ProductPad

Jana Basto stumbled into product management early in her career, eventually becoming head of product at a startup in London. While working in that role, she noticed a critical gap: there were no good tools designed specifically for product managers to organize their work. Timeline-based roadmaps were the industry standard, but Jana quickly realized they didn't reflect reality—teams rarely hit their announced dates, yet the format forced a false sense of certainty onto planning.

Jana's first attempt at ProductPad was a digitized Gantt chart—essentially a drag-and-drop tool to make timeline roadmaps easier to manage. She worked with co-founder Simon to build this version in jQuery, and early customers loved having a better interface for what they were already doing. But something interesting happened: about a month after implementation, customers started asking to shift everything by a month. When Jana dug into the "five whys," she discovered the real problem. "No one was actually delivering the roadmap in the timeframe that they were saying they were," she explains. If even the best product managers couldn't hit the dates they set, why was the format forcing dates on everything?

This realization led to a fundamental redesign. Jana and Simon replaced the timeline entirely with three buckets: Now, Next, Later. This framework acknowledged the cone of uncertainty—things become less certain the further out you plan. Early adopters immediately resonated with the idea. As Jana notes, customers realized they could say "here's what we're working on now, what's coming next, and what's in the future," and only add dates where truly necessary (regulatory deadlines, seasonal launches, etc.). This shift sparked significant usage growth for ProductPad.

The Now, Next, Later framework became so popular it eventually became the industry standard way product managers think about roadmaps. Jana built this into the tool itself—ProductPad actively prevents bad product management practices by asking thoughtful questions ("What problem does this solve?", "Did you measure success?") and making it hard to fall into a "build trap" of shipping features without measuring outcomes.

Jana's work also extended beyond the product itself. She co-founded Mind the Product, which grew into the world's largest community of product people, with Product Tanks running in nearly 300 cities at its peak. The community became a proving ground for better product practices and a network effect driver for ProductPad adoption.

Mind the Product was sold earlier in 2024, though Jana remains deeply involved in the product community and speaking circuit. ProductPad continues to focus on helping teams adopt better product practices—not just through tooling, but by building in guardrails that encourage discovery, measurement, and psychological safety. Jana's speaking engagements and the Now, Next, Later framework have become foundational to how modern product teams think about planning.