AMA TODAY! 🤓I invented the Now-Next-Later roadmap, co-founded Mind the Product & ProdPad

@herbig Awesome questions, thanks Tim! We’ve been building AI features into ProdPad since 2018, though back then they were more simple: They helped us meet user needs like deduplicating ideas in their backlog and matching up new feedback to ideas they had in discovery, as well as improving search and some other facets. This helped us meet our vision of being a tool that helped you become a better product manager, by making it easier to make clear decisions and reducing the grunt work that got in your way. Today we continue to include AI in our strategy for the same sort of reason: To meet customer needs and to help us reach our ultimate goals. With GPT, we’ve been able to take a big step forward in serving those needs and becoming the tool we always envisioned 🤩 Ultimately, AI is just one of the tools in our belt. Instead of solely focusing on AI-driven initiatives, we'll use AI as one of the tools to address everyday challenges. We'll consistently ask: 'What are the major issues our customers face that we can help resolve?' AI will be considered as one potential solution among various methods to enhance or address these problems. Discovery for AI features is really no different than discovery for anything else. In fact, we started discovering the problems that ProdPad AI (which we’re launching here on ProductHunt on Monday 😎 https://www.producthunt.com/prod...) was going to solve long before GPT even came on the market, as we’ve spent years talking to product people about how they work and what holds them back from doing their best work. It’s no secret that product people get stuck when faced with a blank page, or hate writing user stories and key results, and waste hours trying to sift through pages and pages of customer feedback. We’ve been hearing these complaints for years, but it was only with recent tech that we could REALLY take big chunks out of those sorts of problems, all at once. Once we got started with GPT, our Head of Product @kkg and her team has been instrumental in crafting a delightful, usable, and valuable implementation of the tech that solved these problems. She set about to listen to the feedback that was coming in, and work with our CTIO and co-founder @simoncast on underlying prompts before we even think about UI, tweaking and testing the output until we’re happy it’s good enough to test with customers. We’ve then been sending the raw output to customers and asking for their feedback on where it enhances or falls short on what they currently do vs what they expect it to do. The team then takes that feedback and iterates on it as needed, and once the responses are good enough that it satisfies the customer need, then the product team looks to build the flow and UI around it. A new UI feature will then always go to Beta first to give us the chance to get wider feedback and then iterate as more learnings come in, and then finally, we release to production when we’re satisfied.

@askotzko Thanks for the questions, Andrew! Roadmaps today: The shift in how we work has led to more flexible and adaptive roadmaps. The Now-Next-Later roadmap is here to stay! The unpredictability of our current world means roadmaps aren't set in stone anymore. Communication is now more frequent, and transparent, and involves a wider range of stakeholders to make sure everyone's on the same page, to keep up with the pace of change and the lack of face-to-face interaction. Burnout: Regularly check in with team members wellbeing and workloads. We have a weekly pulse score but then also regular 1:1s and a team ready to adapt to individual needs. We offer regular (extra) days off throughout the year, mental health resources, and, perhaps best of all, try not to work to external/arbitrary deadlines which inevitably create crunch periods that require recovery from. Most of all, we try to create an environment where people feel like they can speak up if they are snowed under. Outcomes v Output: While the focus is rightly on outcomes (the impact of the work), discussing activity metrics can still be valuable. These metrics give context to the efforts made and can highlight areas of improvement. For instance, if a team conducted numerous customer interviews but didn't gain much insight, it might be time to reevaluate the interview process or the questions being asked. So, while outcomes are the main goal, activity metrics can provide valuable insights into the journey there.

@belsito Amazing, thanks so very much for the support Mike! Launch is out and live today 🌟💪🚀 https://www.producthunt.com/post... We're really proud of how we've used AI to solve a wide range of problems. We didn't want to just generate a flood of stuff (though it is helpful to have it help fill in blanks, brainstorm so you don't miss gaps, and get rid of that 'blank page' problem), we also used it to lend a critical eye on whether the work you're doing as a product manager is any good - eg. is your vision statement strong? Are your ideas aligned with your vision? Check it out, add your support, and tell your producty friends! 😁

@iogical_blabber This is a good time to talk about healthy tension and unhealthy tension, as it’s hard to tell which situation you’re in from this, but hopefully this framing helps: Healthy tension is good for a team. It makes sense that the business and growth teams are looking to see a good pace out of the product team. In fairness, they want everyone on the team to deliver everything yesterday, and everyone’s mucking in equally to get things done the best they can. This is only fair if they are asking the same of themselves, of marketing, of sales, etc. If this is just pressure being put on the product team, see my notes on unhealthy tension below! And while they want it ‘yesterday’, they should have a fair understanding of the way that product development really works, in that it’s more of an art than a science, and that you don’t know what the final product will be until it’s out and accepted by customers, since it’s never been built by anyone before. There’s pressure to deliver, but no bad consequences to your livelihood or career or mental state if your product fails. In fact, your team bands behind you, and celebrates that you did *something* and learned from it, and are ready to do something else that’s probably closer to solving the problem. In a team with healthy tension, external deadlines or deadlines from other teams are rare, but instead, each team and individual sets their own pace and milestones (whether this is a development team running 2-week sprints and weekly releases like we do here at ProdPad, or other methods), and keeps the wider team informed of just how fast and productive they are being. In a healthy team, people should be in healthy competition to deliver as much as they can, in service of the wider team’s goals, and aren’t doing just because there’s a looming deadline from the execs that they are afraid of missing. Unhealthy tension is when the execs or others external to the team literally do want it yesterday, and are unreasonable about accepting that making great products simply takes time. They don’t get that it takes lots of iterations, and during those iterations, you’ve got to have space to mess up a good handful of times, or else you’re never going to learn. If there’s pressure to ship, ship fast, and then move on and ship the next thing because you’re already overdue based on some plan that was drawn up some months ago, your whole team is setting themselves up for failure. This is a path filled with tech debt and rushed solutions that only half-solve the problem, and with team members who hate their job because it’s always a crunch, no matter how fast they work. This company is the one, in a couple years time, has to refactor their whole codebase, because the whole thing was rushed out the door in a series of launches that were all due yesterday, but who has had all their devs quit, because the codebase is a tangled mess and no one wants to work in a crunch all the time. I hope yours is the former, as healthy tension is good—internal deadlines and goals keep us ticking, and having a whole team striving to improve constantly helps us stay on track to improve in our own corner. If it’s the latter, I hope you or someone there can shine a light on how unhealthy the habits will become, and what the fate of the business is, if they keep opting to push their people for output at the expense of quality, psychological safety, or long-term staying power. Good luck and happy building! If this was useful, please check out ProdPad (it’s one way you might help give some transparency into how products are really made, taking some of that pressure off 😉), and come back on Monday to give us an upvote and review on our ProdPad AI launch! https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

@simplybastow Thank you Janna. As in most companies, I think, it always a mix of healthy tension and unhealthy tension. There are some good teams, which want to work together to solve problems. There are other teams which always play "You said vs I said". However, I get what you are saying

@wes_bush Hey Wes, thanks for the question! AI is making product manager’s jobs way easier. I was talking to a customer some months ago, and they were saying that, for every hour they spend interviewing a customer in the discovery stage, they need to spend 3-7 hours simply processing the output (dealing with the transcript, summarizing, linking, tagging, just generally making sense of the feedback, etc.). I know that not every team spends this much time on processing, but they could, if they wanted to eke out full value from each conversation. A customer conversation is incredibly rich and valuable! It’s just that we haven’t had time and energy to do it in the past. PMs, up until now, have had so many time wasting jobs (like managing backlogs and creating different versions of roadmaps and scheduling time with customers and writing detailed specs), all things that keep them from spending time on actually talking to customers and figuring out their problems. Product managers should embrace AI, and let their AI assistants take the weight off, so they can finally get out of the building and talk to customers, the way we always wanted to. And that customer who was spending 3-7 hours on each hour of interview? They no longer have to spend so long, with the ProdPad AI tools, as we built a feedback summarizer to do the bulk of it for them and others 😎 Check it out on Monday when we launch. I’d love your upvote and review 🌟 https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

@dcjarvis Good one! Making the leap from a project-focused approach to a product-centric one is a game changer. Okay, my first tip is around having a long term vision. Instead of getting caught up in the immediate tasks, it's about dreaming big and setting sights on where you want to be down the road. Looking ahead to this long-term vision becomes your guiding star. My next tip is to build in flexibility. Traditional, rigid plans can hold you back. Embracing adaptable methods, like the Now-Next-Later roadmap, allows for more freedom and responsiveness. If you’re stuck on a timeline roadmap or in an otherwise inflexible org, I’ve written this guide on ditching timelines that might help: https://www.prodpad.com/resource... It’s also essential to keep users front and center. What’s a product without its users? You’re looking to create something that customers will desire and value, so it builds value for the business. This customer centricity should inform decisions. Also, look at how your team is organized. Do you have the right people, and enough of them (and not too many 🙈) to let each team/squad/pod/whatever make autonomous decisions, or are they having to submit requests and wait their turn for replies and work from across the org? Lastly, while it's tempting to cater to specific requests from a few customers, it's important not to fall into what I call the Agency Trap. You’re looking to build for the broader market, not just a select few in exchange for a quick buck. I’ve written about this one too, and how to avoid and get out of the Agency Trap (I’ve been in this particular flavour of project-mindset, and it’s tough!): https://www.prodpad.com/blog/avo... If you or others found this useful, please come check out ProdPad AI today or over the weekend, and then come back on Monday when we launch to upvote and give us a lovely review! 🌟https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

@ines_liberato Thanks for sharing the love about ProdPad! 🥰 And yes! There's actually already some prompting in there around privacy and accessibility (so the ideas that come back have these considerations in mind, or are flagged in the risks and challenges), and we're testing some tweaks around considering ethical or other responsibility/accountability angles that product people should keep in mind.

@phil_hornby2 Hey Phil, thank for asking about ProdPad AI! We’re excited for the Product Hunt launch on Monday: https://www.producthunt.com/prod... Happy to chat through these questions: To your first question, we’ve primed this in the background to have knowledge of product management best practices, so it doesn’t lead you astray. It’s already got a sense of what sort of information is needed to go into a useful product spec that people will read and will help move the idea along, and is primed to ask questions and jot down risks and challenges where necessary so you don’t get swayed by ChatGPT’s hallucinations. All of this is available just by clicking a button. We’ve dropped in different instances of the AI Assistant throughout the app, but each is primed to help in different ways: One’s there to help you beat the problem of turning a rough draft idea into something you can start bringing around for feedback. One’s there to help you brainstorm and write user stories. One’s there to help you craft Key Results to match your Objectives. One’s there to help tell you if the product vision you wrote is any good, and coach you on how to make it better. One’s there to help you check whether the idea you wrote aligns with the vision you’d outlined, and gives feedback on how to improve. So while you could go to ChatGPT and carefully craft these sorts of questions yourself, it’d be a whole lot of repetitive typing and trial and error to get to the same thing you get in ProdPad, included as standard in all of our packages. That’s a lot of grunt work saved, just right there! And that takes me to your second question, about your data use with our AI tools. This is arguably the most important benefit of using ProdPad AI over ChatGPT, because you definitely do not want your data fed back into ChatGPT for the world to use. We absolutely do not share the data back to ChatGPT. We use OpenAI’s GPT underlying models, and any data sent to those models is not used for training in any way. This means you can use our GPT-powered tools to work on your product strategy and internal ideas, without fear your competitors or anyone else in the world will lay eyes on them. I love this third question, thanks! I’m going to shift it to my thoughts around what I think the Now-Next-Later is for AI for product management in general, as we’re still discovering what AI means for ProdPad just here in the Now 😅 It’s hard to imagine where AI is going to take us in the decades to come but here’s my best guess: Now: What we’re seeing right now is how AI is being used to reduce the grunt work for product people. Compared to just a year ago, we can write specs and user stories faster, summarize huge piles of feedback in a jiffy, and get instant feedback on work. AI is beginning to act like a sidekick in our decision-making process. Next: AI is criticized for tending towards the average, but for the work we do as PMs, this is largely beneficial! Our jobs are to create things that are usable, functional, and valuable. When crafting things that are usable and functional, tending towards the average is perfect. After all, you don’t want surprises in your UX or in how something technically functions—that makes it buggy or unusable. We spend so much time as product people, redoing the same boring interfaces: How many times in your career have you spec’d and helped deliver a login and registration flow, or a settings configuration page, or a tag management system? Basically, all of these things SHOULD be more or less the same, with no surprises, and yet we’re collectively wasting time rebuilding them from scratch every time we build an app from scratch. In the near future, with the combination of low/no-code tools and AI, we’ll be able to breeze past the ‘expected’ parts of the product build and instead focus on the small sliver of work that makes it stand out—the part that makes it valuable. I don’t think AI is going to be able to replace THAT any time soon, but it’ll free us up the time to spend thinking about what valuable means—to the customer, to the business, to the world—and to go through the motions to really tease out that value, instead of just trying to get something basic like tags or filters or search or whatever to work. Later: Down the line, product management/building/crafting/whatever, is going to become commoditized. Just like it was HARD to build and launch a website 30 years ago, but easy now, or HARD to build an e-commerce shop 20 years ago, but easy now, it’ll soon be easy to build an entire app of just about any description. If you can describe it, it can be built in minutes or seconds, as easy as asking: “Alexa, make me an app for tracking my dog's daily steps” (although I doubt it’ll be Alexa here unless Amazon makes some leaps forward in their AI capabilities!). It’ll result in a proliferation of apps and products. Think like YouTube, how there are more videos uploaded than can ever be watched. The job of the product manager will then be less about what they can build (as anyone can build just about anything now), but about truly understanding audiences and problems, and curating to get the right solutions in front of them. Philosophically, the role of the product manager won’t change—but the playing field, and the tools and capabilities at hand, will shift massively, in the years to come.

@james_challinor1 Hi James, what a good question! It sounds like you’ve covered off the key angles about how you differentiate between product management tools like ProdPad and classic development tools like Jira or Azure Devops, eg. they’re for different jobs in the workflow, they are complimentary, dev tools simply aren’t made for product management, etc. There are some other angles you might try to hammer the point home: Talk about the business value and ROI of using a dedicated product management tool. Highlight how it can lead to better product decisions, faster time-to-market, and ultimately, increased revenue or customer satisfaction. In that same vein, talk about the risk that you’re mitigating by having a separate tool. Without a clear product strategy and roadmap (which ProdPad helps you with) there’s a higher risk that your org builds the wrong features, spends time/resources/money on the wrong thing, or misses opportunities in the market. I love these two in particular as they speak the exec’s language, and what is our job as product people if it’s not to empathise and speak the language of our stakeholders (even if they also happen to be our bosses). You can play the clarity angle, and point out that using the right tool for the right job reduces confusion and streamlines processes. Using a dev tool for product management can lead to cluttered backlogs, missed opportunities, and misalignment in general. Or just the good old fashion efficiency angle, with the new ProdPad AI stuff that cuts down on the amount of effort, and helps each PM on your team get more done with their time. You could also talk about the increased customer-centricity that having ProdPad gives you, as it connects not only with your development side, but directly with what your customers are asking for. Which of these do you think is going to speak most to your team? Let us know how you get on! And please do get back here for the ProdPad AI launch on Monday—we’d love a review and upvote 😁 https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

@simplybastow Thanks Janna. Good tips. I feel like I've got more ammunition now! :D And great AI launch on Monday. You got my upvote ;)

@jjrorie1 Sure thing, I’m happy to share some tips here! Treat your roadmap as a prototype for your strategy, rather than a perfect plan that you’ve conjured up in your ivory tower. Don’t just run straight in telling people you have the answers, use the roadmap as a starting point for conversations, and take their insights on board. After all, it’s not your job to have all the answers, it’s your job to have the questions, and to surround yourself with people who can help fill in the gaps and check your assumptions. Show your completed roadmap (this is a really key feature of ProdPad that people love), as in show the work that’s been done to solve problems—whether or not the initiatives were successful or failures, it’s important for people to see how the product team is allocating effort, and what they are learning from the time spent, and therefore how it’s shaping work going forward. And just in general make it easy for them to contribute their ideas, and make it easy for them to see the progress of work, like where their ideas are in the workflow, or why certain product decisions are being made. I’ve always been a huge advocate for transparency in product management, which is why we started building ProdPad in the first place. Transparency builds trust, and trust means the team can go further together. Hope to see you over at the ProdPad AI launch page on Monday! https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

@simplybastow love this! especially about showing the work that's been done to solve problems. thanks!

@sjohnson717 A question as old as time. Or at least as old as the gantt chart roadmap 🙈 Utlimately, a roadmap shouldn't be driven by dates, because it's bad for business. It results in tech debt stacking up, and team members getting less done, and coming out of it feeling less autonomous and happy. It introduces risk into the business. Risk that the wrong thing is built, or that market opportunities are missed, or that expectations are left unfulfilled. Teams could avoid so much heartache by not relying on a date-driven format of working. This doesn't mean dates can't EVER appear on roadmaps. If something is externally driven or strategically important, it can still be communicated on a lean roadmap. It just doesn't assume that EVERYTHING on the roadmap has a date, just because the format makes it so, or because some pointy-haired boss thinks it's going to drive things faster (it won't). You can show high level deliverables on a Now-Next-Later roadmap, or finer-grained levels of detail on your release plan. Generally, the execs and other stakeholders around you want dates on the roadmap as it gives them a sense of control and knowledge, and that's hard to give up, even when we shine a light on it and point out it's a false sense of control and knowledge (us PMs have been making up dates on the roadmap since the day we were asked to tie anything down, and we all add huge amounts of buffer so we don't get caught out getting it wrong, so even if the roadmap is in control—delivered on time—the team undoubtedly delivered less than if they were allowed to work in a lean way in the first place). Hope this helps! If it does, please make sure to check out ProdPad and lend your support to our Product Hunt launch today 😎 https://www.producthunt.com/post...

@antmurphy Ha, an age old question indeed! Here’s the secret though: It’s a fallacy that a Now-Next-Later roadmap CAN’T have dates on it. We don’t live in la-la land. If something has to have a date milestone communicated against it, then you can and should put that on the roadmap card so people on the team know what fixed commitments are coming at them on the horizon. What the Now-Next-Later format allows you to do is to step away from the problem of having dates for EVERYTHING, which is what a timeline roadmap has. Because, really, do you need to specify a date for everything, or are you really just penalizing yourself by putting deadlines on things where you could otherwise give your team a little space for flexibility? If there’s the occasional deadline, that’s probably fine. Externally driven, or strategically important dates sometimes just need to be communicated. But if the leaders are insisting that everything has a date… really push back and ask why. Do they think you won’t deliver as fast if you don’t have a barrage of deadlines? Are they unsure of how they can market effectively without knowing exact launch dates? Have they promised a bunch of stuff to customers and are now passing the buck to y’all in the product team? I’ve written a guide on how move from a timeline roadmap to Now-Next-Later and how to handle all of these objections and more (check the last page): https://www.prodpad.com/resource... If you found this helpful, please be sure to check out our launch on Monday and give us a good review if you like what you see! https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

@justin_woods3 Thanks Justin! I really appreciate you saying so 😊 I’m most proud of building ProdPad as a bootstrapped business, against the odds. It would have been so easy to raise funding at a number of points in the past, but we’ve always believed that the best way to serve our customers and reach our goals was to build something that was customer-funded! I’m really glad we didn’t get pulled off track, as I think it would have distracted us from building the best product in the market. Long term, I’m motivated to build a product that supports a business that we’re all proud to have pitched in and worked with. I’d like the people I work with to look back and see it as impactful work and time well spent, learning and developing, and working in a place that supports them. Trying to do right by this future vision is what keeps me motivated and honest 😅

@kiwidenny Thanks for the question Denny! When you're building a roadmap for a product that hasn't launched yet, you’ve got to start with clear objectives. For a pre-launch product, the immediate objective could be to successfully launch with a specific initial userbase. In the Now column, your immediate priority might be market research to understand your target audience and their needs. You'll be focused on developing MVP that addresses the core problem you've identified. Once you have that MVP, you'll release it to a select group for beta testing. The main outcome you're aiming for here is to validate your product idea, refine the MVP based on real-world feedback, and set the stage for a broader launch. Moving to the Next horizon, this is when you might officially launch your product. You'll also be doing marketing campaigns to drive awareness and user acquisition, so you might represent those on your Now-Next-Later roadmap as cards. As users engage with your product, gather feedback to understand what's resonating and what might need iteration. The goal for this phase is to achieve your initial user base targets, gather insights for product improvements, and maybe start generating revenue. Lastly, in the Later phase, your sights are set on the long-term. Here, you'll be looking to scale your efforts, expand the product's features based on user feedback and market demand, and maybe seek out strategic partnerships to enhance your product's reach or capabilities. The long-term outcomes might be things like making significant progress towards your revenue goals, establishing a solid and growing user base, and positioning your product as a go-to solution in its category. I hope this helps! See you back here on Monday, we'd love a review and upvote for ProdPad 😁 https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

@simplybastow Sounds good! my question is, how did you grow such a large following on Product Hunt?

@scottlabsai It wasn't entirely intentional! I think it was a mix of a few things: - I started on ProductHunt early, and had an early smash hit (#1 Product of the Day!) in 2014 when we first posted ProdPad on it. - We've posted a series of neat upgrades over the years since then (you can track our history here: https://www.producthunt.com/prod...) - I made my profile match my Twitter profile, where I have a big following too, and connected the accounts to make it easy for people to find me. I followed a bunch of people I knew from my Twitter product/tech circles. - Time, haha! I guess the following just grew over the years. I wish this thing had analytics so I could see where the bumps in growth came from and what my following is made up of 🤓 (cue someone posting a link to a ProductHunt post of a tool that's exactly that 😅)

@graham_bird Thanks for the question, Graham! Firstly, it's essential to publish your roadmaps. Making them accessible to relevant stakeholders helps to provide transparency and allows everyone to be on the same page about product direction. It also builds trust! Next, always align your roadmaps with company goals. This provides clarity and also reinforces the roadmap's relevance/importance to your broader org objectives. And as always, regular communication is key. Whether it's through meetings, updates, or interpretive dance 💃, you’ve got to be consistently communicating changes, progress, and rationale behind decisions so you can get (and keep) buy in from various teams. And use ProdPad to help with consistency and upward communication of roadmaps. Eg. use it to manage your more detailed version, but then create saved views and published versions to match the needs of whichever stakeholders you need to meet with next.

@jen_swanson_tuckpoint Ha! Hi Jen, and nice to meet Aimee and Stu too 😅 With generative AI, I think people got pretty over-excited about what it could do, but when you really start playing with it, you realise it’s powerful but has clear limitations. It seems more powerful than it is, though, because of its masterful command of language. Sorry Aimee 🙈 AI is a tool in our toolbelt. As product people, we shouldn’t lean too heavily on a tool, nor shirk it, but understand it for what it is, and what it’s capable of, and craft products with it accordingly. This command of language is incredibly useful in some applications like product management, where writing with clarity is needed, but not for the sake of the writing (it’s a means to the end, really), which is why we so enthusiastically adopted it. It’s also good at coming up with next-in-series, which is great for brainstorming, helping people spot gaps in the stories they’re trying to capture, for example. And it’s also good at concise, constructive feedback, and asking follow up questions, which is why it’s working well as an AI coach. But don’t worry Stu, it’s not going to take over the planet 😜 Thanks for the question, Jen! Hope to see you back on our launch page on Monday 😎 https://www.producthunt.com/prod...