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Product Management Webinar: Product Culture

Culture Clash: How to Make Product and Engineering Work Together Effectively

How can we build a great product and engineering culture?

Catch up on our webinar with David Subar, CTO, Chief Product Officer, founder, and managing partner of Interna, and host Janna Bastow, CEO of ProdPad and inventor of the Now/Next/Later roadmap to find out.

David Subar Profile image
David Subar Profile Image

About David Subar

David Subar is a CTO, Chief Product Officer, and the founder and managing partner of Interna, a consultancy that enables technology companies to ship better products faster, to achieve product-market fit more quickly, and to deploy capital more efficiently. Interna has worked with companies ranging in size from small, six-member startups to the Walt Disney Company, and helped Pluto on the way to its $320MM sale to Paramount and Lynda.com on the path to its $1.5B sale to Linkedin.

Prior to founding Interna, David was CTO and CPO of a number of companies, including ZestFinance, Break Media, and Interthinx. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the LA CTO Forum.

Key Takeaways

  • Why product and engineering are so often out of alignment and how to fix it.
  • Common evaluation metrics of each and why they are failing us.
  • How to align your goals across product and engineering.
  • Exploring the Spotify Product Development model.
Image of Alignment and it's Three States

[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.

[00:00:00] Janna Bastow: Hey, everybody. Welcome to ProdPad’s Product Expert Webinar. I’d like to introduce our guest. This is David Subar, and David is a CTO, a chief product officer, and he’s founder and managing partner of Interna. 

David came on my radar through a colleague and I spotted one of his talks and it really resonated with me because it shone a new light on some of the exact problems that ended up talking to product customers about all the time. So I thought I’d invite them on here as this week product expert to share with you.

He’s going to be talking about how product and engineering teams just really commonly clash and why that is and what we can actually do with it. 

[00:00:39] David Subar: Thank you. And thanks for having me. As Janna said, I’m going to talk today about the culture clash between product managers and engineering and how to make them work effectively together. 

I started my career doing research and development in machine learning and artificial intelligence at a military owned think tank in Washington, DC. And we were working on problems about how do you determine what the enemy is doing? When the enemy is trying to not release information to you and start to release false information and using machine learning techniques, AI techniques, to try to figure that out.

And that sounds very exciting. And I was very excited frankly, to take the job, but what we were doing was not producing real products. What we were doing was research. And when you do research, you write a paper, that’s your own. And if it’s a good paper, maybe you presented a conference. Some of ours, we could, some of them, we couldn’t, because some were classified some weren’t and then maybe 200 people listened to you and then nothing else happens.

And so I started my career doing that, but I found it really frustrating because like I grew up a nerd, I wanted to use technology to build products that changed something that moved to market that mattered to someone that frankly, that I could tell my mom about and doing research, you just couldn’t do that.

And so from there I became an engineer, and then I took management roles, eventually becoming CTO of companies and then also running product. So I’ve had both product and technology roles. And what I spent time doing was thinking about how do you make these teams effective?

I went from building the product to building teams that build products, both product management and technology. It’s been a long time doing that. And then for seven years I’ve been doing at Turner, we consult with technology companies about product and engineering and how to make the teams more effective. And we evaluate teams and come with recommendations. We coach and mentor CTOs, chief product officers, engineering and technology executives. And we do interim roles. We will go and fix a team ourselves and come out, and doing that, we see a bunch of patterns among the companies, how product management and engineering work. So that’s, how I come to this. So I’m not gonna talk about one culture clash between product manager and engineering, but two: one between product manager and engineering, and one of that, that are both important. 

And I’m gonna talk about five ways to overcome them. I encourage you, if you have questions to ask, please don’t hesitate to ask questions. So I’m going to start with what you need to overcome the culture clashes.

I’m going to dig into them, but there’s really five things that are important. Alignment, measurement, review, transparency, iteration. We’ll talk all about them, but first I want to talk about alignment now, and I’m talking alignment here initially between product manager and engineering, and there’s really three states of that.

So five things you need to know, three states of alignment, and we’re going to go into first optimizing the team. So here I use CTO, chief product officer, but really it could be any technology or product management executive using CTO and chief product officer as a shortcut. But a lot of people that run product teams, technology teams, spend time thinking about how to optimize their team’s efficiency.

I get some input, I do some process and I’ll output something. And I think about that’s what my team is responsible for. That’s what I have to make more efficient. So in product it might be: I collect some input from the markets, users, sales, marketing someone like that. I write some roadmap and some user stories.

And my output is that to engineering, to technology, and I’ve done my job and I want to do that better and more efficiently. And engineers often have a similar thought. I get some user stories. I write some code, I put it on servers and I’m done. I want to make that process more efficient. That’s well-meaning it’s thoughtful.

But this leads to the first culture clash that I want to talk about. Because if product management, if engineering’s primary concern is how I write code more efficiently, how I write better user stories. It creates a cancer in the organization. What happens when something goes wrong? And by the way, something will go wrong.

Something always goes wrong. There’s a question of, who’s to blame and engineering might often say if the product didn’t work the way users wanted it that’s not on me. That’s on my product manager. Or if we were late, those user stories weren’t really well-defined and they keep changing.

And so of course we can’t predict time. Or product might say if it’s late engineering predicted wrong, or if it’s buggy, QA and engineering didn’t think about it well, and what happens as much as when something goes wrong, then there’s a question of how do we change process to make this better?

And engineering might say, we need a lot more process upfront and we need you to find everything we can upfront so we can build a writer architecture and the right scalability or product might say we need better timelines. And so this goes from agile to waterfall. And, not only that, but we start putting up barriers between engineers and product.

And what I’m here to say is you need to think, but engineering with product is not two separate teams and not making those two independent groups to make them more efficient, but you need to think about them as one team. So that’s the reasonable next solution, is to think about product management, engineering as one team— bind them together.

And you see this a lot, right? This is a very agile concept. The three horsemen, so a product leader, an engineering leader, a QA leader, leading squads. And this is better, right? Because now the job is not to: I write software and put it on servers, or I write user stories.

Our job is to build a product, so great. That’s awesome. We’re moving forward, but it there’s another issue here is who are we moving forward for? Who is your customer? Who are we here serving? And oftentimes when I talk to people. When I go into companies, when I work with folks, oh, your product manager and engineering, you say, oh, we were here to do our customer sales.

Our customers marketing. The CEO has got a bunch of ideas. We just have to do what the CEO says, and my argument here is now you have the same culture clash. But instead of being between product management and engineering, it’s outside that moat. And I often get calls from CEOs at this point where CEOs or boards of directors, of bigger companies like Disney some executive might say, we keep putting more and more money into product managing and engineering and products aren’t getting out faster. They’re not better. This is a side effect of not understanding who you serve. I will hear this in the same conversations I’ll hear from the product management engineering group is we need to talk to business to find out what to do next. That’s another symptom of the same problem.

And when you hear that, you understand that there’s a moat between the product teams, product management, engineering, and the rest of the company. But the problem here is focusing on the wrong people, marketing and sales, the CEO, your CFO, they’re not your customer.

They can’t be your customer. They’re your teammates. You have to focus product management, engineering on who pays. Who do you really serve? Who does the company really serve? That’s the customer. Marketing and sales might have ideas of what needs to happen, and sales driven organizations, you might often hear things like we need this to close this account. But it’s the job of the product team, writ large product managment/engineering to think about how are we going to draw the company out? How are we going to make it bigger? And by thinking about the customer in the true sense, you get a lot of positive effects.

Now thinking about the customer, the true sense is really like, how do I create, how do we create customer value? Now, people talk about this all the time, but they often don’t appreciate the value of this because the value of this is not just about the customer, but it’s about the company you work for and getting rid of that second culture clash, that culture clash around the product team, between other people in the company. The fundamental person you want to get alignment is with the CEO.

And the CEO’s job is to create a company with increasing value in a sustainable way, and a sustainable company. You want your next round. If you’re a private company would be larger than your last, if you’re a public company, you need to show growth. The reason this works is, it’s in the line with your users.

Your users only buy from companies that are going to deliver value to them. So if you’re focused on customer value, you will tend to get more customers. More customers means more revenue. If you’re doing it with unit margin, if it’s profitable on a unit basis, you’ll grow a profit for the company.

The value of the company is the sum of all future cash flows. That’s what your CEO wants. And that creates alignment that breaks down that second culture clash. If you can talk to the CEO about, if we do this, we’re creating more customer value—and the side effect of the customer value, not the primary goal, but the side effect of the customer value is we’ll get more revenue and more profit and you can talk in that way.

Then the conversation with the person in sales, who might be responsible for closing just this one account or marketing or someone else becomes the noise. Now I’m not saying you will never hear that. There may be some account that’s big enough that, of course, you’ve got to shift some something on the roadmap for, but the primary thing you’re doing by creating customer value will be engaging in a conversation with the CEO about how you solve the CEO’s problem about growing.

How do you know if you’re delivering customer value, look at your roadmap. If the majority of your activities don’t direct change for your user, you’re not creating customer value. I’m gonna talk about how to do that in a moment. You should measure the value your team has delivered and have that conversation with your team all the time.

And every member of your team, engineering and product members, both, should know why they’re doing it. What value they’re delivering? Who do you serve? Why or why is what you’re doing for them important? How does it change their lives? And they should be able to argue one story over the other and how that does that.

And this is not just product managers, arguing the stories. The engineers should argue for them. And by the way, the product managers should you with the engineering about architecture. Help me understand this, help me how this gets there, but that only happens in context of people understanding customer value.

That’s the first thing. Alignment, between product and the engine engineering about thinking about we build a product and alignment of who we serve alignment with the CEO. But how do you know if what you’re doing is serving? What is the mechanism you use?

Now? People often talk about metrics and you’ll often hear engineering talk about velocity and cycle time and PR response time, and frequently they talk to the CEO about these things. And that creates a problem. And product management has similar kind of things. They often talk to CEO just about roadmaps or user stories.

But that creates a problem because both of those metrics are internal metrics. These are efficiency metrics that talk about how we’re doing inside, but these are value metrics about what we’re doing for the people we serve. Once again, the people we serve are outside, our customers.

So what I recommend to you is thinking about the roadmap as a series of bets. You don’t actually know before you start something exactly what your customers want. Your customers don’t know, you can ask them, but they won’t know how to tell you. And so the things in the roadmap are a series of bets that hopefully are directionally correct, but not specifically correct.

The job of a product manager is impossible. If it’s measured by, I know exactly what people want. I tell CEOs all the time there’s, a class of CEOs who think they’re Steve jobs. And I have this conversation. I have it in a slightly more polite version than this, but it goes, I know how many Steve jobs currently exist in the universe.

There used to be one. Now there’s not, we need to have a series of bets on a roadmap by which we discover what people want. And the bets look like this, these epic statements, everything on the roadmap gets an epic statement. We believe by doing this feature for these users, they will get this outcome.

They will get this outcome. And we’ll know it when we see this metric move. But everything on the roadmap that you’re doing for an external user should have a thesis like this. You don’t have to use this exact format. There’s other formats you can use, but I strongly recommend a well-known format that you make these bets with and you’ll see why in a moment.

One reason is not just that, you know what you’re doing, but there’s a secondary benefit, which is internal alignment. Think of everybody in the company as a vector. Now how many of you took linear algebra in high school or college, but vectors have two attributes. There’s a magnitude and a heading of direction.

Magnitude is how big it is. The heading is where it’s going. If people don’t know the why, it’s like a tug of war every day, product managers are making decisions. Engineers are making decisions and there’s three or four ways you can code anything. And many, more ways that you can decide what user stories you’re going to do, UX people with what UX is going to look like, and they need to make these decisions every day in real time. Without knowing the context, they’re not likely to consistently make the right decision. Epic statements state the context. You can then ask if I do it this way, does this help get us closer or further away creating user value?

If my teams know the context in general, their vectors are going to be pointing in generally the right direction, as opposed to a tug of war where one set of people are pulling one way and other people are pulling another and you have some random Brownian movement in the middle and you might go one way or you might go another or worse, multiple ropes pulling.

You find that people align. And the vectors alignand you get pulls all in the same direction. And so having the epic statement allows people to make decisions and allows the squad to have conversations among themselves about Hey, why are you doing that architecture?

How does it help us get to the goal or engineer talking to product manager? I understand what you want. I understand why you want it. If we do it, it’s going to take a long time.On the other hand, I could do it like this and get 80% of it done at 20% of the time and have these other features. It engages a conversation between the engineers and the product managers.

It breaks down that first culture clash, because we’re not two teams. We’re one on the same goal. 

[00:18:34] Janna Bastow: David, do you have time for a question? How do you accommodate for diversity in this model? 

[00:18:42] David Subar: So diversity among thoughts or diversity among general diversity hiring diverse? 

[00:18:50] Janna Bastow: Diversity of opinion.

[00:18:51] David Subar: I love that question. You want diversity of opinion, right? I’ll talk about it a little bit later about how do you empower teams? How do you empower teams to operate on their own? And there’s a whole other presentation I’ve done, which I’ll reference later about commander’s intent and how you have empowered teams that are aligned the same way.

But I want my product managers, my engineers to disagree, and I want them to disagree with me. Because different people have different points of view because some are closer to the data, some are broader, but diversity of opinions starts with defining that epic statement.

Why is this important for the customer? At the end of the day, the product manager gets to make the product decision. The engineering leader gets to make the engineering decision, but I want the people to care and argue academically, about given this why, here’s the best way to accomplish it.

And when I sit in meetings, I will look for the people that aren’t talking. And I will ask them, what do you think. It’s important to draw them. Out also, by the way, if you are the most senior in the room, you need to talk last, your voice is loudest, louder than anyone else in the room.

Even if you’re quiet. If you want diversity of opinion, and by the way, you should, you need to bring that. There’s other techniques. There’s Fist to Five, which I won’t go over now, but if someone wants, I can explain or I can direct people to it, which is how do you get simultaneous opinions without the loudest person in the room talking.

But there’s different techniques to pull opinions out from people. And then you do also need a resolution and the way to empower the person who gets to make the final decision. I had a CEO who did this. I thought it was brilliant. We’d be debating something, and the debate would go on for some period of time, the CEO would look at us and say, whose decision is this? Now, all decisions could have been the CEO’s decision, because he was CEO and ,someone would say it’s Karen’s decision. And so he would turn to Karen and say, okay, Karen, you’ve heard the different opinions.

What’s your call? So it’s about seeking diversity of opinion, getting to solution and empowering the people to make the solution. 

[00:21:37] Janna Bastow: And to echo that Alex in the chat just said having a difference of opinion is really important. The key, he said, is to ensure that teams are empowered to work through opinions and arrive at a decision. Otherwise it turns into unresolved tension. 

[00:21:52] David Subar: That’s right. And Alex’s point about teams being able to work through it is also critical.

The CEO, as I said before, can make every decision in the organization. The problem with that is no person scales more than 24/7. And by the way, if the CEO makes every decision, people will tend to find new jobs where they’re more respected. 

[00:22:15] Janna Bastow: One of the things that I always say is one of the most dangerous things for a business is a product manager who thinks they have all the right answers.

Your job as a product person is not to have all the answers. It’s to ask the best questions and to surround yourself with the people who have those insights and to make the space for those insights to come together, to create something more out of it than just your own take on the product.

Otherwise, what you’ll end up with is the singular product manager’s idea of what the product should be. And almost certainly, it’s never going to be as powerful as what the team together could come up with. 

[00:22:49] David Subar: That’s right. And that’s why it’s a product team, with product managers and product owners and engineers and QA and UX whoever’s on it.

That’s why it’s a team doing it. And that’s why it’s a conversation outside of the team about who do we serve, because it’s not only the opinion within the team is clearly the most important, but also there’s colleagues you have in sales and marketing, who actually do know some stuff that are important and not just sales and marketing.

And so aligning to the same vision creates alignment within the people that you’re working with. We talked about alignment. We talked about measurement. Now I talk about review because it’s not enough to say we’re all serving the same goal and we all have a statement of how we’re going to serve them.

But you got to ask how you did. From what I was saying before that it’s being the product managers in a possible job. Because you can’t know exactly what the user wants. You’re making a series of bets. Some of those bets are going to be wrong. Some of the bets are gonna be wrong. By the way you want some of the bets be wrong.

I could make every bet a right bet by making no bets. You want some of the bets to be wrong. But given that some of the bets are going to be wrong, you want to learn from them and people know how to retro sprints. Hey, we just did a two week sprint one week sprint, whatever your sprint cycle is, there’s similar things in Kanban and other agile methodologies.

What did we do well that we want to keep doing? What do we want to do differently? How? What people don’t do frequently is retro what their bets were on the roadmap. What went well? How did we serve our users better? How did we miss? We did a lot of effort. We didn’t serve them better. We’d serve them worse.

And what do we learn from that? You’ve got to retro your releases, but you can’t retro them the day that they end, like a sprint. You’ve got to wait until some users have some time to do it. And maybe you even need to retro it more than once, but two weeks or three weeks out after delivery, or if you’re a big B2B environment, maybe it’s longer, you’ve got to retro them.

So you’ve learned what you’ve done. And so you could think about how do I make these bets better? This is critical.

But it’s not enough just to retro them. You’ve got to be transparent too, not just within the product manager and engineering team that you’re working with, not just within your squad, but with the rest of your teammates. You got to report to the other departments, other executives, how you did on your best.

Now, this is a really scary thing. It’s scary to go to the CEO and say, we made these bets. Maybe we made five bets and two of them did really well, hit it out of the park. One of them did okay. And two of them just didn’t do well. Didn’t do well. It’s a scary conversation to have, but to get alignment with the CEO, you need to be transparent to the CEO. The CEO is going to figure it out sooner or later, anyway, because by the thesis of we create customer value. And as a side effect of customer value, we create revenue and profit, and that creates company value for us. The CEO is going to figure out whether you did it anyway.

So you might as well be upfront with the CEO, upfront with your partners and talk about it. But the key is, not just to say, here’s the things we did well, and here’s the things we did differently on. It’s the value of the retro. Here’s what we learned. And more importantly, here’s how we’re changing the roadmap next.

Here’s how we’re continuing to improve customer value and therefore revenue and profitability and cashflow and the value of our business. You’ve got to have a full cycle of, we know who we serve, we make bets in this format, we release product, we measure it, we update the roadmap based on it. Wash, rinse, repeat, do it again. 

And again, and that is the cycle that gets you through the culture clashes gets you to alignment between product managers and engineering people in the squads, and those squads with the rest of the company. That’s the cycle. That’s important. Now I want to, now that is not enough.

We talked about the five things to overcome the culture clash, but there’s other things to know to create an effective culture. 

 There’s four other additional things to create an effective culture

Organizational models. I met Kevin Goldsmith, who was one of the executives at Spotify. Brilliant guy. If you ever get a chance to know Kevin, you should get to know him.

And I recommend listening to the interview that I did with him, because he says a lot of brilliant nuggets of things, but I’ll tell you a few of them here. There’s a worship of the Spotify model. Hey, we’re going to have a squad. And we’re going to have guilds and we have tribes and this is the way they work and we’re going to do that because it was so successful at Spotify.

And there’s a counter worship where people say it failed at Spotify. They’re not doing it so we know it failed. And so you shouldn’t use the Spotify model. And Kevin says something that’s interesting. That’s neither of those. Kevin said, we define an organizational model for the business problem we have, and it was successful until it wasn’t.

Our business problem was, we were doing music streaming and we knew there were going to be large companies coming into our space that had a lot more capital than us, a lot more revenue, better brand. And if we’re going to try to just outspend them, it would never work, but we could do something that they couldn’t do.

We could innovate really quick. And so we created an organizational model. We had a bunch of independent squads that worked on stuff cause they knew who the customer was and they were focused on the customer and they would work on things independent of each other. And so I said to Kevin, wait, hold on.

That means two groups were doing the same kind of code to do the same kind of stuff you said. Yup. That’s, inefficient, he goes, yup. We don’t care. We didn’t care because our goal was not code efficiency. Our goal was innovation. We created these independent squads to be innovative. And I said to him, didn’t that cause problems? He said, yup. You said our interfaces for two different parts of the Spotify app looked different for the same kinds of buttons. We made an organizational model trade-off to solve the business mission that we had. Out innovate who our competitors would be, who we didn’t know at that point, but maybe Microsoft or Apple or Amazon, we didn’t know who was going to be, but we needed to innovate.

And we created an organization, the model to do it. And he said, and then we won. And so Spotify doesn’t do Spotify. Doesn’t do that organizational model anymore because we no longer needed to out innovate. And so the memes about Spotify is great. We should do exactly what they do did. And the memes about Spotify model is stupid. They don’t do it so clearly it failed. Both are wrong. We created an organizational model that worked for us at the time. And then that organizational model changed when our needs changed. Kevin strongly stated, you need to understand, you need to create an organizational model that supports what your business goals are.

Now notice he didn’t say to create engineering efficiency or product management efficiency. It’s what the business goals are. So once again, this is about alignment to where you’re joining the company and what you need in alignment with the CEO. This is completely consistent with this. Anyway, I recommend you listen to the interview with Kevin or any other place Kevin’s spoken. He’s very forward about this concept and a brilliant guy. 

So organizational models, that’s one thing. Personnel, none of this works if you don’t have great personnel.

And there’s three things you need to do to have great personnel. You need to recruit. You need to retain well and you need to fire well. The third of those is the hardest, but the good news is, if you have alignment to a customer, all of these become easier.

Engineers and product managers have choices of jobs. I’ve told CEO’s that everyone in the engineering and product management staff can walk out of the office today and get a new job in three days. And if they can’t, I don’t want them here either. So you have to assume that everybody on the staff has plenty of options.

They don’t have to be here and we don’t have enough money to pay people enough to essentially buy them. Google’s got more money than we have, whoever you are, or Facebook or pick your company. And interesting projects, turns out there’s a lot. What we have as a differentiator, is who we serve. So I had this job offer at a fantasy sports company and the CEO was great.

And back when people went to offices they had beautiful offices and they had a hundred million dollars in investment and it looked like a great opportunity and I really want to work for the CEO and they made me an offer and I thought about it and I thought about, and I thought about it and I didn’t take the job.

The CEO, his name, Richard, I didn’t take the job. I called Richard up. And I said, thank you for your offer. And I really want to work for you, but I unfortunately can’t take your job because you know what? I don’t care about sports. I can never be great at this job. I can only be very good. And by knowing who you serve, that’s a differentiator, here’s the impact we make at this company. And if this is something that you’re interested in, that’s our differentiator.

You should come work here.

You need a great team. And having that solves both the recruitment problem and at least part of the retention problem. 

We talked about organizational model, personnel, and now it’s about empowerment. It’s important to not tell people what to do. What’s important to do is set the goal set for people. Hey team, our goal is to do X.

Please argue with me, ask me hard questions about why we need to do X and they, you should encourage them to ask you hard questions, and then you should have the conversation with them. The argument with them, debate with them about why they’re going to know some stuff you don’t know as a leader. And you’re going to know some stuff they don’t know because you have breath after you decide on the, what don’t tell them that.

Go to the team and say, your job is to come back and tell me how you’re going to get us to this goal. I trust you. And when they come back and tell you, your job is to ask them hard questions, do not tell them if you tell them things, they will tend to do what you say. That’s not what you want. You want to hear their opinions and you want to ask them hard questions.

And the hard questions you may understand that they didn’t understand something or you may come to understand that they have some data you don’t have. Now you’ve agreed on goal and implementation your job now is to let them run. You have to let them run. You have to get impediments out of their way.

And you check in with them on status to make sure they’re getting aligned. That’s the commander’s intent. That’s the empowerment model in a nutshell.

 And finally, the environment. All of this only works, if you have a company that can grow or is growing, you have the ability to lead the team, you are empowered the same way I suggested empowering the team to lead the team, you can give them what they need to do their job, you can create that environment, and you have a seat at the table. That’s the environment that you need to exist in. That’s the environment you need to set up for your team.

And if that’s not true, you need to make it true, we need to find a place that is true.

So I’ll leave you with one last thought. The author of The Little Prince wrote other material, a book called the Airman’s Odyssey. And he said, love it does, it is not about looking into gazing at each other, but looking outward together in the same direction. I argue, this is exactly right, but it’s not just right about being in love with someone, it’s right about collaboration and creating a culture of service, of creating a culture for product managers and engineering.

It’s not about just how do we make our jobs better, but how do we, who do we serve? How do we focus on them? And, how do we make their lives better gazing the same direction for a same mission. So if anybody has any questions, anybody wants to talk more about industry. There’s a variety of ways to get ahold of me.

I’m glad to just chat with people. Anyone want to chat, feel free to reach out. So that’s what I got. 

[00:38:07] Janna Bastow: Wonderful. Excellent. Thank you so much. And there’s actually a great question that somebody wanted to clarify.

One of the other points that you put up there towards the last slide, I think there were some criteria in there going, you’ve got to have the empowerment, you’ve got to have a seat at the table. And somebody asked, was that a message for CTOs and CPOs?

[00:38:29] David Subar: I think it’s a message for everybody. I think it’s a message for everybody. I want to work with empowered teams.

I think that companies can only scale it up there have empowered teams. Is it more important for CTOs or chief product officers? No, it’s not. If you’re CTO and chief product officer, if you want to be successful, it means you want your teams to be successful and they have to be empowered.

What to do if you’re in a company that’s not empowering you?

I read this great article by how do you deal with managers that micromanage? And the answer was, I don’t want you to know that this works in all cases, but I thought the answer was really interesting is do everything they ask plus a little bit, empower yourself to do a little more, and demonstrate to your manager, you asked for A, B and C and I did that and gosh, we’re successful on that.

And by the way, while I was there, I did D and I think this creates value here. Take a little bit of expansion. Now that starts engaging the conversation, right? If your balloon is this big, you can’t expand it to that. You can only go from this to that. So it might take time, but it might engage in a conversation, but you might not be empowered because the person you work for is scared.

The other thing is breaking bread with someone is a very powerful thing. Sitting down and having a meal with someone where you learn about oh, you have a significant other, who’s that significant other, or you have kids, you don’t have kids, you have a dog or a cat.

And when people get to know each other, they start to be someone you can trust. And so that also expands. So neither of those might work, you might have to get another job, but you don’t necessarily have to get another job. 

[00:40:16] Janna Bastow: I remember an early boss in my career really opened my eyes when they reminded me that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. And they basically gave me implied permission to go do some things take some resources, take some, effort and do some things that were not necessarily by the book, but allowed us to get some things done. 

A really clear difference that I want to point out to anybody though. Don’t put up with a toxic environment. There’s a difference between not being empowered and not being able to do parts of your job, which is not fun. It’s sucks. 

But don’t put up with a toxic environment if you’re in that and it doesn’t feel right. Get out, there are plenty of people hiring. 

[00:40:59] David Subar: By the way, I had the opportunity to meet Grace Hopper, the woman who originally said, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness and permission many years ago, I don’t know how old she was, but I think she was ancient at that point.

She was amazing. She was a fireball, even I’m guessing she was in her eighties and she was giving a presentation, a company I was working for. And I got to spend a little time with her. And in her, even in her eighties, she was empowered. Like she was frail. She was walking with a cane. She was bent over and the most powerful person in the room, by far. 

[00:41:36] Janna Bastow: I love that. All right. Let’s try to do some quick fire questions here. How do you engage a CTO that does not prioritize to measure what was released? Any tips on that? 

[00:41:48] David Subar: Clearly that CTO knows if the servers go down and when the servers go down, clearly the CTO is very attuned to getting them fixed because sooner or later the CEO will figure it out. And that won’t be a pleasant day. So there’s some type of retro the CTO does, even if they don’t think about it that way.

I think the conversation goes with Hey, my job is to try to create a product that people like I’m going to be wrong. I would like to know where I’m wrong. Cause I want to do my job better. And I would like to be your partner in this.

Now they might just go say pound sand or something, not so nice. But then you, then, if you’re not the chief product officer, you might need to engage the chief product officer to engage in the conversation with the CEO. Or if you are the chief product officer, you might need to engage a conversation with the CEO to say, Hey, here’s what I’m trying to do.

Here’s why I’m trying to do it. Here’s why I need a partner and I don’t have one today. Can you help me create this person into a partner? But this goes back to if you’re aligned with the CEO and your environment, other people generally will have to fall in mind or find another job 

[00:43:13] Janna Bastow: Excellent. Next question. If you can’t come up with any kind of success measure for epic statements, should you not do that yet? 

[00:43:21] David Subar: I would question why you’re doing it. If you don’t know the value you’re trying to create, I would ask him like, why are you doing this? 

[00:43:29] Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that.

Everything should be able to be justified by your north star metric. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that everything has to get us revenue, but you should be able to understand what impact it’s going to have for the business. Ask those five whys and dig down as to what it’s actually doing there.

And if you can’t answer that, if it has no point place in the backlog

[00:43:53] David Subar: And there’ll be some things in the roadmap that don’t serve because for not everything will serve the customers. Some like we’ve got to refactor this bit because it’s going to get us, it’s going to get us out of tech debt.

That’s as long as those are okay, too, but you better have a why. 

[00:44:07] Janna Bastow: Actually. This is something I was going to mention. Cause you said something about showing value on your roadmap and it’s important not to misjudge value as creating new things for the customers to play with. That doesn’t mean new features, sometimes value to customers means helping them realize the value that you’ve already created in your product.

Helping them see how to use or changing how you price or package things. There’s lots of ways to create value for your customers. That doesn’t mean creating new code or creating new features for them. 

[00:44:42] David Subar: Yep, exactly. Exactly. 

[00:44:45] Janna Bastow: As a product manager, how do you get your team to be comfortable with ambiguity?

[00:44:56] David Subar: I think the answer is, the MVP model. We don’t know we’re going to build small and we’re going to explore the space and iterate through it. This is classic agile, right? What’s the smallest possible thing that we can build that still has value. 

 There’s a counter question is someone asked me the other day, is what do you do when you have engineers working on something, and it turns out it didn’t add value. Don’t they feel bad about it? And the answer is, yeah, probably if they look at the mission and the small, but if you look at the mission to large and we’re going to try a bunch of stuff, some are going to work in some aren’t then what did we learn is the value is the thing you really created.

Yeah. And so what is the minimum we can invest to learn the next thing. And here’s another way to look at it is if I’m going to start up and let’s say we have 18 months run rate. So with 18 months before we have to have our next round, we better start looking for our next round in six months before we run out, because we’ll lose all leverage.

So we don’t really have 12 months and we need to show business progress in that 12 months. And if I do a release every week, I have 48 times to try to get this business forward, I’m just making easy math. And so how do I use those 48 bets? You actually have a lot more than 48, but how do I use it? 

[00:46:20] Janna Bastow: That makes a lot of sense. 

[00:46:21] David Subar: I love how you’ve I take that to you think about it from both sides. And I think that makes a lot of sense. All right. On that note I think we’re out of time for questions. Thank you so much for everyone, for sending through your questions and getting involved in the chats and a huge thank you to David.

[00:46:38] Janna Bastow: Thank you so much for getting involved in sharing, somebody called them knowledge bombs earlier. Keep an eye out for the next webinars that we’ve got coming up.

Bye-bye everybody.

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