Janna Bastow

Co-founded the world's largest product management community (Mind the Product) and invented the Now/Next/Later roadmap framework that is now used by thousands of product teams, backed by a decade of building ProdPad and observing how roadmaps fail in practice. Their core argument: Roadmaps should be outcome-oriented prototypes of strategy, not date-driven commitments. The evidence is specific: ProdPad's first version was a digitized timeline roadmap -- users requested multi-select drag to 'move everything by a month,' revealing that no one was hitting their dates. Furthermore, the Now/Next/Later framework emerged from applying five whys to ProdPad's user feedback, discovering the systematic failure of timeline roadmaps. Mind the Product (world's largest PM community) provided Janna a feedback loop of thousands of product managers' roadmap struggles, validating the pattern at scale. In Janna Bastow's own words: "The whole point about a roadmap is that it's not designed to be your plan. I think about it as being a prototype for your strategy." (Core philosophy of roadmaps as strategy prototypes.)