Janna Bastow on Roadmapping and Now Next Later

Janna Bastow on Roadmapping and Now Next Later

product-managementroadmappingstrategycommunity-building

Janna Bastow on Roadmapping and Now Next Later

Janna Bastow — Lenny’s Podcast

Key ideas

  • The roadmap as strategy prototype. A roadmap is not a delivery plan — it is a prototype for your strategy. Its value lies in the roadmapping process: sharing early assumptions with teammates and customers to check direction, exactly as you would share a design mockup to check a feature. You iterate the roadmap; you throw out the bad version and make a better one.
  • Now, Next, Later invented as a fix for a broken format. Bastow originated the Now / Next / Later framework after discovering, via customer research on ProdPad, that no one was actually delivering timeline roadmaps on time. Removing the timeline axis removes the implied due date from every item and reflects the cone of uncertainty: near-term commitments can be specific, far-future items remain deliberately vague. Hard dates can still be added where genuinely required (regulatory deadlines, seasonal launches).
  • Soft launch / hard launch decoupling. Teams should separate the engineering release (soft launch) from the marketing campaign (hard launch). Engineering ships when ready; marketing then works from a live product, gathers testimonials and demos, and plans the hard launch on its own schedule. This eliminates the stress of aligning two fundamentally different project types on one date.
  • Product teams deserve the same leeway as sales. Sales leaders commit to a pipeline and a process — they do not promise which specific deals will close or exactly when. Product teams should be held to the same standard: accountable for the number of experiments run and the outcomes achieved, not for predicting in advance which experiments will succeed.
  • Psychological safety and retrospectives as the root of high-performing teams. Beyond roadmapping format, the clearest differentiator of excellent product teams is psychological safety — the ability to surface problems, question decisions, and change things that are not working. Retrospectives are the structural mechanism that instantiates this safety and drives continuous improvement.