99: Building a Product that People LOVE with Janna Bastow of ProdPad
Jul 5, 2016
auto_awesome
Janna Bastow of ProdPad discusses the importance of effective product management in startups, emphasizing the balance between technical feasibility, customer value, and business profitability. She shares insights on the role of a product manager, the challenges of product analytics, and strategies for building successful products. Additionally, the podcast explores managing remote teams, implementing tailored email marketing, and maintaining team dynamics through regular in-person catch-ups.
Building a successful product requires balancing technical feasibility, customer value, and profitability.
Engaging with customers, understanding their needs, and iterating based on feedback are crucial for product success.
Deep dives
Building a Product Roadmap with Prodpad
Prodpad is a tool that helps build visual representations of product roadmaps, allowing entrepreneurs and product managers to plan out the development of their products or services. The tool enables users to break down their product vision into actionable steps, categorize them into current, near-term, and future goals, and even get feedback from customers by sharing a simplified version of the roadmap. Prodpad also emphasizes the importance of talking to customers and understanding their needs to ensure that the product being built is valuable and solves their problems. The company's own product optimization efforts include personalized onboarding emails based on user behavior, demonstrating its commitment to continuous improvement.
The Journey of Building Prodpad
The founder of Prodpad, Jana Basto, shares her journey of product management and how it led to the creation of Prodpad. She initially started as a junior product manager and fell in love with the role, eventually realizing the lack of resources available for product managers. With her co-founder, she developed Prodpad as an internal tool in her previous roles, and after receiving positive feedback and validation from other product managers, they decided to turn it into a standalone company. Prodpad has since grown into a team of six spread across different locations. Their bootstrap approach prioritizes revenue generation from day one and a strong focus on customer feedback to guide product development.
The Importance of User Feedback and Product Vision
The podcast highlights the importance of customer feedback and understanding their needs in order to build a successful product. Jana emphasizes that entrepreneurs should not solely rely on their own ideas, but actively engage with customers and users to validate their assumptions and iterate on their product roadmap. She also emphasizes the value of setting a clear product vision and being open to evolving it as the market and customer needs change. By continuously listening to customers and aligning the product roadmap with their feedback, entrepreneurs can build products that solve real problems and ensure long-term success.
Managing a Remote Team and Scaling the Business
The podcast explores the challenges and strategies of managing a remote team. Jana discusses the use of tools like Slack and Skype for communication, while acknowledging the importance of trust among team members. Regular catch-ups and off-site meetings help foster a strong sense of collaboration and accountability. In terms of scaling the business, ProdPad has already experienced growth in leads, traffic, and customers. Jana mentions their deliberate choice to remain self-funded and focus on organic growth. With an expanding team and customer base, ProdPad aims to continue iterating their product, delivering value to their customers, and embracing opportunities for further scale and growth.
As much as entrepreneurs can go on extolling the virtues of a great marketing strategy or knowing your target customer, at the end of the day, it's all about having something worth selling. No matter how great your advertising campaign may be, if you don't have something that people want to buy then you simply don't have a business.
And yet, entrepreneurs all too often tend to gloss over this fact. They'll focus on everything else, but somehow forget to question whether or not their product is a winner, or even if it's a good idea in the first place.
This is where Janna Bastow of ProdPad steps in, because she, more than anyone else in the world, knows exactly why effective product management is so instrumental to your startup's success.
For Bastow, effective product management is when you're able to find that delicate balance between what's technically feasible, valuable for the customer, and profitable for the business, and define a roadmap on that basis.
Ever since launching ProdPad in 2012, a tool that lets startup teams formally gather ideas, pick out the best ones and turn them into profitable products, Bastow has helped hundreds of startups and entrepreneurs in finding out what their perfect product is. More than anyone else, she knows how just difficult this process can be and why you shouldn't take it for granted.
In this interview you will learn:
What a product manager is and why you need one as part of your startup
The best way to talk to customers and figure out what they actually want
Step-by-step instructions on how to design a product roadmap
Why you need a user story and what it means
How to manage a remote team as a bootstrapped startup
& much more!
Get the Snipd podcast app
Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.
AI-powered podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
Discover highlights
Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode
Save any moment
Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways
Share & Export
Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more
AI-powered podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
Discover highlights
Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode