The April Fool’s Gag That Presaged the Future of Product Management | Janna Bastow (Founder & CEO of ProdPad & Founder, Mind The Product)

CRAFTED.

On April 1st, 2013, ProdPad promised something revolutionary: “We now take your backlog of ideas, and with highly advanced big data crunching algorithm technology, automagically render a complete and accurate product roadmap. [...] The Auto-Roadmap Tool not only builds itself, but also covers for the hardest part of the Product Manager’s job: Getting complete buy-in from your team.”

Amazing! And product managers wrote in with unbridled excitement itching to get their hands on this incredible tool.

Except… this was obviously an April Fool’s joke, right!?

Well, fast forward to today and it ain’t a joke! ProdPad is building these automagical abilities right now. Thanks to Generative AI, this absurdist joke has become reality (though not yet the part about magically getting buy-in from your fussy stakeholders... that's in the 2.0 version :)

On this episode of CRAFTED., Janna Bastow, the founder and CEO of ProdPad, founder of Mind The Product, inventor of the now-next-later roadmap, and an April Fool's prankster you need to keep your eye on describes what a great roadmap is, how AI is freeing up product people to do more meaningful work, and what the future of product management will entail (getting out of the building more!).

Welcome to CRAFTED., a show about great products and the people who make them.

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