367: Radical product thinking for product managers – with Radhika Dutt

Steps for creating world-changing products Today we are talking about radical product thinking, which is a mindset and process for innovating smarter. Our guest, Radhika Dutt, will help us understand radical product thinking. She is an entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in four acquisitions, two of which were companies she founded. She has built products in industries including broadcasting, media, advertising, technology, government, consumer, robotics, and wine. She also teaches entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern University. She cofounded the Radical Product Thinking movement of leaders creating vision-driven change, along with authoring the book Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:56] What put you on the path to being a product leader? My path to product leadership has been through entrepreneurship and product diseases. Regardless of which industry I was in, I kept seeing the same patterns of diseases. For example, hero syndrome is when you get so focused on being big and scaling you forget about the problem you set out to solve. Other diseases are pivot-itis and obsessive sales disorder. I learned from these product diseases and developed an intuition after really hard lessons. I wondered, are we all doomed to learn these hard lessons or can we share intuition to build better product and avoid product diseases? That burning question started Radical Product Thinking. Two colleagues and I built a framework that translated our intuition into steps for building world-changing products systematically. I’ve realized that product is a way of thinking. Building products is how you create change. Your title is irrelevant—if you’re building products and thinking about how to engineer change, you’re applying product thinking. [9:05] Why did you write Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter? I realized we need to change how we build products. We’ve been taught to keep iterating until you find product market fit—just keep trying different things. We need to become more vision-driven and think of our product as a mechanism for creating change in the world. That starts with having a clear picture of the change you want to bring about and being able to translate that to actions. Whenever your vision becomes disconnected from your actions, product diseases set in. The key to building better products while avoiding product diseases is avoiding breaks in the chain from vision to action. [11:23] Tell us about the five elements of Radical Product Thinking, starting with Vision. We need to unlearn the myths that a good vision is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), broad slogan, or short tagline. For example, “contributing to human progress while empowering people to express themselves” could be the vision of a piano teacher, a post-it note company, or anything else. A good vision should be a detailed North Star for decision-making.  A BHAG vision like this is not useful because you can’t use it to evaluate features and figure out what to do and not do. A good vision answers: * Whose world are you trying to change? * What does the world look like for them today? * Why does that world need changing? * When will we know we’ve accomplished our mission? * How are we going to bring about the change? A vision with this level of detail gives teams enough direction to make decisions. For example, a good vision is: “Today when amateur wine drinkers want to find wines that they’re likely to like, they have to find attractive-looking wine bottles or pick wines that are on sale. This is unacceptable because it leads to so many disappointments, and it’s hard to learn about wine this way. We envision a world where finding wines you lik...