I’ve spent over a decade on stages telling rooms full of product people that their roadmap is lying to them. They keep inviting me back, so I’m going to assume that’s a good sign.

I speak at conferences, but a lot of my favourite work happens in smaller rooms: an internal talk for a product org, a lunch and learn, a leadership offsite, a team that’s stuck and needs someone from outside to say the thing out loud.

What I do

Keynotes and conference talks. Business of Software, Turing Fest, Mind the Product, How to Web, Lean Agile Exchange, Productized, Product Elevation and plenty more, plus the ProductTank meetups I helped start.

Internal talks and lunch and learns. A 30 to 60 minute session for your product, design and engineering teams, tuned to what they’re actually wrestling with. Remote or in person. Past clients include AIB, ESW, Mews, ASOS, Merck, the Department for Education, EDF Renewables, Headspace, Sainsbury’s, Checkatrade, Informa and many more.

Leadership sessions and offsites. Smaller, more candid conversations with CPOs, VPs and senior PMs. Less slides, more “ok, so what’s really going on here?”

Workshops. Half day or full day, hands on. Roadmapping, OKRs, prioritisation, product culture. Recent example: a full day workshop on lean roadmapping, OKRs and alignment at UX Days Tokyo 2025. If you need something longer running, I also offer consulting.

“Janna led three product workshops for our business, gently facilitating open, engaging conversations while also ensuring we achieved both compelling and realistic outputs. Her professional but approachable style encouraged active involvement from all participants.”

Webinars, podcasts and panels. I host ProdPad’s Product Expert webinar series and I’m a regular podcast guest. Happy to be interviewed, happy to moderate.

What I talk about

Everything below can be run as a keynote, an internal talk or a workshop, and I tailor it to the room. Most of it comes back to one question: what problem are you trying to solve?

Roadmaps, strategy and getting out of the feature factory

I invented the Now-Next-Later roadmap because timeline roadmaps kept setting good teams up to fail. This is the stuff I get asked about most.

How to Ditch Your Timeline Roadmap for Good Why date-driven roadmaps cause so much pain, what to use instead, and how to get your boss on board. Slides: How to Ditch your Timeline Roadmap for Good · Read: Honesty Scales Better Than Certainty

Lean Roadmapping + OKRs Treating your roadmap as a prototype for your strategy, and using OKRs to tie it to outcomes rather than output. Watch: Lean Roadmapping and OKRs (Hands-on Agile) · Recap: Mind the Product Engage Hamburg · Read: OKRs Are Not a Reporting Format

“After her talk ‘The Skinny on Lean Roadmapping & OKRs’, I decided to follow the main ideas of her talk and try her approach. So we started to turn our roadmap from a time-bound to a now-next-later approach with clear connections between initiatives and our goals… We had the presentation to the team and everyone was very excited, said it was more helpful and they were happy with our new artifact.”

Marcus Neuber, Director Product, Europace AG (after seeing the talk at Mind the Product Engage Hamburg)

The Four Faux Pas of Product Roadmapping The mistakes nearly every team makes with their roadmap, including prioritising at the idea level instead of the problem level, and how to fix them. Listen: Is your roadmap a prototype or plan? (Talking Roadmaps)

Outcome-driven roadmapping for senior product orgs Built for experienced PMs and product leaders. The angles I usually dig into:

  • The tension between owning outcomes and being held accountable for delivery (even very senior PMs wrestle with this)
  • Keeping a roadmap strategic when leadership wants dates
  • Making prioritisation a strategic act rather than a backlog ritual

Read: Executive Anxiety: Roadmaps as Security Blankets · Strategy Keeps Losing to the Inbox · Your Backlog Has a Hierarchy Problem

AI and the changing product role

How AI is changing the way product teams work What AI is actually good for in product work, what it isn’t, and how leaders can bring it into their orgs without losing the judgment that makes product management worth doing. I spoke on this at Productized 2025 Leaders Day.

What to offload to AI (and what not to) A practical session on handing PM busywork to AI without killing quality. Goal setting, roadmap planning, backlog management, feedback review, the lot. Watch: How to Offload Your PM Busywork to AI · How to Automate Your Product Processes with AI (with GitHub’s Chris Butler) Listen: 3 Ways AI Is Transforming Product Management (Product Momentum)

Culture and innovation

Culture, Vanity, and Corporate Insanity Why vanity metrics are a trap, and how to use your roadmap to shape a product culture that sets the company up for the long term. Watch: From Vanity Metrics to Effective Product Culture (Business of Software)

Powering Product Culture How to assess your product culture, what healthy looks like, and why it’s the most important product you’ll ever work on. Slides: The Power of Product Culture (Turing Fest)

Innovation is a Team Sport For larger companies with complex portfolios. What an innovation culture looks like day to day, and how roadmapping and OKRs give teams the alignment and autonomy to innovate. Session: Lean Agile Exchange keynote

Growing Up Lean: Strategies for Maturing Products Launching an MVP is the easy bit. This one’s about managing products past their initial growth: taming the backlog, driving experimentation, and disrupting yourself before someone else does. Read: Growing up Lean (Mind the Product) · Slides: Growing Up Lean

Hard calls and the traps teams fall into

Avoiding the Agency Trap How to tell if your “product-led” company is actually operating like an agency, building to order for whoever shouts loudest, and what to do about it. Watch: Avoiding the Agency Trap · Escaping the Agency Trap (How to Web 2023) · Read: Avoiding the Agency Trap

Decisions, Debt, and Other Dilemmas Every trade-off creates debt. Tech debt, design debt, process debt, org debt. How to spot it, manage it, and use it to your advantage instead of drowning in it. Watch: Decisions, Debt, and Other Dilemmas (Mind the Product) · How to Make Hard Product Decisions Without Creating Long-Term Debt

Avoiding the Pitfalls of Vanity Metrics Numbers that look great on paper and mean nothing. How to spot them and what to measure instead. Read: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Vanity Metrics

Finding Product/Market Fit What it is, how to measure it, and how not to fool yourself along the way. (Spoiler: it’s a moving target, and your early adopters are not your market.) Watch: What is product/market fit? (ProductTank London) · Read: Finding Product/Market Fit

Podcasts

A few conversations worth a listen if you want to hear how I think before booking me:

Why me

I’ve spent the last 20+ years building products, companies and communities in the product management space. I’m co-founder and CEO of ProdPad, and before that I co-founded Mind the Product (ProductTank) and ProductCamp London, communities that helped shape how product management is practiced globally. I also created the Now-Next-Later roadmap.

I still run a product company, so none of this is theory. I’m dealing with the same trade-offs your team is. And alongside ProdPad, I coach senior product and tech leaders and consult with companies, so I see what’s going on inside a lot of product orgs right now.

More about me »

I’ll tailor the session to your audience, keep it practical, and leave room for the awkward questions. Those are usually the best bit.

Get in touch

If you’re putting together an internal event, a team offsite or a conference and want someone who’ll say the useful thing, not just the safe thing, drop me a line. Tell me who’s in the room and what they’re stuck on, and I’ll suggest an angle.