Building better product roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad)

Janna Bastow, founder of ProdPad and Mind the Product, explains how product roadmaps function less as rigid plans and more as tools for alignment, expectation management, and decision-making. Drawing from her experience helping thousands of teams, she emphasizes roadmaps that reflect reality, incorporate customer feedback, and address psychological barriers like overconfidence in predictions.

Core purpose and common mistakes

Roadmaps primarily communicate strategy, progress, and trade-offs to stakeholders, rather than serving as unchangeable schedules. Bastow notes frequent errors include treating them as Gantt charts with false precision, which leads to distrust when timelines slip. Instead, they should highlight themes, outcomes, and initiatives, using formats like now-next-later to manage uncertainty—acknowledging that detailed forecasting fails due to cognitive biases like the planning fallacy, where teams underestimate complexity.