72 / The Product Leader’s Dilemma: Balancing Possibility, Predictability

As product leaders, we’re rarely hired to build a product from scratch. Unless, of course, you’re the founder. Much of the time we’re handed our predecessor’s backlog with little guidance – other than, perhaps, “Here, help us with this.” And with that, you’re faced with a decision to make, as introduced by Janna Bastow: press forward, predictably and safely, in a project-led mindset. Or change tack, introducing the thrill of possibility and risk into a product-led process.

In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast Sean and Paul are joined by Janna Bastow, co-founder of ProdPad, ProductTank, and Mind the Product. Janna discusses the tension within organizations between the predictability that shareholders long for, and the uncertain sprint-to-sprint existence of the product manager.

“The people who are investing in your company are watching your stocks,” Janna says. “They want predictability at that level. They don’t care about the individual product features and, you know, agile vs. waterfall vs. whatever else. To them, Agile is just a means to the end.”

But for product managers, predictability is often just as risky as innovation. To us, Agile helps us run our experiments we need – some of which lead to innovation. It’s not reasonable to expect us to know what the results of these experiment are, though. Janna suggests that product leaders should work with management to carve out the freedom and budget to find the right balance between predictability and possibility.

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