map. So we’re going to talk about these types of fears as well. And then you get marketing, right? So marketing might be concerned with how they’re supposed to plan campaigns and launch stuff without a timeline, if they don’t have an idea as to when something is going to be out there.

But we can talk about how we can work with these fears as well. And then your customer teams are going to be primarily concerned with how they can confidently respond to customer questions. Customers are going to be wanting, wondering what it is that you’re actually up to and whether you’re building into the direction that makes sense for them.

And so your customer teams are going to want to cite as to what’s going on as well. So we’re going to look at how we can win over each of these stakeholders and get them all on board with the now next later way of working. The way that I really recommend doing this Is to get your stakeholders in a room and show them the light, show them what they’ve been missing because oftentimes they don’t understand why you’re making this change.

And so if you can explain to them. Where you’re coming from, what the value is for their particular function, and for the business, you can start getting people on board. One of the best ways to do this is to get people into a room together, a Zoom room is fine, right? And what you want to do is share with them the values of a Now Next Later roadmap and make sure that they’re on board with it.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you some slides that we’ve created that we’re going to hand out to you afterwards that you can use. For your own stakeholders. So these next slides are ones that you can take home and the slides themselves also have cues in the slide notes, presenter notes.

So you can follow along and use that to get people on board. So keeping in mind that we are coming from a place where we have convinced or we’ve helped people, thousands of companies convinced their bosses and their teams to get on board with it. This is basically the formula the points that you can use now, because this is a take home thing that you can use for your own company.

Feel free to make adjustments, right? If there’s a different stakeholder you want to take in or take out or, address a particular concern, change these around, right? Chop and change these as you see fit. But here’s a way that you can start doing it. So imagine that you’ve got your hands on this deck and you’re convincing the rest of your stakeholders.

Here’s where you might start. So first of all, you want to bring them in and start talking about why Better Roadmap is going to get you better results. This isn’t just about you removing the pressure of having to put dates or you’re not too lazy to go get estimates from the rest of your team.

You’re doing this to get better results for your team. This is about driving high value outcomes for your company. So this is the frame of mind that we’re going to start this argument in this conversation in uh, and what you’re looking to do is help them move from timeline road mapping to agile road mapping.

So point out. What it is that you’re trying to do your proposal here is to move from one format to the other format. And what we’re going to do is talk them through what the now next later format is, and how the timeline roadmap format hasn’t been working for them point out the cracks in this facade and start.

Bringing forward this new idea. So again, this is very much an outcome focus. This is all about delivering solutions that are or to strategically important problems and measuring those results. So you’re going to provide more to them. You’re not taking something away. So what you’re going to be doing is you’re gonna be making a promise, right?

You’re going to be promising these different things that you could do for the company. One, like delivery will speed up. You will be able to deliver faster using a a timeline sorry a now next later roadmap, but you’re not caught up in trying to do all of the project management estimations before you jump in and try to solve the problems you’ll be shipping more.

You’ll be driving better results, right? You’re driving towards outcomes rather than just a whole bunch of outputs, a bunch of features. You’ll be responding faster to new opportunities and therefore not missing opportunities in the market, which is so important in this world when everything just changes on a dime every.

A few months, it seems, uh, you’re going to be better strategically aligned. So you’re going to be using cases like this to make the, you’re going to be making a case around how it aligns the whole team around it by having a simpler roadmap that identifies what your strategy is, as opposed to just having a list of features and things to do, and you’re going to be operating with greater efficiency, less waste.

There’s a reason we call it the lean roadmap format is that it’s less wasteful. And finally, you should be getting, you should be able to make the case that it will help you retain staff, right? No more sad developers who are leaving because it’s full of tech debt and, they’re sick of building just feature after feature with no real cause.

So I’m going to expand on each of these more later so that you have the points to drive these home. And those are going to be included in this deck. So first of all, make sure people know what you mean by agile road mapping and we use the term agile road mapping now next later road mapping and agile road mapping.

They go all by different names. Call it what you want, right? Call it whatever seems to work for your particular company. But I like the term. Agile because it speaks to that broader approach, the Agile methodology, which is, it allows for flexibility. It’s there for continuous improvement and rapid response to change.

And so therefore Agile road mapping has been adopted into road mapping or the Agile methodology has been adopted into your road mapping methods. And that’s how you get this now next later. So we’re definitely going to try to focus and sell people on the fact that this is outcome, not output focus, right?

You’re not just taking away dates. You’re actually giving them something, the outcomes here. You’re bringing the company into a more customer centric way of thinking so that the problems are organized around. Customer problems to solve. yoU are structuring with broad time horizons rather than rigid deadlines.

And so this is really important because this gives you that flexibility, but still gives people a sense of direction and pace and, distance how far something is from being done now. And really most importantly, it’s flexible. It gives you space for learning. So these are the things that you’re going to want to share with people as you are getting them on board with your.

Now next later way of working so you can then introduce that now next later road map as a specific way of doing agile road mapping. So this is the approach that was invented by myself and Simon. It actually came out of the fact that we were building prod patents early days and started looking at ways that we could build a road map that wouldn’t track people.

And so really we wanted to end the focus on features and deadline in favor of a greater emphasis. On discovery and it’s now being used by literally thousands of teams around the world. So many product managers are now using this and we’ve got proven cases of how this has helped team deliver more and be more outcome focused.

It’s also an easy to understand format, right? It’s it’s not convoluted with a whole bunch of junk. It helps you, it’s inherently strategically aligned, because I like to think of it as a prototype for your strategy, a way to outline The, your high level strategic steps before you dive into deep it gives you that flexibility so that you can change things on the fly based on insights that you get at the strategic level.

And it’s inherently outcome focused, right? Each of the things on your roadmap are going to be tied back to the outcomes that you’re looking to get for each of them. And it’s the most customer centric approach to roadmapping. bEcause what it’s doing is giving you clarity on what those customer facing problems are and outlining how you’re going to go about solving those problems.

So then you can start diving into deeper, right? So how does the the now next later roadmap work? As I’ve said, it’s often referred to as a lean roadmap or a time horizon roadmap. Now next later are the time horizons. The ones that are in the now column are your well understood problems with defined solutions and committed Development resources.

This is stuff that team is working on right now. You’ve got your next column, which is the problems that are generally at design or discovery stage with some assumptions that you need to validate before committing those resources. And then you’ve got your later column, right? These are your aspirations.

These are the things that are a bit fuzzy and are still taking form. They’re on the horizon in the distance. Although we do know that we want to solve them if we want to get to. That, the big vision for our company. And so basically, as you start working on things, you’ll take things from your later and you’ll break them down into more detail and they’ll move into your next.

And then you’ll break them down in more detail and they’ll become part of your now, and it’s not fully linear. Anybody who’s made a roadmap knows that your roadmap is not linear. And this isn’t trying to be, what it’s doing is mapping out what you understand. The product space in front of you looks like if this is what we tackle now, then what are we going to tackle next?

And what are we going to tackle further off in the distance? And as you take steps, think of these cards on the road map is stepping stones. As you take steps and you get closer to that future vision, you’re going to adjust and you’re going to say, Oh now that we can get, we can see more, we might actually take this direction instead.

And you shuffle the direction of these cards depending on what you learn. So it’s inherently a flexible roadmap that changes as you learn more. You also might call your roadmap columns different things, right? I, one of my favorite takes on it is calling the Now, Next, Later columns Doing, Discovering, Dreaming, because they outline the things that you’re going to be doing.

At those particular times during the, that far out on the roadmap, the things that are in the doing or what you’re doing right now, things in the second column or what you’re discovering. And the later column, the third column is you’re dreaming, right? Here’s where you’d like to get to, but you’ll figure it out as you get a bit closer as well.

Other teams like to wean themselves off the timeline roadmap. One way that really helps to work, helps people move over is to move from their usual timeline roadmap into something that has more of a fuzzy this quarter, next quarter, Q3 plus, right? And that way you’re getting people used to this sense of, time horizons, and they’re getting fuzzier as they get further away but not taking away those dates on day one. Once they get used to the, the Q1, Q2, Q3 sort of format, you can start bringing them closer and changing the wording to now, next, later, and that way you’re not stuck with things within particular columns.

But, what’s important is that understanding that the maturity of initiatives in each and in each horizon. So now is where you’ve got a granular area of focus. And whereas initiatives that are in the. Later are broad high level. They’re subject to change as you discover more about them.

And as initiatives move from right to left, they develop, they evolve, they, the mature and by the now column, they’re known pieces of work specs that are being written. Delivery dates are being planned. Development work is being done. aNd I can see that somebody Chris is saying in the the chat here that they found that Q1, Q2, Q3 to be a good safety feeling for people, right?

It feels more tangible to them. And I agree with this. It’s a really good way to get people on board with this. And there’s no shame in having. dates like that on your roadmap, on your now next later roadmap, because you’re still going to be getting most of the benefits of it. It’s still going to be outcome focused.

It’s still going to be customer centric. It’s still going to be easy to understand. And it’s always something that you can change later as people get more used to the three column view. So how it works, you’re gonna be talking to people about how you’re going to be populating this roadmap with or basically instead of populating your roadmap with features to be built your now next later roadmap contains what we call initiatives or roadmap cards, or, these chunky blocks, the big white blocks on the roadmap.

anD I like to think of them as problems to solve, or opportunities, or areas of focus, and within those initiatives are then a series of different ideas that could be worked on to try to solve that problem. We call them ideas in ProdPad Land, but I like to think of them as experiments as well. Because what you’re basically saying is we’re going to find several ways to experiment and solve this problem in order to reach the goal that’s on our roadmap.

And by using experiments, it gives you a little bit more flexibility to to think about how you’re going to solve this problem. You’re not meant to do all your experiments. There’s a bunch of ways that you could solve this problem. And so really you’re changing it from our roadmap is a list of things that we will do.

And instead, it’s a list of problems we want to solve and then broken down into how might we solve this problem. We could try this, and this. And as you work your way through, you get better at understanding how that problem is going to be broken down. And you start tackling that problem. You start working towards your outcome.

So the other key thing is that initiatives on the roadmap should be linked to at least one of your core product or company objectives, right? Those objectives are the that the green line or the blue line or the pink line at the top. These are all things that help you identify the why.

Why are we doing this? Why would we solve this problem? And so you should be able to create a roadmap that you can collapse down and ProdPad offers these collapsed views. You should be able to collapse it down and squidge your eyes and just get a sense as to what your roadmap is about, what your product strategy is.

Are you growing your user base up front and then getting revenue? Or are you going to tackle revenue and then market share or tackle the churn problem first? So you should be able to see these almost trends within your roadmap. That will help outline what your overall product strategy is. And then you break it down into more detail about what problem you’re going to solve.

And then break that down into even more detail about how you might solve that problem. So that’s the gist of how it works. Now there’s more on this that we can teach you. But we’re not going to dive into that because there’s a lot of nuances about how to do road mapping. I’ll show you a course.

Afterwords that allows you to dive into this stuff in more detail. But we’re all at this level when you’re bringing this to your team, they don’t need to know all the nuances. What you want to do is sell them on the benefits. So what is it that they actually get from this? Let’s go through these.

I mentioned this is the same list that I mentioned earlier. So we’re going to dive into these in more detail. bEcause NowNextLater does not rely on exact deadlines for its structure, teams aren’t asked to plan schedules ahead of time and commit to exact dates which are, for the most part, entirely fictitious this far out.

So that requirement for dates almost nearly nearly always sees teams Bake buffer time into their estimates in the hope of mitigating missing those deadlines and then being blamed and then feeling the pressure for that. Um, What often happens if you’re adding a whole bunch of buffer time to your work and putting that on your roadmap is that if you’ve ever heard of Parkinson’s law, it’s the law that states that work expands to fill that time.

And so what was once a cautious estimate becomes the actual time taken. You rarely hear of teams finishing things early and then cracking on with the next thing. Things are always coming out just about on time or a little bit late, regardless of how much time you said up front you were going to spend on it.

So the broader time horizons of pro of the NADx later means that no one is baking in buffer time just for the sake of having it. And things actually get delivered faster. If things move faster, then more work can get done, right? More features are built. What you’ll find is teams using NowNixLater deliver more, more often, and get things out the door faster than teams who have to spend all that time doing the planning and figuring out exactly how long they’d want it to sit on the roadmap, and then try to line them all up in a row.

Agile roadmapping and the nanoslator roadmap means that your team is going to move faster and ship more. This is a really key selling point and it’s sometimes a bit counterintuitive. People think that having deadlines is going to get them to move faster, but it’s not true. Deadlines have never inspired people to move faster.

What it’s really going to do is mean that you’re having to protect your butts and not get as many things put on that roadmap and therefore deliver less.

One of the other things that you can emphasize here is Talking about the outcomes that you’re going to be getting rather than the output that you’re going to be focused on, right? So each roadmap item is focused on a particular outcome, solving a particular problem for the customer and for the business.

So this emphasis means that the product team is accountable for an outcome, not just those outputs. This is really key because, remember, delivered does not mean done. Results have to be measured and iterations and improvements made where needed. Products bloated with ineffective features essentially become a thing of the past, right?

You’re not going to want to worry about that. So with Now Next Later, teams are motivated to drive real value and deliver against their objectives, not just have a feature because the roadmap said to have a feature. So you’re declaring the problem. Not the solution and the roadmap is a space to discover what’s actually best and the best way to solve that problem.

So roadmapping and the now next later format, what you want to really enforce is the fact that it’s there to help you deliver greater value to the customer to the business.

Other really key thing that you want to drive home is the flexibility afforded by having this timeline or this time horizon way of working, right? You’re focused on those outcomes. You’re focused on the time horizon, but really you’re focused on the order in which you’re looking to tackle things.

And you can adapt that order, right? You might finish one thing and then realize that the next most important thing is not what you thought it was last quarter. It’s something new because. The market’s changed or people reacted differently to what it is that you built last quarter. So the roadmap format should give you space to adapt.

Naturally, as you learn more, so there might be ways that you need things you need to respond to. So there might be new discoveries from user research. There might be market research. There might be a competitor analysis. That’s been done. There might be shifts in the markets, just in the economy. Lots of things happen.

We know this now. There might be new opportunities like a. AI comes out or the next big thing comes out and you realize that there’s a huge opportunity to build that in where you no longer beholden to building, whatever it said you to build in June, just because June is here. You should build what’s most important for the business as that point comes up, as that time comes up, as that opportunity comes up.

And there might just be changing strategic priorities, right? The company might have to shift its goals and therefore your roadmap needs to be able to shift as well. So the now next later roadmapping approach, what you really want to drive home is that it’s going to be, allow you to respond faster to threats and capitalize on new opportunities, right?

You’re going to be able to adjust your plan as you go.

Other key point is that the now next later format. requires all initiatives to be linked to a product objective or a company objective, right? This is an IR clan way of ensuring that the team is prioritizing and working on things that actually bring strategic value to the business. You can’t put things on the roadmap.

Just because you wanted a new feature, you’ve got to be able to say what features does this problem solve? And why do we want to solve this? If you can’t answer those two questions, then it probably doesn’t deserve to be on your roadmap. So it’s a really good forcing function to get your team thinking about the strategy and aligning the work that’s being done to that company or product level strategy.

So really drive that point home about that alignment and then it’s also going to help you operate with greater efficiency. Everyone loves to save a bit of time and not waste their time doing stuff that ends up not being used, right? So the now next later time horizons stop product teams from wasting time planning out super detailed schedules that are far in the future about, what’s going to be delivered and when oftentimes that stuff.

Just ends up getting reworked or thrown out or ignored because they naturally have to change along the way. And it’s also hard to estimate that far out. And so the more that you’re doing it, the more that you’re making it up and that’s not a useful. Way to spend your time as a product manager.

You can be spending that time talking to customers or learning about the market or, figuring out the best thing to build next, as opposed to trying to figure out how long something’s going to take in three months time, it doesn’t matter and you don’t know. So it drives efficiencies and it’s going to unlock more time for higher value product management work, really drive this point home as well.

And then the last one, this is really key for people who are in the exec team are Drive home the fact that it makes for happier teams and therefore better retention. What you’re really getting here is the fact that you’re, when you remove the practice of setting deadlines too far in the future, you alleviate the pressure and fear that comes with hitting unrealistic dates.

The delivery dates. Put in place with now next later way of working are only set once work has been defined and specifications have been written. You’re not trying to plan way out and then hold people to these dates that haven’t been that aren’t realistic. 

What you’re really looking to do here is to what you’re actually looking to do here is also it reduces the amount of tech debt, right? If you have a whole bunch of. Projects that end up getting delivered one after the other, but you end up cutting it close at each turn, you’re going to start accruing tech debt.

And that tech debt stacks up, creates a tech code base that becomes unworkable. And you end up with teams that have just tons and tons of difficulties building things, unhappy developers who end up. Leaving, right? And so having this way of working helps to retain your staff and reduces your hiring spend, right?

You don’t have to replace people, you don’t have to train people up. fLip this around the other way as well, right? You want to tell them about the benefits, but you also want to give them the warning about what happens If they don’t, right? So delivery is slower, tech debt builds up, and you end up with a tech project, a tech stack that needs to be rewritten opportunities end up being missed, right?

You’re too blinded by what you said you were going to build at the beginning of the year, and you’re halfway through the year now, that you have to go build whatever it says to go do in June, that you don’t look outside and say, oh maybe we should be building this instead, because this is going to solve the right problems for us.

You end up with people being less accountable for the results, and you end up with your brand reputation sometimes being damaged if you build the wrong things, or if you end up missing promises that you’ve made in this roadmap, you end up losing people in the team if they’re not able to work in a autonomous way to solve the problems in the best way, rather than just cranking out feature after feature, which is soul destroying and oftentimes money is wasted building the wrong thing.

So many teams end up just building stuff because it seemed like a good idea when they mapped out this road map at the beginning of the year and aren’t actually building the right stuff. So other really key thing is that you want to make sure that you’re getting certain you want to make sure that people on the team are feeling this win, right?

So a lot of what we’ve spoken about so far are benefits for the wider team or for the exec team. You really want to be driving those benefits home. But also you can use these slides here to tell, to talk the sales team through or talk different mark different Stakeholders through, and we’ll go through a bunch of different ones as to how they’re going to win doing this.

So this is a win situation. You’re not taking something away. So for sales team. They’re going to end up with better objection handling, right? So presenting your roadmap through problems to solve can provide your salespeople with a simple way to handle objections and answer needs, right? If a prospect says a competitor has one feature that we don’t, the salesperson can drill into the problem that the feature is trying to solve, and then they can scan.

And then they can start explaining a different feature that we might have or soon to have that solves that problem and, maybe suggest that it’s a better way of solving it. So it’s driving salespeople to think about the problems that people are having, as opposed to just saying tick box, do we have this feature or not compared to our competitor?

You’re really truly getting people to think about the problem view. It’s also a safer way to share the roadmap, right? You might have two different types of salespeople, right? You’ve got one who is smart enough not to show the timeline roadmaps with prospects. But we all know some salespeople will just take that roadmap and share with prospects and go ta dum, go Take your pick.

What would you like to buy? And when would you like to buy it? Because we’re going to have all these cool features, which we know the roadmap never gets delivered. A timeline roadmap never gets delivered as. It was written out. And so it’s dangerous, right? You end up with salespeople who get mud on their face because they’ve made promises that the team can’t keep.

And so with using a now next later roadmap, you’ve taken the dates off. You’re not talking about specific features that can be delivered by specific dates. You’re able to turn that around and say Hey, here are the problems we’re looking to solve. We’re going to go from here to here, these types of problems.

And you’re not making promises of specific things that are going to be delivered for them. But you can use this as an opportunity to discover whether these problems align with your customers. And if one customer comes back and looks at your roadmap and says, Oh, this isn’t right for us. It’s probably not a big signal.

If a lot of customers look at your roadmap and say, Whoa, I can’t believe you’re solving this problem before you solve this problem. That’s good insight. And that might be a time that you can adjust that roadmap. So you can work with your salespeople to share the roadmap as you have it, get feedback on it and use that feedback to inform you as to whether you’re heading in the right direction that your customers care about, that your market cares about.

And it’s a huge misconception that now next later roadmaps cannot have dates at all, one of its biggest misconceptions. And this is the thing that often holds sales teams or even execs back. If a huge deal hangs on a particular feature being live on a particular date. Then you might be able to work that out, right?

You can it doesn’t mean that you don’t have dates on that roadmap. It means that you’re not driving that roadmap by dates. So something has to have a hard date. You can show that on the roadmap. Now, what you’re giving up is that your team does need to do the project management work to line up to get that.

But you’re still able to show specific dates. You’re still able to communicate dates where they are strategically important. And externally driven, right? So it’s not just about putting arbitrary dates on everything, but if something does need to be communicated, you can still communicate that on a now, next late, now, next later roadmap.

iF you’ve got a sales team on board with, or if you’re trying to get the sales team on board with the now, next later roadmap and they’re pushing back on it, You might find that they’re struggling because they’re not used to selling the product that exists today, right? This can be a tough conversation to have because sometimes it means that the sales team just isn’t up to the job, right?

They’re selling something that doesn’t exist yet because it’s easier to get somebody to just come along and state what they want rather than working. Harder to find the types of leads that they actually do that actually are going to make use of your product as is. So really key thing that you can be doing is working with your sales team to identify your ideal customer profile, your ICP, and they should be able to.

Target the right types of leads that are going to find your product useful for what it is today, rather than just constantly throwing it out to anybody and bringing in anybody. So you’ve got to be that, that that voice to say, here’s who is going to use our product. Here’s the jobs it does solve. Go find people who need to solve those jobs.

So that’s a a really key point is that you’ve got to work with your salespeople on what your ICP is. The marketing team is often afraid of moving to the now next later format because they think that they need a deadline so that they can launch their. Features they can launch their campaigns on the same day that you’ve launched your features.

And that is always fraught with difficulty because what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to line up a development project to land on the same day as a marketing project. And if that development project gets pushed back, your marketing project. has jumped the gun, right? Or they’ve lost money or they’ve lost time.

What you want to do is you want to separate your hard and soft launches, right? So your soft launch comes out and from that point you’ve got a version of the product that is in a feature flagged area of your product or is in a beta subdomain or is, turned on just for specific customers. And what you want to do is you and then you can turn this thing on just for your internal users or a specific set of users, maybe a beta group of people, and then from there, marketing can pick it up and they can plan out the biggest bangest launch that they can imagine, right?

But now, instead of trying to tie their launch date with your feature launch date. They’re starting from a point that the feature already exists. They can get pictures of it. They can get videos of it. They can start getting testimonials of it in this soft launch format. And then from there, they can plan out a huge launch, right?

Whether this takes them six days or six weeks or whatever it takes them to do this launch. It separates your soft launch from your hard launch. And at that point that hard launch goes out, you know that feature is going to be there because. It’s in a feature flag mode. It’s in beta. It can just be turned on as opposed to you trying to figure out if you can actually get things out on that date and possibly losing scope and quality along the way.

So make sure that you use the soft launch to give your marketing team heads up on Where they’re going with it use that soft launch to give them confidence in the feature and, show them what the feature is actually going to be as opposed to them hoping it matches the original design specs from earlier on.

And basically this means that your campaigns have a better chance of success. You’re always going to have a constant stream of campaigns going out. They’ll just be shifted by Whether it’s six days or six weeks or six months for the marketing team to make their their launch happen. But it then has a list of really solid campaigns that always work and the product’s always there for them backed up with great testimonials and videos and everything they need to create to make that campaign really pop.

And then with customer teams, right? One of the really key things we have customer teams. We’re talking support, customer success, account management, customer service. They no longer have to deal with complaints when dates are missing, when dates are missed, right? Cause you’re not sitting here making promises of what’s going to be delivered and when you’re focused on solving the right problems for the business.

And things are constantly going out the door because you’re shipping faster, but. If you have a customer facing roadmap that shows a whole bunch of due dates and delivery dates, you’re beholden to either hit those dates or let somebody down, and you’re no longer going to be letting people down. You’re just going to be shipping the right things that make sense for your business and just constantly keeping your customers updated on what’s coming or what’s been launched.

yOu no longer have to field endless feature requests. It’s more focused around which problems to solve, right? So you’re still going to feature requests, but you can align them with the problem to solve and be able to give people a sense as to whether these are the types of areas that you’re focusing on or whether these are areas that aren’t congruent with your strategy.

And you’re no longer taking in customer. Requests and constantly thinking, Oh, should we build this one or should we build that one that we heard last week? You’re focused on solving problems that are important for the business. And then the roadmap itself, the now next later roadmap, as I said, with the sales team, it’s safe to share, right?

It’s easier to understand this roadmap. You can basically say, here’s where it is. We are now. Here’s where we’re going with it. And here’s the reasons why we’re trying to hit. We’re trying to solve these types of problems and build this type of company. And that helps your customers understand whether your product is aligned with their longer term vision.

So it’s not about getting their pet. feature in there. It’s about whether it solves the right types of problems for them, regardless of which feature you actually end up building to solve that problem. So you can use this opportunity to get customer validation and to get buy in on your product strategy and your vision.

You can show them the Now Next Later road map and get that buy in. And then you can iterate your road map based on insights that you glean from these customer conversations. So make use of your roadmap, get it in front of customers and use it to get your get insight as to whether you’re heading in the right direction that, that works for where the market needs you to go.

Justin in the chat had a really good point here. He said, your customers can often be more forgiving than your internal teams. So once you’re able to show people that. You are building towards a solid vision. You are solving key problems. They’re not going to get picky over which feature gets delivered.

When they’re going to worry that you’re actually still constantly building. So show them what it is that you are building and what have been building and then show them the problems that you’re solving that you’re solving for as you move forwards. So let’s really drive this home for your team.

We want to finish your, your presentation to your team here with some stats. And you want to say, let’s not be a statistic, right? We know that 75 percent of businesses anticipate that software project will fail. That whole planning things out in. Many projects lined up on your timeline roadmap.

75 percent of them aren’t going to meet the time scope or cost or quality requirements upfront anyways. So what is this whole planning thing that we’re doing anyways, it feels like a big waste of time. We also know that 32 percent of it projects face challenges because they’re, they don’t have clear objectives.

So let’s solve that by making sure that roadmap is tied back to an objective. If you can’t tie it back to an objective. Don’t put it on the roadmap. We also know that 45 percent of features and functions in software projects are never used. So let’s try to solve for that problem, make sure that we are building stuff that solves real problems and aren’t just being put on the roadmap because somebody asked for it to be on the roadmap, which frankly is how a lot of that stuff gets on your timeline roadmaps.

And we also know that 17% Of projects run the risk of failing so badly that they threaten the existence of the company. So let’s not put the business out of business. Let’s make sure that we’re focused on solving the right problems in the right order and tying our problems, our strategic steps the problems we’re trying to solve back to strategic goals for the business and not wasting any time, not risking the business by building projects so badly that it takes down the whole company.

So with that, I recommend that you wrap up. This is why we’ve got a a slide deck here for you to use. You wrap up and then ask questions, right? Get people’s feedback. Product management process, a roadmapping process is something that you can build and then you can iterate on. This is why we have things like in ProdPad the now next later columns can be renamed.

It’s not a dogmatic approach. It doesn’t say you have to put this on the roadmap in a certain way. You can use it in a very flexible way and take this feedback from your team. Figure out what works for you. If you need to do Q1, Q2, Q3 or some variation of that to get people on board, do that. But take this time to ask questions and get people on board with it.

So this Grab a screenshot of this, if you like, this is a course that you can take. We’ve written this course that outlines what a NowNextLater roadmap is, what are the benefits in a lot more detail than what we’ve covered today, and then practical steps to transition from your timeline roadmap to your NowNextLater roadmap.

So take this course and prepare yourself with. This learning so that when your team is asking questions, you’re prepared. Lesson four is all about convincing your stakeholders, right? Getting those tricky stakeholders on board. We have shared this deck with you as well. So grab a screenshot of this page too.

This deck is basically the same deck that I was just showing you a minute ago. But it has notes in this, in the Speaker section that you can use to talk your team through and get them on board. It’s completely editable, so take out the parts that don’t work for you, add in parts that you think will work for your particular context.

But this is a tool that you can use to get your team on board. Lauren’s just asked as to whether we’re going to be sharing this with the recording. Yes, absolutely. So you’re all going to get a copy of this. Feel free to share it with your teams, share it with your fellow product people, share it around, make use of it.

We want to just help people get away from timeline roadmaps and move them to NowNix later. aNd on that note, I want to invite questions. 

[00:49:44] Megan Saker: That was great, Jenna. Thank you very much. We’ve actually got a lot of 

[00:49:47] Janna Bastow: questions. All right, let’s tackle them. 

[00:49:50] Megan Saker: In fact, Ryan says it feels like we need an after party.

There’s so many questions to come in. So listen, we’ve only got five minutes. We might not get to all these questions. If we don’t, I’ll collect the questions, extract some answers from Jenna’s head and maybe include those in the email afterwards. Okay. So where shall 

[00:50:08] Janna Bastow: we start? Um, there’s so Ryan asked, do we have any good visuals that show how attempting to the team make more at the same time causes them to slow down?

I have seen something like this, so I don’t have one in this deck but I can definitely point you to something that I think might be helpful. Or if not, I can scratch it out. I’ve done it, that same sort of thing on a piece of paper before and showed it to people to make that case. So really what you’re looking for is something to.

Really nail home that point that having people work on multiple things at the same time actually makes them slower. And that is a truism, right? What often happens with the timeline roadmap is that they end up trying to tackle a whole bunch of different things and they don’t actually move faster.

And this was an interesting 

[00:50:59] Megan Saker: question, Janna. How would you respond to the claim that it won’t work for B2B software because enterprise customers require reliable time and feature based roadmaps or they won’t buy 

[00:51:11] Janna Bastow: in? So I’d actually push back on that because most of the time enterprise customers don’t require that, right?

Enterprise customers, just like any other customers, buying the product that you have today. If you’re not able to sell that product as it is today, either the product isn’t good enough, And, shouldn’t be out on the market with a big sales team trying to sell it because it’s not ready. Or you’re selling to the wrong types of customers.

Enterprise customers like to throw their weight around. They like to say, hey, we’re so big that you should go build this one thing. But what you should be doing is turning that around and saying, that’s good feedback. And we’re going to take that on board. But focus on building the thing that’s best for the wider market and is going to get you more.

Of the right types of customers, whether those are enterprise or not. So if you’ve got like a whole bunch of enterprise customers asking for the same thing, you might want to prioritize that, right? You’re moving something up in the roadmap. But each time you take a custom piece of work and you say this enterprise customer wants to buy a product, but it needs this one custom thing that no one else is ever going to use again, that is work that you’re going to spend for that month or several months building that thing that you won’t be able to spend doing.

Discovery work and experimentation led work that’s going to drive the product to the right types of customers in the future. If you’re just constantly building these custom pieces of work that don’t fit with your product roadmap, you’re going to end up with a Frankenstein of a product that can’t really be sold by to anybody and can’t be supported well either.

So it’s really important to actually think about whether these things are worth doing or not, and oftentimes teams who are in the habit of doing that aren’t spending enough time finding the right customers, that ICP were stuck in that agency trap, right? What they’re really doing is they are selling off pieces of their time in order to get small bits of cash or sometimes large bits of cash.

But they’ve got to be and I’ve got a whole talk that I can share on this, the agency trap, you’ve got to make sure that you’re not falling into this agency trap and building stuff just because someone said to jump, right? So you’ve got to find that line. 

[00:53:10] Megan Saker: Janna, we had, A couple of people wanting to know your thoughts on jobs to be done. And that’s sitting as part of the now, next, later. 

[00:53:18] Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. So jobs to be done worked really well with the now, next, later. Basically it aligns with the problems to be solved, right? If you’re saying that there’s a whole bunch of customers who want to have who want to solve for this particular job and your product doesn’t do that now, then the problem to solve is well to.

Allow for people to solve that problem, to do that job. And so that becomes the placeholder on your roadmap. And within there, you might have a bunch of different experiments or things that you can do to help them get to that point to be able to solve that particular job. So jobs to be done is a really good way of thinking about things.

Cause it aligns your customer problems with your business problems. 

[00:53:57] Megan Saker: And this, we’ve got Kayla and Catherine are both experiencing the same problem. How do you set limits on what classifies as now? I have stakeholders that try to push a lot of items into the now when we simply don’t have the resources to tackle every item in the now 

[00:54:12] Janna Bastow: column.

Yeah. Everything is now, nothing is now, right? Exactly. There’s a couple of things you can do. Treat it very much like a Kanban board with work in progress limits. In ProdPad, you can see how many initiatives and how many ideas you have in each column. And if you have only one team working on stuff, you probably shouldn’t have 10 different, um, now things.

Cause are you actually working on that many right now? Or actually, are they just trying to make them look like they’re happening closer by not putting them in the next. So use that forcing function. What are you actually working on right now? What is in active discovery and active delivery? That’s keeping your team busy right now.

Everything else put into the next and prioritize in there. The other thing is trying not to go too granular. Some people break their problems into really granular, little tiny problems, and they’ll have 20 different problems. And actually, if you took a step back, take a step back, you’d realize this is one problem area, and this is another problem area, group them together and tackle them.

And, as they move into your now column, you can break them down into more detail. But try not to have. hugely granular roadmap that becomes a pain in the butt to read. Ideally, your roadmap shouldn’t be any more than what fits on a screen or two, maybe a scroll but not a big scroll. You want something that if you printed it out, it fits within a printed page or two.

So you can hand it to somebody and they can read it. You don’t want an overwhelming roadmap with all the things. It’s not a replacement for your backlog. Otherwise it doesn’t actually tell people what your strategy is.

[00:55:39] Megan Saker: We are now out of time. We still have a whole bunch of questions here that we haven’t answered.

So I think the best thing we’ll do is, like I say, I will collate them all and we will write out the answers and make sure you can all see what was asked and indeed Jenna’s reply to that. Thank you very much, Janna. That was great. Like I say we will email round both the recording and the course and the the slide deck so you can take that away and use that with your stakeholders.

So best of luck making the move to Now Next Later and do let us know how you get on and if you want any more help. 

[00:56:21] Janna Bastow: Yep, absolutely. So everybody’s looking to make this transition. Get in touch. Let us know how you get on with it. Let us know who your tricky stakeholder is, and we’ll be happy to help you through, provide any guidance on that.

We’ve probably written something for it. And as Megan said, that we are going to take your questions and make sure that we we get those answers out for you because this is a an area that is fraught with contention. So let’s help you get through it. Good luck with everything, grab that presentation, and we’ll see you on the flip side when you’ve got your NowNext later.

Good luck everyone! And bye for now.

Janna Bastow: [00:00:00]
Hello, everybody, and welcome. So glad to have you all here. All right, let me get that chat up, because I want to see what you’re all saying as we are talking today as well. All right. Good. I’m seeing some familiar faces, good to see you all here. All right. So welcome to our series of webinars that we run here at ProdPad. And what we tend to do here is we have a mix of presentations and firesides that we include as this series of webinars that we run here at ProdPad. And we always invite amazing experts that we know, and that we find out there in the real world who bring to us their excellent insights. And it’s always  with this focus on the content and the learning and the sharing. So you’re going to be getting lots of that today.

Today is going to be recorded and shared afterwards, and you will have a chance to ask questions. So by all means get in here, make use of the chat, make use of the Q&A section to ask your questions. And you will get a copy of this afterwards as well. We’ll be putting it up on our page, so you’ll be able to get the info on this, so you can share it around to your colleagues and all that kind of stuff. 

Before I jump in and get started with this, I just want to tell you a little bit about ProdPad, which is what we do. It was originally a tool built by myself and my co-founder, Simon. You might know us as a couple of the founders of Mind the Product, but we were product managers ourselves originally, and we needed tools to do our own jobs.

We needed something to keep track of the experiments we were running to try to hit the business objectives and to try to solve our customer problems and to keep tabs on all the ideas and feedback that made up our backlog. And building ProdPad gave us control and organization and transparency. So it wasn’t long before we shared it with the other product people that we knew around us. And today, it’s used by thousands of teams around the world. And it’s free to try, we have a Sandbox mode where it has example product management data, so you can actually see how things like lean roadmaps and OKRs and experiments, and everything else fits together in this product management space. And our team is made up of product people, myself and my co-founder are product people, we’ve got a bunch of product people throughout the team. So start a trial today and then get in touch and  let us know your feedback, we’d love to hear how it’s working. 

I also have a special thing to announce, because every week we do interesting launches, we launch every Wednesday. And we actually did a really interesting one just recently, which is what we call Ask DotBot. And for those of you who don’t know DotBot, DotBot is the AI friend who lives in ProdPad, who makes connections and helps you de-duplicate and merge ideas and spot connections between the feedback your customers have and the ideas that your team is coming up with. So DotBot lives within ProdPad already, but you can now ask DotBot questions about your backlog of feedback. Ask it things like, “How could we improve this feature?”, or “What frustrates our customers about our product?”, or “What should we build next?”

And it will dig in, read, and figure out what your customers are asking for, and give you answers in a nice human readable format. So it’s a Beta mode feature, it is brand new, but for anybody who’s trialing ProdPad right now, you can turn on that Beta mode and give it a try, and we’d love your feedback on that as well. 

So that’s enough about us. I want to talk about Petra Wille, because Petra has joined us here today, and she’s a wonderful guest, and I want to tell you a little bit about how I know Petra. I know her through Mind the Product. She’s one of the organizers and she’s the curator behind the Mind the Product Engage Hamburg event. So if anybody’s ever been to a Mind the Product event or the Engage Events Petra is one of the forces behind that.

And she’s also a product leadership coach and the author of this amazing new book called STRONG Product People. So Petra and I have hung out in cities all over the place, usually at Mind the Product conferences and related festivities around that, ask us about the boats and all that. You know, we’re long overdue for real life catch-up, Petra, you and I but in the meantime, Petra’s used her lockdown time to write this new book, which we’re gonna be hearing about, and we’re actually gonna be raffling offline to to one of you lucky listeners today, as a signed copy from Petra. Today, ask your questions in the Q&A bar in Zoom, I’m gonna try to pick up some of these questions as we go, and as well as if we have extra time at the end, we’ll definitely have time for questions. Petra, huge welcome for me, and everyone, jump in and say hello to Petra! 

Petra Wille: [00:04:24]
Hello, everyone. Thanks for having me today!

Janna Bastow: [00:04:28]
So Petra, you’ve been a leadership coach for years and, you’ve recently launched this new book I also wanted to hear more about this product coaching cards concept that you’ve done, so we’ll hear about that a little bit later. But just to make sure everyone’s on the same page, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Petra Wille: [00:04:49]
Sure. Happy to do so! My background is actually pretty classical product management career path, so to say. Started out as an engineer so that was the first four years of the job, and slowly transitioned into what was called a project management role back at the time. My engineering colleagues just pushed me in front of the customer, and said “You are the one, you’re good at talking, you’re good at bringing these requirements back, you’re good at discussing timelines with them and explaining why things are taking longer than we actually expected.” So that’s actually how I started. And after doing this project management role for one or two years, I saw a product management job description online, and I read through it, never heard of product management, but it fit exactly my skills and my competencies and what I wanted to do.

So it was a bit of a lucky coincidence that I stumbled upon this job ad. I applied, I landed the job, which was super cool. It was an 80 people startup back at the time, so rather small social network platform, a business social network, which is called Xing, and rather popular in the German speaking market, so to say. It’s a bit like LinkedIn, or it was, but like LinkedIn back at the time. Yeah, and from there I, yeah, climbed the product management career ladder, so to say, a lot of individual contributor, senior product management work ultimately took a, head of product role at the startup later, did this for several years, and then seven years back, decided that I want to do this freelance first as an interim Head of Product, I did a lot of interims leadership gigs.

In Germany, it’s pretty common that people are on paternity leave or maternity leave for about a year. So whenever a product leader leaves for that long a period of time, then somebody else needs to take care of the product team. And that’s the first things that I did. And then naturally or, yeah, gradually, it became more of a product coaching role, so the product lead was still there, but can somebody from outside bring another perspective and help us improve the product craft in our company? Yeah, and the last two years, I’m mainly focusing on helping product leaders to get better at what they do, and a big part of that as we all know, or as most of the product people would hope, is people development, and that’s what the book is talking about mainly. So how can a product leader be a great coach for product folks? How can they help them understand what better looks like? So a more competent version of themselves, how can they help them excel in what they’re currently doing? And that’s what the book mainly talks about. Yeah.

Janna Bastow: [00:07:36]
Yeah. What an amazing, what an important topic, really, because, at the end of the day product managers often fill their time looking at different frameworks or different tactics that they can do, different hard skills they can pick up, but at the end of the day, it’s the people side of the role that’s the most difficult. As I once said I did a talk that was basically called People are Hard [laughs].

Petra Wille: [00:07:59]
[laughs] Remember that one, it was awesome.

Janna Bastow: [00:08:01]
And it wasn’t as, it wasn’t as definitive as yours about what to actually do with the people. And , you it’s really good to see  you taking these tough challenges and actually putting some interesting frameworks around it helping people break down some of these challenges, understanding where they’re coming from, and what they can actually practically do about it in their jobs.

Petra Wille: [00:08:19]
Yeah. Because it’s super hard for product leads to start with a blank slate, so to say, right? So how could you actually manage expectations and explain to your product managers what you think good should look like. So what is your definition of good, and it’s super hard to start with a blank slate, so that’s why I created what we will for sure be talking about as well, I call it the product management wheel. It’s a framework to actually help people to reflect on what they’re already capable of, and where there may be gaps or white spots, or what they could actually learn more or try more. And that helps, and I, but I strongly encourage companies to customize this to their needs. So it’s not a one size fits all always. Yeah, you have it up here.

Janna Bastow: [00:09:00]
There we go. I have the wheel for you here.

Petra Wille: [00:09:02]
Awesome [laughing]. Should I briefly talk the audience through it, maybe, maybe  –

Janna Bastow: [00:09:08]
Yeah. It’d actually really good to hear a little bit about what this what this wheel means and how you use it.

Petra Wille: [00:09:14]
Yeah. The idea was to come up with something—career frameworks often are super focused on the soft skill part of the job, because that’s usually what you can come up in the company to rule them all, so to say, because the soft skill part is something the HR folks need, and maybe the business development folks need, the marketing folks, and the product folks, and the engineers. So that’s why it is easy to create a framework, which is mainly talking about the soft skills, communication, collaboration, all these kind of things. But when it comes to the more, “How are you doing this product management work, what is the important steps in the process, what are the skills and the competencies you need to acquire?” Then it’s often harder to find a framework that is actually doing this.

And I was creating that, 2016, where, for my own, actually for my own coaching practice, because when you start a coaching, a good coach would actually do something like, “Okay, let’s figure out where you actually are, where you want to end up, how I can help you to get there, what are your current goals?” and I was lacking such a framework, and the frameworks out there were not sufficient or not tailored to the needs of a product person. That’s, so that’s why I came up with the product wheel, and it actually talks about eight dimensions. I tried to make it as tool and framework agnostic as possible. It still talks about things like product discovery, and if you’re using a different name in your company, that’s perfectly fine, right, so as said, you need to customize it. 

And it’s even a great tool for a self-assessment too, so to all the product folks out there, if your boss is maybe not taking care about your personal development that much, you could use it. Fill it out on your own, or ask your engineers, quality assurance folks, your agile coach for a bit of feedback as well which makes a pretty nice 360 degree feedback to some extent. And that’s how you can identify the things you want to actually improve. The eight dimensions are, so first of all, it’s, is the product manager able to understand underlying customer problems, what customer pain points are, or what the company actually needs in the current situation? So that’s the understand the problem part. Then once they understand the problem, are they able to ideate on various solutions and maybe test them and experiment a bit, do some planning, is really the roadmapping part, and what do we do, what do we want to do next, and what’s maybe a later, and what’s maybe a never.

So that’s the, do some planning part. Get it done is, are they actually able to rally their development team behind a shared goal, and do they know how to iteratively release things and create software? So that’s really like the day to day work with a Scrum team or an agile team. Listen and learn is, once we put it out there, is the product manager able to listen to the voice of the customer that can be touching upon user data and are they then able to, again, learn from what the customer is saying and iterate again on the product? And the last three buckets are a bit out of this whole product development cycle, it’s team, because I think understanding a team and how team motivation works is a totally different game and another skill to have as a product manager. So that’s a lot talking about how to actually achieve this? Can the team be motivated, how can the team be motivated?

Growth is the personal growth part. So is this product manager investing a bit of her time to actually focus on personal growth? And agile is on that list. You could argue it’s more or less included in the get it done bucket but I find so many product managers in my coaching not even knowing the underlying principles of agile. So that’s just like how I am making sure in my coaching, that we’re touching upon topics like agile values and agile principles. So the nuts and bolts of agile or not so much the, “Can you run the perfect retrospective?”, or something like that. And all of these buckets come with at least 15 detailed questions. So is she able to run user interviews? Has she heard of human biases? So really things you could tick off and say yes, no, or you could give yourself, as indicated here, a rating from one to seven, or use competency level, so I have heard of it, I have applied it once, I have applied it several times. So the scale is a different topic. But that’s how actually the PM Wheel could be used.

Janna Bastow: [00:13:46]
Oh, excellent. Excellent. So you’ve actually got these 15 questions that go alongside this PM Wheel?

Petra Wille: [00:13:52]
Yeah. If you download it, so it’s on my website, it’s for free, you can download it, and then it comes with all these questions, and it really helps to find your one development topic that you actually should focus on next.

Janna Bastow: [00:14:03]
Yeah, wonderful. I love these sort of these really practical frameworks that help you figure out where to improve, because you can imagine seeing yourself on this on this chart, figuring out that “Oh, actually, you know what, I’m good around here, but it dips in this spot. So maybe I should go— my next career move or my next way to develop myself is to improve in this area, and actually these are the ways that I could do so.”

Petra Wille: [00:14:25]
Yeah. Someone was asking for the URL for downloading it, and it’s strongproductpeople.com, all in one word, strongproductpeople.com then you should be able to download it. Yeah, and as Janna was saying, so that even works with, as I said, engineers or, and usually they struggle to give you random feedback. So if you ask them, “Hey, Tim, can you please give me some feedback? How am I doing currently?” That’s super hard for them because they never ever have reflected in detail what they want the product person to be like. So it massively helps if you have a bit of a framework, can hand it to them, and then really get their feedback in. So that’s helpful for this purpose as well.

Janna Bastow: [00:15:12]
Great. So thanks for sharing that one, Petra. And I know that you’ve got some other frameworks that you often find useful to share.

Petra Wille: [00:15:19]
The Future Self is the next one, the logical next one. So let’s assume we used the PM Wheel and we found out that prioritization, for example, is something this product person could actually up their game a bit then you could use the Future Self to create a development plan, or as I usually call it, a contract with myself. That’s a super simple framework for components, I encourage coaches that they write a bit about their As-Is descriptions. So when it comes to prioritization what are the things that are actually how you can tell that you’re not where, your skill is not where it should be. So for example, people are constantly complaining about my prioritization, they’re always asking why is the backlog in this order? I don’t get it. Or they’re talking behind my back and saying “Have you seen Petra’s backlog? It’s all over the place. No clue how she’s doing all of that.”

So that happens, right? So that would be things that you could put in your As-Is descriptions. So what are the things that are currently driving you mad about this one topic or that you actually want to learn? So it can be already, giving a hint to what do you want to learn. And then there is the To-Be description and there are two framing questions for that. And one is like, how do you, as a PM, want it to be? So maybe people stop talking behind your back about your weird prioritization scheme. Or how could others tell that you’ve  improved on this particular competency, right? So what would they say, how would they actually see that I have improved in a certain skill? And then you, and it’s super hard to do it alone. So if your line manager is up for that, ask them if they can help you create action items, if there is no line manager interested that much in your personal development, and it’s coming in some of the companies, so yeah. That happens a lot.

Then find a learning buddy, then just pair up with another project manager or product manager, or the engineers, again, can be helpful. So it’s more like that somebody else is saying “Okay, but what would you really like to do about it?” So what are the things that you that you want to learn? So that you can tick off these boxes. I think it’s important to have something where you can tick off a box, one to five points, usually enough. Coming back to our prioritization example, that could be things like I actually never reflected on the prioritization criteria I have, maybe that’s my first step, and I put them down somewhere. And then I think, okay, is that the perfect way of prioritization? So next step would be, read more about what other people are saying, or what ProdPad is using, or read a book about roadmapping, or all this kind of stuff, and how prioritization works in these environments and stuff like this. So that could be action items, and I said, find somebody helping you create those, because it’s super hard to do that alone.

Janna Bastow: [00:18:10]
Yeah.

Petra Wille: [00:18:10]
And then talking about the period, I like to set something like a two to four month period. If it’s a longer period of time, then often, you don’t do it or forget about it, if it’s too short, then it consumes way too much time on your calendar, and we want this to be doable, right? So if it’s 20 minutes a week, that you’re really dedicating to this one thing you want to learn, and you do this over a period of time from two to four months, that’s awesome already . And so that is something that I use in my coaching practice as well, to create this development plan and only do one of them at a time, because people always have the tendency of, “Oh, I had so many shortcomings in the PM Wheel, so I want to do all of them, and I want to catch up with all of these skills.” But actually, I totally recommend to focus on one at a time. Yeah, take care about it for four months, for example, really have some action items, tick them off, really think about, how would it feel if I improve, and how would others be able to tell that I have improved a certain skill? And that’s how the Future Self can come into play when we, when we’re talking people development. 

Janna Bastow: [00:19:18]
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. This idea of framing it around, where it is that you wanna be, or how you picture yourself. I was reading this thing recently, that apparently people really struggle to visualize or empathize with their future self. So if they try to picture themselves in five years time they can’t so much. And that means that they struggle to take the steps to get themselves there. And so having something like this that sort of makes you lay out going where is it that you plan on being, and what actionable next steps could you take right now that will address these things that you’re trying to do, can be transformative. So these are really good coaching tips.

Petra Wille: [00:19:59]
And all of us are so familiar with doing this for our products. We have objectives and key results, it’s a bit of the same model, right? But sometimes we just struggle to use this on our own, we’re not taking the time for personal development. So I always encourage people to at least, some of their time should always go to the bucket of personal growth and learning new things, and then the Future Self or the PM Wheel could help.

Janna Bastow: [00:20:24]
Yup. Absolutely. James , in the comments just said, “You should treat your career as a product.” and I often say everything can be treated like a product in some ways, right? I mean maybe, it’s that whole hammer, everything’s a nail sort of thing, but I see a lot of things in that Build, Measure, Learn thing, right?

Petra Wille: [00:20:39]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Janna Bastow: [00:20:41]
And, I think with your career, you can think about what you’re actually measuring, what you’ve actually put together, and you can measure on that and iterate upon that and learn from that and improve on that. But oftentimes, we just get stuck in this sort of build, build, build, or go, go, go, mentality without actually stopping and thinking about what it is that we’re trying to do.

Petra Wille: [00:21:00]
Yeah. And, that is really touching on a nice point as well. I think you really need a support framework for your career development as well. Some call it the personal board of directors or something like this, so you really need to find people that are helping you along, that could be a mentor, it could be colleagues in the company you’re currently at but that is something else. If you treat it like a product, you need a team, right? 

Janna Bastow: [00:21:22]
Yeah.

Petra Wille: [00:21:23]
…go find some people that help you. And if, even if it’s just a quarterly reflection or something like that, already massively valuable.

Janna Bastow: [00:21:31]
Yeah, absolutely. Actually that was one of the most transformative things from my own career, was meeting other product people. Because basically, when you’re a product person, you’re the only product person in your team a lot of the times, right?

Petra Wille: [00:21:41]
Yeah.

Janna Bastow: [00:21:41]
Especially when I got into this 15 years ago. And what you realize is you’re surrounded by people who are all better at their jobs than you are, right? They’re all, they can code, and they can do sales, and they can do copy and everything else like that, and you’re the Jack of all trades, you aren’t particularly good at anything, and you’re not really sure what product is meant to do, and there’s no one to talk to about it.

Petra Wille: [00:22:01]
Yeah. Yeah.

Janna Bastow: [00:22:03]
[laughs]  

Petra Wille: [00:22:03]
And it gets, it gets more lonely the more you climb the career ladder as well, right?

Janna Bastow: [00:22:06]
Yeah.

Petra Wille: [00:22:06]
Once you’re a product leader or a founder of a company, it’s even harder to find others too.

Janna Bastow: [00:22:12]
One of the best things that happened was when we started doing the product tank meetups, which was just, it, wasn’t a way to say that we wanted to meet other product people to tell them, we knew how to do product, Mind the Product was not built on that, it was built on the idea of, “We don’t know what we’re doing, but maybe if we meet other product people, they can tell us how to do their jobs, and we’ll figure it out from there.” And what we actually realized is that sharing experiences with other product people and building this network of other product people who’ve had these experiences like yours is super powerful. And so finding that that board, whether it’s a formal thing or even just an informal thing. You know, everyone listening in, if you don’t have a product friend go, go meet-

Petra Wille: [00:22:53]
Go meet product friend [laughs].

Janna Bastow: [00:22:54]
…another product friend, right? They’re all in here, drop your LinkedIns in the channel, go make some friends you know, join a product tank connect with me, do whatever you need to catch up-

Petra Wille: [00:23:07]
Yeah, and when, all of us who are belonging-

Janna Bastow: [00:23:07]
…talk to product people [laughs].

Petra Wille: [00:23:07]
And all of belong to some of these slack channels, right? And sometimes all you need to do is ask if somebody else has a similar challenge or is at a similar inflection point in their career, and you could pair up with those folks.

Janna Bastow: [00:23:19]
Yeah.

Petra Wille: [00:23:19]
Sometimes it’s just that you need to reach out.

Janna Bastow: [00:23:21]
Yeah. And that’s what I also find, is that a lot of the product challenges that we have are so much the same. I mean, the, the situations are different, but so much of the undercurrents are very, very similar, right? It comes down to communication problems, it comes down to people problems, it comes down to skills problems, it comes down to some of the same core themes overall, and just understanding how you handle those things makes a huge difference.

Petra Wille: [00:23:50]
Yeah. And it’s not always the next super expensive training that you need to book, sometimes it’s really just like your small learning group and use some material that’s already out there.

Janna Bastow: [00:24:01] 
So one of the things that I really like is that you’ve done a lot of this personal development around product managers. What sort of things should product people do? Do you have any sort of steps or any suggestions that product people can do to put development on the agenda for themselves?

Petra Wille: [00:24:17]
I think first of all, it’s really key that you find the time, and finding the time is super hard in our busy calendars. But for me, it is key that just put on a sheet of paper why you should care about your personal development, that really helps. And, and really look a bit far out in the future, so if you become a more competent product manager, it’s maybe easier to land your next job, and maybe that’s the dream job, or if you’re learning this particular skill, you might actually be able to land the next role or vacant position in your current company or something like this, right? So when you struggle to find the time for your personal development and really think about, okay, why should I care about my personal development? What’s the uptake of it? Earning more money maybe, even if it’s, that’s your motivation, it’s perfectly fine, we all have a good-

Janna Bastow: [00:25:06] [laughing]
That’s legit. We don’t do this for free [laughing].

Petra Wille: [00:25:10]
Yeah, none of us. So, so really find something that motivates you. For some people, it is maybe if I get more efficient in my job, then I can actually decide to do it four days a week and not five days a week, because I can do more or less the same stuff and way more efficient and can spend more time with the family. So whatever it is that motivates you, really take this time, put it down somewhere, put a sticker on your, I don’t know, screen that actually says invest a bit of time in your personal growth because, reasons, right? So that helps a lot and that’s a nice trick. And then it’s really about persistence. Yeah, that you, week after week, you have just 20 minutes of reading time, or just 20 minutes of trying something new, or you have a monthly meeting with some peers of yours watching talks together from your favorite conference or something like this, and then discuss what you learned, right?

So all these things are super helpful. And so the time factor is key, and then the do it week after week, I think that is super important. Yeah, and then find, and hopefully your line manager will help you with this, find the next bigger challenge, that is important as well. Because none of us only needs to learn new know-how, that’s not how we actually do our job, we need to learn new skills, and skills is something, you hear about something, you read about it, you think it’s a nice idea, we should try it. You apply it in one situation, you will massively fail, because the first few user interviews are always super bad, but the next ones will be way better if you have the time to reflect and do it again, right? But to do this, somebody needs to make some room for you, and applying your new skill of doing user interviews.

So this next bigger challenge is the question, could this be a more strategic project, or could this be a project that requires way more storytelling? If storytelling is something you want to improve. And usually it’s way easier to do this if you’re a line manager of somebody, you could have a list of all your employees and really think about, okay, what would be the next bigger challenge I would love to assign them to make sure that they really learn something new and can apply what they learned? And I said, even if you’re an individual contributor, you can really think about, what could that be? That could be a side project of yours, if nothing is on the horizon in your current company, or you could actively approach your line manager and say “Hey, look, that’s something I want to learn, I have some ideas how I could do it, but I need a chance to apply it otherwise it’s a waste of time. So could you please help me find something where I could try this methodology or  apply this new skill?” So that’s another another tip of mine. Think about the next bigger challenge you want to take on.

Janna Bastow: [00:28:04]
Oh yeah. I really like that. I like what you said about you know, sometimes, your user tests, your first ones, are going to be terrible,  but you’ll get better at them over time. I don’t think a lot of people realize that product management is like this muscle, right? You’ve gotta work it, you’ve gotta practice at it, and it’s going to be terrible at first. You know, none of these things that we do feel natural. And so it’s type of thing that you do a few of them and you start getting the hang of it, right? The user testing starts to become more natural over time, until it becomes second nature. And that’s when you realize that, okay, now it’s your time to step up and take on that bigger challenge. But it doesn’t feel natural, the stuff that we’re doing: we do sit there in rooms or in Zoom boxes asking awkward questions of people and, it takes guts and it takes some know-how and practice to do so.  

Petra Wille: [00:28:51]
Yeah. And for so many of the things we do it’s like just like usually interviewing, it’s just like one piece of the puzzle.

Janna Bastow: [00:28:59]
Yeah. Yeah.

Petra Wille: [00:28:59]
Yeah. And that’s why you really need to have the time to reflect on what you learned, to improve the methodologies you were using, maybe looking for another tool that will support you better, all these kind of things. And yeah, you need the room for that and you need time for that and you need resources and hopefully somebody who is assigning you to the perfect challenge to apply this new skill.

Janna Bastow: [00:29:23]
Yeah, absolutely. I like that in your book, you’ve got a chapter specifically around making time, like making time for these important pieces, because oftentimes they just end up getting skipped. If you don’t make time for this, then you’ll just end up in this phase of just constantly doing stuff, but not actually learning from it.

Petra Wille: [00:29:40]
And especially from a product leader standpoint, this is super weird, because product leads spend tons of hours in hiring, and in interviews and in all of these, how can we bring on new talent? But it’s super common that they not take the same amount of time to invest it in onboarding and actually developing the folks that are already on board. And that is a bit of a weird balance, and I hope this will change over time. So at least a bit of the time should be invested in the personal development of the product people that are already in their product organization.

Janna Bastow: [00:30:15]
That is incredibly insightful.   That’s like a product manager who spends all their time just getting people in the door, but doesn’t spend any time worrying about churn or retention figures. That’s not going to be a successful product overall, right?

Petra Wille: [00:30:28]
Yeah, exactly.

Janna Bastow: [00:30:29]
[laughing] Who knew?

Petra Wille: [00:30:31]
[laughing] Who knew? And just, when I ask them or when I make them aware of this fact, then they usually say yeah, but they have training budget. And I’m always like, you have a training budget. You need to really take care of these people. And for example, this next bigger challenge question, that’s exactly something a line manager can easily do because they have more oversight over the upcoming things in the company, so for them it’s way easier to identify this next challenge for each one on the team. Yeah.

Janna Bastow: [00:30:59]
Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. 

So you’ve got product leaders, they’ve gone through these steps, they’ve improved themselves, they’ve thought about these next steps and they’re moving on up. What are the key ingredients, you talk about this in your book, the key ingredients for upping your people development game, for being an awesome coach to your product people? Can tell us more about that?

Petra Wille: [00:31:18]
Yeah. Yeah, sure. So first of all, and I always was touching on that a bit in the beginning, you need to define your good, that’s how I name it in the book. So what makes a good product manager in your current situation, for your current company and yeah, from your personal perspective, right? And you could use something like the PM Wheel to talk about the skills and the competencies, but I think there’s more to that which is personality traits. I think it really makes sense to reflect on what other personality traits that I would like to see in product managers that I’m hiring, and that I’m actually managing. Not that you can change much about it, but it really helps you in the process of creating a team. For me, for example, curiosity is always something I’m looking for because all the great product managers I know are curious human beings.

So they’re curious about all the things that are happening on this world, more or less. And that tremendously helps if you are you’re taking care about the product, they’re interested in human beings as well, and all these kind of things, right? So reflect on the personality trait, and there’s quick little game that you could play to actually get that started. It will not get you to the finished result, but it gets you started. So think about the worst product manager you ever worked with, create a list of the personality traits they have been showing, and then create a positive framing for  that, right? If you say super not interested in the world, then curiosity might be the one that you have on the opposite scale. So that’s how you can get going with this personality trait thing.

Or you could do a bit of a reverse engineering and look at your current team and think what do they all have in common? Is there a personality pattern that I see and really reflect on, “Okay, does that mean that I should bring more of that, or should I actually go for diversity and hire the opposite to bring in a nicer mix of people, or something like this?” So personality traits, reflect on that, skills and capabilities, use something like the PM Wheel to do this, and then I think it’s key to talk about values as well. And that can be, if there are company values, you could use them because then hopefully your folks are sharing some of the company values. If there are no company values, again, you could create product team values or even use your personal values. So that’s the definition of good, and that usually is step number one.

Then you need to do this assessment phase where you actually ask them to rank themselves, you ask them to ask some other colleagues to rank them, you give them some feedback, and then that gives a nice picture of, okay, what could be our next development topic we’re focusing on? Then you use the Future Self to create this contract with themselves and really get them going. And then it’s super important to follow up. So that for all product leaders out there, follow-ups are key. So don’t create these action items and then never ever ask again. And sometimes all it takes is “Hey, you were actually mentioning that is something you want to learn, that book you want to learn, how is it going? Do you want to send me a summary of the first chapters?”

And it’s not “Please send me a summary of the first chapter,” it’s more offer help, be a bit of a sounding board, and really pay attention, show them that you care. I think this is super, super important here as well. And please don’t, do not make your one-on-ones status updates all the time, sometimes focus on this people development part of the one-on-ones, and follow up with them on the things that they actually put on their agenda.

Janna Bastow: [00:34:59]
Yeah.

Petra Wille: [00:34:59]
But leave it with them. So it’s their job, the people development part is every employee’s job, but help them, be their coach, give them a tip or a trick and a bit of a reflection. I think that’s key. Sometimes even advice might be okay. And sometimes even radical candid feedback, because if you’re a line manager working in interest of the company, and the product manager is not yet competent, in your definition, then obviously you’ll need to give them the hard talk. But yeah, that’s part of the job.

Janna Bastow: [00:35:31]
Yeah, it absolutely is. But that’s the purpose of one-on-ones, not to just give back feedback or hard feedback, but that, that’s where you give that radical candor feedback and where it can be valuable if used in the right sort of way. But good one-on-ones are an art form, right? It’s the type of thing that takes practice and your first ones are really awkward and they’re not very good but then over time, you do get better at them [laughs].

Petra Wille: [00:35:59]
Yeah, that’s true.

Janna Bastow: [00:36:00]
Yup. Excellent. And if anybody has any questions, feel free to drop them into the Q&A section. Petra, there was another canvas that we had here as well, which was the Role Definition canvas. How does this fit in with everything?

Petra Wille: [00:36:16]
The Role Definition canvas is actually something that I often use when I start working with the teams. So it’s not so much that a role definition is missing in most of the companies, but usually it’s rather high level and people are not using it in their day-to-day lives. And I like teams—thanks for   putting it up—and I like teams to use it, so then every role on the team, or even every person on the team tries to feel this. And then they say “Okay, you think this is your responsibility, but I think this is my responsibility, so maybe we should discuss who’s actually responsible for doing that,” right?

Janna Bastow: [00:36:58]
Yeah.

Petra Wille: [00:36:58]
Signing off a backlog item or testing it before it actually goes live. And is that the ultimate responsibility of the product manager or is it the ultimate responsibility of the quality assurance folks? So I really think it helps teams to understand, “Okay, what everybody thinks about their role, and where there are blind spots, where I need to discuss, okay, that’s maybe something that we never have thought about, but whose responsibility should that be, or what are the main tasks that I perform in this team?” And a lot of people, especially early on in their career, think that is totally obvious, so what a product manager does is totally obvious, but I can tell you from coaching, tons of product teams, it’s not. So even if people ask me “Do you think we should call our product folks product owners or product managers?”

Then I’m always like, “Yeah, I always think you should call them product managers, because product owners are just a role, but even if you want to call them product owners, it still doesn’t say anything to people outside of the company what they actually are doing, because it really needs a filled out role canvas to make this a bit more tangible.” So that’s how usually I am using this canvas to foster the discussion in the team to give them a bit more clarity on this, who is responsible for which part of the job or for the software development we’re doing together.

Janna Bastow: [00:38:25]
Yup. Yeah, absolutely. And Mark jumped in to say that this looks great for him, “Especially for those of us in a larger org,” he said. And yeah, I could see this being really helpful for large organizations. I could see this being helpful for smaller teams as well, because in a smaller team, you end up with everyone who’s T-shaped or Pi-shaped, and so everyone’s able to do a lot of different things, and they’re not quite sure as to where they cross over or handover, and everyone jumps on everything, which is great sometimes but also at the same time, it’s good to be able to identify the main tasks and the key responsibilities, and be able to actually write these things down. Great, framework, I appreciate this.

Petra Wille: [00:39:04]
Cool. Yeah. And it’s not, it’s really only, so it’s not that valuable if you use it just on your own for your own role. It becomes more valuable if you use it as a team and see the gaps and the overlaps and the conflict, so to say. 

Janna Bastow: [00:39:17]
Yeah. Having a set of these that you can compare with each other.

Petra Wille: [00:39:21]
Yeah.

Janna Bastow: [00:39:21]
Yeah. A lot of this stuff is just about getting it out of your head, writing down your assumptions and sharing it somewhere, right?

Petra Wille: [00:39:27]
Yeah. That’s true. That is the case.

Janna Bastow: [00:39:30]
It reminds me a little bit of what we do with designs and prototyping. I mean, Prototyping is essentially this idea of taking your first thoughts and just jotting it down and then saying, “I made this, what do you think?” And even if it’s junk the whole point is to get feedback and find out how junk, and then fix the junk and make it better for the next time.

Petra Wille: [00:39:49]
Yeah. Yeah.

Janna Bastow: [00:39:49]
Which is which is fine, right? And, with something like this, if somebody writes down something here saying I think that my main tasks and responsibilities are these,” and if you see this overlap, you’re like, “Okay, we can adjust for this, right? We can iterate on this and figure it out.”

Petra Wille: [00:40:04]
And there is another benefit to it. If you are in the leadership position and you see your folks struggling with filling out the blanks here, then maybe there is an underlying problem that role clarity is something the leadership team should care a bit more, because if, for example, a product manager cannot fill in his goals and missions, what is the mission of my job, or what is the purpose? So why is there this role of product management? And if you’ve really struggled with this, then maybe you should sit down and really figure this out for the whole organization more or less. So that’s another thing. So if you’re using this as a product leader, for example, and teams massively struggle to fill in the gaps, then actually, please help them, take it one level up and see, how can you solve this?

Janna Bastow: [00:40:53]
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And somebody’s actually asked a question here, which is, how can someone with B2B product experience, like a product manager from B2B space, switch into B2C? Is it really hard to prepare?

Petra Wille: [00:41:07]
Do it [laughs]. Just do it. I think the other way round it might be even harder. Because what’s easier when you go from B2B to B2C is, it’s way easier usually to approach customers, talk to customers, bring them in for interviews. You have more user data usually, if you go from B2B to B2C. So most of the time, it’s easier because it’s easy to get in touch with the customers. I saw so many people making both jumps, so from B2C to B2B, and the other way round, and most of them would say it was way easier than they thought, once you understood the underlying principles of product management and that it’s always, “Okay, what are the underlying problems? How could we solve them in the best way with the technology we are having, and the engineering capabilities we’re having?” So if you understood these underlying principles, it actually doesn’t matter that much what the product is all about. For sure, you should be interested in it and curious to learn what it takes to create this particular problem and what it solves for the customer and client.

But if you’re interested in it, I think it’s way easier to do the, the transition, and would encourage you to do if you’re interested in this, do it. It’s more a matter of company culture then, because some of the B2B companies have totally different company cultures than the B2C ones, so that is something that I would actually really pay attention to in the interviewing process, could I be doing right work here as well, would I be able to learn the important things, and are they aware that it’s maybe a stretch in the beginning and that I have to learn new things? So can I take it a bit easy in the beginning, picking up with all the new things that I have to catch up. So that would be more of my question.

Janna Bastow: [00:43:01]
That’s a really good point about figuring out as to whether the company is going to be a good fit for you, because you might have a certain set of skills and a particular aptitude, and, you might be a product manager that sort of fits like this. But doesn’t mean that the role, just because it says product manager at the top, doesn’t mean it’s going to be a perfect fit for you, or that the company is gonna be a perfect fit for you.

Petra Wille: [00:43:19]
Yeah.

Janna Bastow: [00:43:19]
And that’s okay, because there’s a ton of different product roles out there, and they’re all differently shaped. And it’s a matter of, when you’re going in there and interviewing, you asking the tough questions of them to figure out if they’ve got a good product culture as well. Ask them questions about, “When was the last time they had a big failure and how did they handle it? What happened to the last product manager? Can you see their roadmap?” Ask them to see this stuff and ask them to answer these types of questions. Ask to interview people on the team and get a sense of what they’re like as well. If they seem a little bit like they’re hiding this stuff away, you might get the sense that maybe you’re going into a company that’s-

Petra Wille: [00:43:58]
Don’t.

Janna Bastow: [00:43:59]
Maybe not, yeah [laughs].

Petra Wille: [00:44:02]
Don’t join them [laughing]. And that is maybe more common in the B2B world, right? So that the larger corporates working still in rather old ways of doing product management, so that is something you want to check in the interview process. But it’s not the product itself. So I encourage you, if that is the only thing that is holding you back, “I’ve always worked on B2B products, but I would love to work on B2C products,” go do.

Janna Bastow: [00:44:29]
[affirmative]. The other point on that is the fact that you know what, honestly, like moving from one space to the other is actually beneficial. Like I think as a product person, if you come in with fresh eyes and you don’t actually know the space you come in with fresh eyes, more curiosity, the bigger, more interesting questions, if you come in and you feel like you already know the space, you might not actually see the angles that your competitors are seeing.

Petra Wille: [00:44:58]
Yeah.

Janna Bastow: [00:44:58]
You know, a lot of the competitors that are coming in and disrupting these big players aren’t in that particular space. Look at FinTech, for example.

 Yeah. FinTech, yeah.

 They are not FinTech players, right? The people coming in disrupting healthcare right now are not healthcare players. And they’re not being run by people who necessarily had the history in that. It’s people looking at things and changing the way that you think about these spaces and that can be really healthy.

Petra Wille: [00:45:22]
Yeah.

Janna Bastow: [00:45:25]
So yeah, moving from one space to the other: do it. It’s, it’s really good for your career, you’ll pick up a wider range of different things. When preparing for the interview, read a few articles and listen to some talks about people talking about how they manage B2B products or B2C products or B-to-whatever product, whatever you’re doing. So you have some lingo and you kind of know what they’re doing. And always, like with any job, always research the company, and try to figure out what problem they’re trying to solve with the role that they are filling, right? So when they post that job, that you should be able to pick up on clues on what problem they have, and you should be pitching yourself and saying, “Here’s the problem I’m gonna solve for you by being your product manager.” 

Petra Wille: [00:46:04]
Yeah. And maybe they’re actively seeking somebody who brings in this new perspective and this different background, and they’re looking for more, a more diverse product team. And then it’s a perfect time to join, right? If they are actually openly stating, “Hey, look, we have too few people that have a different background, we want to change that. Then it’s a perfect time to join such a company.

Janna Bastow: [00:46:29]
Yup. Yup, absolutely. Another question here from Danny, he says, “As an associate PM, I’m looking to develop as quickly as possible. Does the PM Wheel and Future Self still apply, or should I focus on other learnings before using those?

Petra Wille: [00:46:46]
No. You can, I think you can use them right away. What you still would need is somebody help you find the great resource as a bit of a curation for you, because I think if you’re an associate, that’s the hard thing, because then you see, “Oh, prioritization is something I should learn,” but then how are you actually going to do that, right? So again, find a learning buddy, find somebody who has a bit more experience or read the blogs we’re all reading. So Mind the Product is writing an awesome blog and you could start reading from there. Figure out or ask people, what are great folks to follow on Twitter that are sharing great content regularly. Content that is more or less for your career level, because there’s a lot of advanced stuff out there as well. That’s maybe not a good start. Ask for good books that you could start with and, and then you build it from there, right? So I think you can use the PM Wheel, I think you should use the Future Self, but you need somebody helping you to figure out what is the best way to learn this new skills and what are the good resources to actually do so, or even what are trainings that could be helpful in the situation?

Janna Bastow: [00:47:55]
Yeah. Excellent. Oh, James has just asked, he’d love to get Petra’s thought on career paths for PMs.

Petra Wille: [00:48:04]
Oh. Yeah, Ken Norton just published a really nice article about that, yesterday or something like this. So look it up, Ken Norton, career paths for product manager. So my take on the career path is the following. First of all, you want to become a team product manager, that’s how I call it. So you want to be capable to work with a product development team and you are able to oversee, let’s say, time horizon, something like eight weeks. And that, that already is a stretch. So because then you’re making decisions about what this team should be doing for a decent amount of time. So that’s investment decisions, and it’s a big responsibility. And to nail that already is not easy. You focus on late stage testing, so to say, so a bit of usability testing, learning from A/B testing, for example, iterate on some features, so that’s how you’re usually starting.

But then you are not, so that’s why I call in my book, the team-focused PM. From my perspective, you’re then not yet competent. A competent PM is able to work a bit more strategically, is able to set goals and objectives of, a bit more far out, maybe like a 12 months horizon or something like this. That would be something that would be cool. And you need to be better in storytelling and how to rally the team behind this shared goal you’re creating. So it’s more than just like being able to handle the task board and the stand up and several iterations, right? So that, that’s the first step, but then you want to do more of the strategic work, more of the storytelling stuff. I think that’s what makes a competent PM.

And then there is a split in the road or fork, so to speak. Then you obviously could work on more strategic products. That is always something you could be focusing on different products that we were discussing, the B2B, B2C thing. Because I think for example, if you just have done it once in one company, in one environment, that is not what it takes to become, for example, in my perspective, a super senior product manager. So you need to go out there and apply what you learned in various contexts, so to say. That is something you could be doing. And then you might ultimately become a line manager, and responsible for leading a team of product folks, or you can stay on the individual contributor track and do more what principal product managers do. And that could be focusing on creating a community of practice.

So how are we as a company doing product management how can we improve the craft here, what are the things that we want to share across board, you could help onboard associates and the new joiners, all these kind of things. That is something the seniors take on, or their principal roles, so it depends. And I think it’s way too rare that companies allow people to be in their product management IC role for a decent amount of time. Some of us just don’t want to be in leadership position, and not all of us should be in a leadership position, because it’s a different job to have, and many of us are then missing the nitty-gritty product management work that they used to do. So, yeah, that’s the career path to take on.

Janna Bastow: [00:51:34]
Yeah.

Petra Wille: [00:51:34]
And it really it really varies, so title and all this stuff, we can talk titles, because again, that is so dependent on the company size and where the company is located, and there are massive differences in how roles are called in Europe and in the U.S., for example. Yeah.

Janna Bastow: [00:51:52]
Yeah.

Petra Wille: [00:51:52]
It’s hard to talk titles.

Janna Bastow: [00:51:54]
Yeah, that makes sense. Because titles are, I think, overrated anyways. I think they’re really difficult to pin down from country to country, from space to space, from company to company. But it is important to have them defined within the company.

Petra Wille: [00:52:07]
Yeah.

Janna Bastow: [00:52:08]
And on that note, somebody asked a question, “How can you push a company to set up a product career path and frameworks?”

Petra Wille: [00:52:16]
I’m not sure if you can. It is, yeah that’s something I try with the book, to tell them, “Hey, people development is something you should really care about.” so it always boils down to start with the “Why?”. So if you want somebody to take care about something, then they really need to understand what’s in it for them. So if you want to convince a whole organization that they should look more into the people development thing or how product people are doing their job, then the question is, what’s in it for them, and can you convince the whole organization that this is an important thing to tackle? And that it’s usually hard. It’s easier to take it step by step. So maybe you can start to use these frameworks on your own, then convince some of your colleagues, and then hopefully, you can climb up the ladder a bit to convince your line manager that it saves him a lot of time, or her if they use it in their one-on-ones and for the hiring, and these kind of things. So it’s more root movement that you need to start.

It’s super hard to convince a whole organization from the individual contributor level, unless it’s a startup, right? Because then it’s, yeah, then it’s rather easy. So in short, buy the book, hand the book to them and say “It’s important, people development is important,” or start with why, so why should they care? What would improve for them if they invest more in the people development. How does this pay off? Yeah. That would be my suggestion.

Janna Bastow: [00:53:51]
Excellent. Excellent. And somebody has just asked about, besides your own book, what are some of the other books that you recommend for product managers? And while you answer that, I’ll put up your book [laughing].

Petra Wille: [00:54:02]
And the fun pictures we took! Oh, there are so many great books about product management where to start. So you obviously could read all the basic Marty Cagan stuff which most of us have read at some point in the career, but I like Matt LeMay’s book, for example, as well which is rather hands-on if you’re new to product management it, I forgot the title, Janna help me.

Janna Bastow: [00:54:28]
I think-

Petra Wille: [00:54:29]
Product management in practice?

Janna Bastow: [00:54:32]
Possibly. We’ll get the link and we’ll we’ll make sure that we include that when we post it.

Petra Wille: [00:54:36]
Yes [laughing].

Janna Bastow: [00:54:36]
Yes [laughing].

Petra Wille: [00:54:37]
I could look it up, but it’s maybe not so easy to do this in parallel.

Janna Bastow: [00:54:40]
No, not the right time [laughs].

Petra Wille: [00:54:42]
Yeah. So Matt LeMay’s book. Then just recently Teresa Torres released her book about Continuous Discovery Habits, that’s actually the title of the book as well. And I think this is a super crucial book if you want to take product discovery serious hands-on as well a nice, easy to read, easy to digest, hard to apply, because yeah, it’s really not that easy to do great product discovery in each and every company, it takes a while, I know but it’s a good book to get you started and to understand the core principle, so to say. Other great books on product management. Yeah the roadmapping book from C. Todd for example, is one that I always love to recommend because it’s C. Todd…

Janna Bastow: [00:55:29]
so C. Todd Lombardo.

Petra Wille: [00:55:30]
Yeah.

Janna Bastow: [00:55:30]
And yeah, that one’s Product Roadmaps Relaunched. And you were right about Matt LeMay’s book, it is Product Management in Practice.

 Thank you for not fooling me!

Somebody posted it in the chat, and there’s a whole second section of that title, which you would not have gotten. So that’s totally fine [laughs].

Petra Wille: [00:55:45]
Yeah, and, by the way on my website, so petra-wille.com there is a list of all the books that I’m recommending, so that are just a few that I that I like reading. Escaping the Build Trap, for example, again, Melissa Perri is a nice one to read if you have the feeling that your company is stuck in this build trap. So that’s helpful as well. And then there are for product managers that are more seasoned, I think, everything that Christina Wodtke writes, so Radical Focus is a nice book to read, for example, or The Team That Managed Itself, awesome book, both of them are novels, and the last part of the book is always talking about the underlying principles. And then storytelling is something that you might want to look into. There is a great book from Nancy Duarte, which is called Illuminate talking a bit more about storytelling, or Selling the Dream, Guy Kawasaki, that’s storytelling stuff as well. A super old book, but still relevant. He was one of the product evangelists at Macintosh back in the time, and sharing some of his stories. Yeah, that’s if you’re more, more looking, or Radical Candor, Kim Scott.

Janna Bastow: [00:56:58]
Yeah.

Petra Wille: [00:56:58]
If you really struggle with giving people feedback, and that is a good skill to have as a product manager as well so then that’s a nice one. Yeah. Tons of great books out there.

Janna Bastow: [00:57:08]
Amazing suggestions,  love that. It’s a ton of great suggestions. And I love that everybody in the chat jumped in with their own suggestions, and +1’ing all those as well.

Petra Wille: [00:57:16]
Keep them coming.

Janna Bastow: [00:57:17]
Great stuff.

Petra Wille: [00:57:18]
Keep them coming [laughing].

Janna Bastow: [00:57:18]
Yeah. All right, great. So that’s all the time that we have for today. Thank you so much, Petra, for for taking the time to chat with us and share your learnings. As I said, this is all going to be recorded and we’re going to be sharing this video out to everybody who’s been listening in. So you can share this with your colleagues, share it with your friends, and all that kind of stuff. I really love that everybody got involved and connected with each other.

Petra Wille: [00:57:43]
Yeah. Super suggestions.

Janna Bastow: [00:57:44]
Thank you for getting involved with all your questions and all that. The other thing is that there is a raffle for the book. Petra, thank you so much for offering to sign one of your books and sending it off to one of our awesome attendees.  We’re going to contact the winner after this webinar. So keep an eye on your inboxes and that will be coming your way. So thank you, everybody, so much for joining, and thank you, Petra, this has been wonderful. Take care, everybody, and, have a great day!

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