ProdPad

Emerging

Brighton UK bootstrapped product management platform that invented Now-Next-Later roadmapping; six-figure ARR serving HP/Adobe/Autodesk/NHS with CoPilot AI assistant and Mind the Product community competing with Aha! for outcome-oriented product planning.

Company Overview

About ProdPad

ProdPad is a Brighton, UK-based product management software platform — bootstrapped and profitable — providing product management teams at HP, Thomson Reuters, Concur, Adobe, Autodesk, Mozilla, Target, KLM, Cancer Research UK, the UK Government, and NHS Education with roadmapping, backlog management, customer feedback aggregation, OKR integration, and AI-powered prioritization and writing assistance tools. ProdPad invented the Now-Next-Later roadmap format (the outcome-oriented roadmap approach that replaced date-based feature roadmaps as the industry standard for lean product planning) and was the first product management tool to integrate OKRs natively. In 2024, ProdPad launched CoPilot (an AI assistant for writing, prioritizing, organizing, and synthesizing product work — built over two years by CTO Simon Cast) as the most advanced AI toolset in the product management software category. Six-figure ARR with 19-21 employees distributed across 3 continents. Founded 2012 by Janna Bastow (CEO) and Simon Cast (CTO), both former product managers frustrated by inadequate tooling; the founders also created Mind the Product, the world's largest product management community.

Business Model & Competitive Advantage

ProdPad's outcome-focused roadmapping approach addresses the strategic alignment gap that date-and-feature roadmaps create in product organizations: traditional product roadmaps (listing specific features with quarterly delivery dates) turn product teams into feature factories executing to a pre-defined specification rather than continuously discovering the highest-value solutions to customer problems — with the roadmap becoming a commitment to stakeholders that creates schedule pressure regardless of whether the pre-defined features are validated against customer needs. ProdPad's Now-Next-Later framework (organizing roadmap items by strategic priority rather than delivery date, with Now representing committed ongoing work, Next representing validated ideas ready for development scoping, and Later representing options being discovered and evaluated) keeps product teams focused on outcomes while maintaining stakeholder visibility — reducing the waste of building features that customers don't use.

Competitive Landscape 2025–2026

In 2025, ProdPad competes in the product management software, product roadmapping, and AI-powered PM tools market with Aha! (product management, $91M revenue, roadmapping), Productboard (unicorn, $1.72B valuation, customer-driven roadmap), and Linear (engineering project management, $35M raised) for product team roadmapping workflow adoption and AI-assisted product discovery. ProdPad's bootstrapped growth trajectory (reaching enterprise customers like Autodesk and Thomson Reuters without venture capital) reflects the discipline of founder-funded product development and the value of the Mind the Product community as a customer acquisition channel. CoPilot's AI capabilities (writing assistance for PRDs and user stories, automated prioritization scoring, and an AI product coach that provides real-time guidance via Slack) address the product management AI assistant market that Productboard Spark and other PM AI tools are competing for. The 2025 strategy focuses on growing the enterprise team adoption through CoPilot AI differentiation, expanding the Mind the Product community-to-ProdPad conversion funnel, and building the integrations with Linear and GitHub that connect product planning to engineering execution.

Founded
2012
Headquarters
Brighton, United Kingdom
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The ProdPad Story

Founded in 2012
Brighton, United Kingdom
Founded by Janna Bastow, Simon Cast

Founders

Janna BastowSimon Cast
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Company Timeline

Major milestones in ProdPad's journey

9
Total Events
0
Funding Rounds
0
Acquisitions
5
Product Launches
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Leadership Team

Meet the leaders behind ProdPad

Janna Bastow

Co-Founder & CEO

Janna Bastow is co-founder and CEO of ProdPad, having created the world's first dedicated product management system in 2012. She invented the Now-Next-Later roadmapping approach and co-founded Mind the Product, the world's largest product management community. Janna is recognized as a thought leader in product management with extensive speaking and writing contributions to the field.

Simon Cast

Co-Founder & CTO

Simon Cast is co-founder and CTO of ProdPad, responsible for the platform's technical architecture and AI capabilities. He spent two years crafting ProdPad's latest AI iteration, CoPilot for Product Managers, which represents some of the most advanced AI tools in product management software. Simon also co-founded Mind the Product alongside Janna Bastow.

Open Positions

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Key Differentiators

Emerging Innovator

ProdPad is an emerging player bringing innovative solutions to the Productivity & Collaboration market.

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