In this week's conversation on The Product Experience podcast, we speak with Radhika Dutt about various product diseases that can hinder effective management and the need for organizations to adopt a more systematic approach to product development.
Radhika shares insights on implementing this mindset within teams and the significance of balancing long-term vision with short-term survival needs.
Key takeaways
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Radical Product Thinking
02:44 The Vision-Driven Approach
05:59 Understanding Vision, Mission, and Purpose
09:09 Defining a Radical Vision Statement
11:55 Identifying Product Diseases
15:09 The Impact of Product Diseases on Management
17:54 Adopting Radical Product Thinking
21:04 Implementing Change in Organizations
24:01 The Balance of Vision and Survival
26:48 The Evolution of Organizational Vision
30:07 Redefining Visionaries
33:01 Teasing the New Book on Metrics
Featured Links: Follow Radhika on LinkedIn | Buy Radhika's book'Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter' | Radical Product website | Sign up here to participate in Radhika's next book'Radically Rethinking Metrics' !
Episode Transcript
Lily Smith : 0:00
Hello and welcome to the Product Experience. This week I talk to Radhika Dutt, the author of Radical Product Thinking, and we talk about how it's much better to be vision-led than iteration-led. So if you want to learn more, then listen on. She's also inviting people to take part in her second book. See the show notes for more information and how to apply. And how to apply. The Product Experience Podcast is brought to you by Mind, the Product part of the Pendo family. Every week we talk to inspiring product people from around the globe.
Randy Silver: 0:40
Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover free resources to help you with your product practice. Learn about Mind, the Product's conferences and their great training opportunities.
Lily Smith : 0:47
Create a free account to get product inspiration delivered weekly to your inbox. Mind, the Product supports over 200 product type meetups from New York to Barcelona. There's probably one near you. Hi Redika, welcome to the product experience. Hi, lily, it's good to be here. Thank you for inviting me again, and we tried to have this conversation before, when we were at Pandemonium, but it was so busy and crazy and so we were like let's just do this online instead. So, yeah, it's very nice to see your lovely face again and to be talking about this again, and hopefully we'll have a bit more time as well. So, in a bit more detail, Likewise, I'm excited.
Radhika Dutt: 1:32
I was really enjoying that conversation when we got cut off last time.
Lily Smith : 1:36
Okay, so before we get started, some people may not have read your book or heard about you, and it would be great if you could give our listeners a quick intro to who you are and your experience in product.
Radhika Dutt: 1:49
Okay, great. So I wrote the book Radical Product Thinking the New Mindset for Innovating Smarter, which came out in 2021. And it makes me super happy to say that. You know, at this point, it's become staple reading for a lot of product managers, and no matter where I travel. Now, like I went to Romania and someone was saying, oh, my incubator made this mandatory reading for all of us, so it just thrills me to hear these things. So, let's see, the book came out, as I mentioned, in 2021.
Radhika Dutt: 2:21
And what is it about? It's a methodology for how we can build vision-driven products. And, by way of a quick introduction, how did that all come about? It was really from a whole bunch of mistakes that I've made over a 20-year career, right when I've run into what I call product diseases myself, having caught some of those product diseases as I was building products, and over time, I learned how to avoid these diseases and I saw that there were other people who were experiencing the same product diseases, and it led me to this burning question of you know are we all just fated to learn from trial and error and we have to go through these hard lessons every time, or can I come up with a methodology so that we can all build products very systematically and be more vision driven.
Radhika Dutt: 3:13
And so myself and two other ex-colleagues we were talking about just these product diseases and they had experienced the same things, and so that's how we came up with the radical product thinking framework and we put it out there in the world. It was free to download and it still is from radicalproductcom, and just people started using it and it organically grew into a movement, and which is why I realized there was a need for a book. And that brings us to today, where the book is out and it's now a global phenomenon.
Lily Smith : 3:45
And that brings us to today, where the book is out and it's now a global phenomenon. Oh, I love it. Like that must be so cool that you kind of had this sort of concept and this thought and it's just, you know, taken the life of its own and, like you say, kind of grown into this global phenomenon. But then obviously there was a need there and like what does it mean to be vision driven, I guess, versus like what is the thing that everyone else is doing? That's not vision driven, that's kind of the antithesis of that was to start a company.
Radhika Dutt: 4:13
Of course, what else would one do? But this was back in 1999. And you know it was right, as the dot-com bubble was happening, right. And so let's think back to startups and like what is the key message we hear from Silicon Valley? It's that you have to fail fast, learn fast, move fast, break things, you have to iterate quickly. Like the focus is all on iteration, that if you just iterate quickly, just throw things in the market and see what sticks, that's how you build good products. Just throw things and then you'll iterate and figure it out.
Radhika Dutt: 4:58
And what I realized is you know that's not actually how it works. Because when you are building a company, you literally have two to three pivots before you run out of either money or momentum. And I don't care how much money one has, even if you're, I don't know, oracle, microsoft, it doesn't matter If you do more than two to three pivots. What happens is people feel like you have no idea what you're doing and they get frustrated, demotivated. You lose momentum in your project, right. And so my realization was given that the reality is you have two to three pivots, this whole motto of oh, let's just throw things at the wall and see what sticks really doesn't work, and so this whole iteration-led approach.
Radhika Dutt: 5:47
While there might be a few startups that became unicorns following this approach, this isn't what works for everyone. There's a whole graveyard of companies that have failed trying this approach, and so if we're not supposed to be iteration-led, well, what's the right answer then? And the answer to that is we really have to be more vision-driven, meaning starting with this clarity of what is the end state that you want to bring about, and then thinking of your product as a mechanism to bring about that end state. Engineering from MIT, and so really thinking about this from the engineering perspective. To me, you know, when you start thinking about your product as this mechanism for change, then you can engineer that change very systematically, and that's what the radical product thinking framework helps you do. It helps you engineer the change you want to bring about very systematically.
Lily Smith : 6:42
So is it a case of vision driven, but combined with iteration.
Radhika Dutt: 6:48
Yes exactly.
Lily Smith : 6:49
So it's not kind of either, or.
Radhika Dutt: 6:53
So you know you're exactly right, because I'm not against lean or agile by any means. In fact, I use these approaches myself, right? So the way I describe it lean and agile, give you speed approaches myself, right? So the way I describe it lean and agile, give you speed. So, if you think about it, like you know, every individual in the organization is an arrow.
Radhika Dutt: 7:11
Right, when we only use lean and agile, it's like all of these arrows are pointing in different directions and we're all moving fast, but when you have all these arrows in different directions, it looks like chaos. And so what we need is we still need that speed and feedback-driven, iterative development, and so what we just need to add to that is direction. Right, having this clarity of what is the vision, what is the strategy, how are we going to prioritize our activities in such a way that we're all aligned? You know, that is really what radical product thinking is about. And so, if you think about it visually, instead of all of these arrows pointing in different directions, when you add the radical product thinking direction to it, we then move all of these arrows to be in the same direction. So, so that, instead of speed, you now have forward velocity.
Lily Smith : 8:07
Do you think in this kind of context, like I always get sort of hung up on, is it vision, or is it mission, or is it purpose, like are all of these things interchangeable, or is it specifically vision in this context?
Radhika Dutt: 8:22
See, this question that you bring up like it has played to me for a long, long, long time until we came up with this radical product thinking vision statement. I'll share my fundamental issue with this whole vision, mission, values, approach, right. It has always baffled me, like how many things am I supposed to remember? You know, I don't know if you've had this experience where you ask someone, oh, what is your company vision? And they go like, oh, yeah, wait, let me remember, Because, yeah, yeah, you feel like wait a minute, I don't need you to remember the words, I just want you to describe it to me Like, tell me what comes from the heart, right? And so the way I think about it, you know how Freddie Mercury? He sang the song One Vision. I like to remind people of that. He sang One Vision for a reason let's just have one statement and the radical product thinking way.
Radhika Dutt: 9:19
You know, instead of having a fluffy vision, that's something like, you know, empowering humanity to, you know, make progress by, you know, helping them express themselves, or something like that. You know it's just like bullshit statements, but I'm not making these up, they actually exist, right. Like Boeing's vision was something like aspiring to be the enduring global leader in aerospace, right? And what does that even mean? Do you measure this leadership by revenues, by market cap, by sales? Like? It's really unclear, right? And so, instead of such fluffy vision statements in the radical product thinking way, you have one vision statement. Forget the mission, values, et cetera, Like if it's. If values are so important to you in some way, you'll find a way to make it part of the problem statement or the solution. So the radical vision statement and I'll share an example. This was the vision statement of my startup back in 2011, when I founded it, and I sold it in 2014. So it's a fill in the blank statement. That's the radical product thinking way. It goes like this Today, when amateur wine drinkers want to find wines that they're likely to like and learn about wines along the way, they have to pick attractive looking wine labels or find wines that are on sale.
Radhika Dutt: 10:47
This is unacceptable because it leads to so many disappointments and it's hard to learn about wine in this way. We envision a world where finding wines you like is as easy as finding movies you like on Netflix. We're bringing this about through a recommendations algorithm that matches wines to your personal tastes and an operational setup that delivers these wines to your door. And that is what I mean by one vision to rule them all. Because in this vision, when I told you about this vision, my startup I hadn't said anything about the startup, but hopefully, by describing this vision, you knew exactly what we were doing and why we were doing it. And that's the point of a of a radical vision statement.
Lily Smith : 11:37
Nice. So I'm going to try and remember the the bits that weren't the fill the blanks bits. So I think it was today when, uh, you want to? Oh, no, hang on, this doesn't work if I do it.
Radhika Dutt: 11:54
You probably can't remember it. The easy way to remember it right is it's a fill in the blank statement that helps you answer the who, what, why, when and who all are we trying to change? What is their problem and how are they solving it today? Why does this problem even need to be solved? Because maybe it doesn't. Then what does the end state look like, meaning when will you know you've arrived? And finally, the how.
Radhika Dutt: 12:24
This is, finally, where you talk about the product, right, and so in the fill in the blank statement, it says today, when this particular group of users, when they want to accomplish whatever it is, the job to be done, is they have to and whatever the current solution is, this is unacceptable because and this is where you describe why you must change the status quo not just because you feel like disrupting, but because there is an existential need that you're trying to solve. Then you can answer what the end state is. So we envision a world where blah, blah, and then, finally, how we're bringing it about through our product, and then, finally, how we're bringing it about through our product.
Lily Smith : 13:07
I think it's really interesting because I can imagine this working as well with all different types of products. Like any product can come up with what they're doing and why they're doing it and who it's for and what problem it's. Well, they should be able to. You're exactly right. You know, even even if it's an internal product and it's like a data thing like there's, there's still, I think you know, sometimes we reserve vision for, you know, much, much more existential businesses or products. But yeah, I can see this working very well across all different types and that's such an insightful observation because you're exactly right.
Radhika Dutt: 13:49
You know, often when I do trainings for clients, sometimes teams say to me you know, but I feel like in my vision I have to put down an external customer, even if my product is internal, and we feel like we have to artificially make our vision super inspiring, right, whereas the reality is, let's be honest about really, who is our product for, and this artificial inspiration never ends up being truly inspiring for the people who are working on it, right, like I have written this vision statement for a product when we were working on a product for television advertising, and there can be nothing less inspiring Well, very few things that are less inspiring than TV advertising, right? And yet, you know, when we were really honest about whose problem are we solving, et cetera, it was something that was genuinely inspiring for us. We had figured out what was our purpose and that's why, you know, like what you pointed out, it's so true, like even that honesty about what is our shared purpose is such an amazing, such an amazing bonding experience.
Lily Smith : 15:06
We've spent more time than I thought we'd just talking about the vision piece, but so product diseases you mentioned this earlier and you mentioned, you know, about us being fated to learn from trial and error, which you know. I feel that, vibe, definitely, I'm definitely making lots of errors in my work. Hopefully, hopefully, less today than you know in my past, but probably I don't know maybe the same amount. What are the sort of product diseases? Give us the lowdown of the things that people experience that are really kind of, you know, affecting how they're doing product management.
Radhika Dutt: 15:40
I'll start with my favorite one, because I've contributed to this disease, and that's obsessive sales disorder. That happens, you know, when your salesperson comes to you looking all excited and says you know, if we just add this one custom feature we can win this mega deal. And you know it sounds mostly harmless. So you go yes, and you know, plus, it's our OKR to be able to get to X million of revenue by the end of the year. So we say yes, let's do this. And so pretty soon by the end of the year, you're sitting with a stack of contracts and a roadmap that's filled with everything that you have to make good on. So that's obsessive sales disorder. Another disease is what I call pivotitis, and I'll give you an example where I was a VP of marketing at a startup and we were trying to be the next visa of the world and we started out with that idea. Except we realized very quickly. But you know that is very hard because you have to acquire merchants and you have to acquire customers. So then we pivoted, we became a loyalty solutions provider for merchants. But you know, about a month later we said, oh, wait a minute, you know that's really hard. So we became a credit solutions provider for merchants. And the thing is, you know, as VP of marketing, at some point, after all these pivots, I really didn't know what I was even asking people to sign up for on the website anymore. So that's pivotitis.
Radhika Dutt: 17:11
There are so many other diseases. Maybe I'll give you a couple of more examples. One is narcissist complex, which I have fallen trap to right, which is when I built a startup actually the Swine startup the first set of features that we put out. Those features were features that I thought if I just had those features, you know I would use this app. And it just turned out that's not what everyone else wanted. So we then had to figure out, really like, instead of focusing on ourselves and looking inwards and having this narcissist complex, we really should have looked outwards and figured out what is it that our customers actually want, become more connected to what they want, right? So that's an example of narcissist complex, which happens so often when we forget to do user research. But those are a few examples.
Lily Smith : 18:01
I really love coming at it from this point of view, because you hear so much like this is the way to do things. This is, you know, be data led, be this, be unbiased, be blah, blah, blah. But actually putting labels on the sort of bad behaviors, if you like, really brings it to life and it really kind of it makes it feel a lot more relatable, I guess, because it's not just striving for something, it's more like literally naming the things that are not good behaviors.
Radhika Dutt: 18:32
You're exactly right. Also, because you know naming something actually well. We know that. You know being able to recognize and admit to a problem is the first step to a solution, right, and when we're able to name it as an organization, it becomes so much easier to then say okay, now that we've defined the problem, here's what we need to do to change it.
Radhika Dutt: 18:55
Because when I talk about this need for moving from being iteration led to being more vision driven, very often just talking about being iteration led doesn't fully resonate for people, because how do you recognize when you're being iteration-led? And the way I like to frame it in terms of diseases? As you start to recognize diseases, you realize that these diseases are happening because your everyday actions are disconnected from your vision and from a strategy. Actions are disconnected from your vision and from a strategy, and so that's whenever there's a break in the chain, all the way from vision down to your everyday actions that's where these product diseases creep in. And so once you start to recognize product diseases, you're ready to say okay, now I see the problem and here's what we need to be able to fix this product disease, and here's how we adopt this radical product thinking framework and what elements of it we really need to start to implement.
Randy Silver: 20:04
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Lily Smith : 20:16
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Randy Silver: 20:54
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Lily Smith : 21:01
There's also some guest speakers from UK product tanks. Special shout out to Rebecca Mortimer, who's in my product team at BBC Maestro. Whether you're coming to the Barbican in person on March 10th and 11th or tuning in digitally, join us and get inspired at MTP Con. London Tickets are on sale now. Check out mindtheproductcom forward slash MTP Con to find out more, or just click on events at the top of the page. And you know you said that this has become a global movement and you've spoken to a lot of people who have adopted this way of working. What have you seen in terms of like that change? How have people kind of managed that change in mindset, I guess within their teams?
Radhika Dutt: 21:54
Yeah. So there have been two approaches that I've seen right, and one is easier than the other. The easier approach I'll start with that. You know, when you're a leader, it's honestly so much easier for a leader to say, okay, people you know here, read this book. We're moving to this approach. Let's define a clear vision. We're going to define a clear strategy. Here's how we think about priorities. You know, as a leader, you have this ability to really get people on board and set things in motion very quickly and adopt this right. So that's one approach. I've also seen the harder path, but which is very doable.
Radhika Dutt: 22:37
You know, there's a product manager who shared with me like how she got the radical product thinking approach going within her organization, product thinking approach going within her organization. And so her approach was she had to approach it, you know, in a way that was non-threatening, not directly coming in and saying, okay, our vision sucks. You know we need a new vision, and so the way she approached it was you know they were prioritizing things and she used the radical product thinking framework to be able to talk through priorities and get consensus with stakeholders, and so she drew up this vision versus survival on the board. That's the radical product thinking approach for prioritization. Why? Because you're constantly balancing the long-term against the short-term, right. That's what you do intuitively as you gain experience, like whenever you're making a trade-off. It's long-term versus short-term. And so when you think about it in that, two by two, you can think about your Y-axis as vision like is this good for the vision or not and then your X-axis, you can think about that as survival, and you say you know, is this good for me in the short term or good for my product in the short term or not? And so things that are good for vision and survival, you know great, those are the easy decisions.
Radhika Dutt: 23:56
But if you always focus on that, then we're sometimes being very myopic. So sometimes you have to decide to invest in the vision, which is where it's good for the vision but maybe it's not great for short term. Vision, but maybe it's not great for short term. So an example of that would be maybe I need to refactor code for three months, or I need to take some time to do some user research, and the opposite of that is where I do something that's great for survival in the short term, but it's not good for the long term. So an example of that is you know what I said about obsessive sales disorder and vision. So I call this quadrant vision debt, because every time I take on a feature where it's going to help me win a deal but it's a custom feature, that's not good for the vision I'm taking on vision debt. It's kind of like technical debt, but in some ways even worse, because you cannot fire your customers.
Radhika Dutt: 24:44
And so you start to talk about priorities in these quadrants and so you get stakeholders and your CEO to start to use this vocabulary. You know, at no point are you directly challenging, you're more facilitating a conversation. You know, what do you think our trade-offs ought to be? So it becomes a very consensus-driven approach. If you need to do that from a bottom-up perspective, it becomes a way of getting buy-in without making it confrontational, and it leads to just more productive discussions. And so this is how a lot of people have brought in radical product thinking. Thinking, because that leads to that next question, like, oh, tell me about these axes, how do you define vision and how do you define survival? And it leads to that next level of discussion where you know if you and I disagree on priorities, maybe we disagree on what the vision is, or maybe we disagree on what the short-term survival axis is, and so those are really helpful discussions that need to be had.
Lily Smith : 25:48
I love that and I love the. You know it's so practical because you do sometimes have to do survival. You know, I've had plenty of discussions with my product managers where they're like, but this isn't helping us with our long-term goals, like we're being too short-termist, and I'm like, yeah, but actually we need to do this right now or we might not be here in the long run. So, yeah, it's just so practical and it's great, like you say, like great to just get those conversations out in the open exactly.
Radhika Dutt: 26:22
You know what you just said about. You know, know, product managers sometimes feeling like, oh, but you know why are we doing this? When we know it's not good for the long term? And you're having to explain this as a leader. You know even your act of explaining this it helps everyone feel like, oh, okay, I'm glad you still believe in the vision. So it's not that you're saying that this is a good thing for us to do, but it's a matter of survival.
Radhika Dutt: 26:47
And so I found that just giving it a label and saying you know what this is vision debt and we unfortunately need to do it it creates a sense of again this bond as a team that we're all acknowledging that this is vision debt. And the second thing is, as you use this visual approach, right, you start to look at how much vision debt am I accumulating? Am I ever investing in the vision? Right, and when you see that you're always accumulating vision debt and you're never investing in the vision, maybe that's the honest truth. You know that you're a startup and this is all you can do. Maybe survival is more important than the obsessive sales disorder disease that you're catching. And that's a conscious choice, right, and that's okay. But as a team it's great to have these conversations, exactly like you said.
Lily Smith : 27:38
Why do you think organizations you know become iteration-led? Or do you think some organizations start iteration led and never have a vision? Or in my soul I'm kind of want to believe that everyone starts with a vision but they sort of lose their way at some point and it kind of gets dropped because they panic. Or you know what's your experience of this when you've spoken to different organizations? Do you find that that is the case? Or is it a case that some people just you know they never start with the vision. They just think that they can work their way towards a solution?
Radhika Dutt: 28:13
Such an interesting question. You know my own experience and I'm so curious to see your take on it too. I've found that, first of all, you know, in terms of a vision, we all start with a vision and we know we need a vision. But often that vision right is very fluffy. And I'll give you my own example. When that the first company that I founded that I mentioned right, our vision was revolutionizing wireless and our tagline was something like enlightened wireless. You know, 25 years later, you ask me what exactly did that mean? I still don't know what problem we were setting out to solve, right, but what you learn as a founder is that your vision has to be a BHAG. You're not told that. You know what you really need to define a problem in a great load of depth and you have to be able to talk about exactly whose problem are you solving right.
Radhika Dutt: 29:11
When I wrote the book Radical Product Thinking, I loved my publicist's quote. She said you know, don't tell me about everyone who could read Radical Product Thinking. Tell me who has the most urgent need for your book, right? And it's just like that for our product. We have to think about who has the most urgent need and when we write a vision statement, we're always told that we have to be ambitious, and so whenever I lead visioning sessions for companies and facilitate these visioning sessions, I have to tell everyone you know, I know you want to be ubiquitous, but let's start with who has the most urgent need. You'll conquer that vision and then you'll spread to the next bit. Right, your vision can change. A year from now. You might have conquered the space and you might move on to the next thing. Rewrite your vision a year from now and you should revisit it, right.
Radhika Dutt: 30:07
So I think that's one reason why we lose our way, because our vision statement is so broad. But there is a second reason, right, which is that and I've been in this particular situation too, where you know your urgent business needs trump long-term and which is what you were talking about as well and at some point, right, it becomes so deeply culturally ingrained that short-term trumps the long-term, and the more time that goes on, you sort of deviate from the vision and that becomes the norm. You sort of lose your way, like we no longer acknowledge that this is vision debt. It just becomes.
Radhika Dutt: 30:51
This is our way of doing business, but I think you know. To come back to how do we inspire our teams and how do we make people feel motivated when we all feel like we believe in that same vision, like if we can come back to it, like this is a perfect time for it. You know we're at the beginning of the year. Take the time to really set that vision and strategy. It creates such a sense of motivation and a feeling like we're all in this together that it's really worth doing as part of the strategic planning effort really worth doing as part of the strategic planning effort.
Lily Smith : 31:29
Yeah, I completely agree. I did a talk once on like high performing teams and the whole conclusion was like, basically, if your team doesn't have purpose which is, I guess, my sort of version of vision then it doesn't matter, like how smart they are, how well they're working together, because that is, it's exactly that thing you said of like all these arrows pointing in various different directions and you just give them that beacon and then that that direction to go into, and then everything comes together so much better. Yeah, just thinking about vision. Like you know, when we talk about vision and being vision led, I guess some people might describe themselves as visionary and some people might kind of specifically not think that they're visionary. How does that affect people taking on this mindset and this kind of way of working?
Radhika Dutt: 32:20
I love this question and I feel like it's such an insightful one because, you know, I think, especially if you're a woman, I think you never consider yourself visionary. I think what society has painted for us is this picture that you know. It's these white men who seem to wear turtlenecks usually, who are visionaries. Right, and in my book, one of the examples that I offer of who I consider a visionary and there are a few such examples One is you know a set of seven housewives from India who lived in this patriarchal society, from low-income households, and you know they were trying to just earn an independent living and they founded an organization which has, since 1959, given financial independence to over 45,000 women and they have dominated the papadum market. They have 65% of the Puppetum market and the rest of it is fragmented across lots of other companies. And what is so visionary about them is they created a business model and a system where these women are able to work from home. They're all equal partners in this organization, so 45,000 women being equal partners in this organization, and they've been able to therefore give financial independence to them. Right, it's such an amazing story and you know, growing up in India, I knew that if you want high quality papadums. You know you go by Lidya that's the brand and you know like to think about. How is it that these women, you know, came up with this concept, the idea that you roll papadums at home, where quality can vary so greatly, and yet they managed to create a brand that is known for its quality, dominate the papadum market? I mean that to me, is visionary. So you know first.
Radhika Dutt: 34:30
In reading the book, I hope one thing that readers take away is that our definition of who is a visionary really needs to change. A visionary doesn't have to be someone who is, you know, loud and is a micromanager. A visionary, instead, can be someone who can really envision that end state. You know that you have clarity of mind to the point where I tell you that if I hand you a magic wand, you know you should know exactly what you want. You have to have that much clarity of purpose as you were saying that if I gave you that magic wand, you would know exactly what to wish for. And I think that's what makes someone a visionary. And when you think about it that way, anyone can be a visionary.
Radhika Dutt: 35:18
And what makes one a visionary is also not just the clarity of purpose, but you get recognized as a visionary when you're able to systematically translate that into your everyday activities, and so that's what the rest of the book and the methodology is about. How do you translate a vision into strategy to understand what is it the market needs, what your customers are really aching for, and how do you build that. What does it mean for a business model? Then you translate that into priorities, which we talked about vision versus survival. And then how do you translate that into agile or lean execution and taking a hypothesis-driven approach for measurement, and then, finally, you can translate that into a whole culture. And that's this approach for translating vision into daily activities is what radical product thinking is about. You don't have to feel like you're a visionary at the start, but rather that a visionary mindset is what you can develop.
Lily Smith : 36:15
I love it. We're almost out of time, but I know you're writing another book because we were just talking about it. So before we go, let's tease the listeners and viewers even with a bit about the new book. Um, tell us a bit about it yeah.
Radhika Dutt: 36:33
So I'm excited about this new book. The working title, which might change is radically rethinking metrics why goals andRs are harmful and what to do instead. And so this book that I'm working on is really going to challenge what I think of, as you know, practically a religion. You know this religion of goal setting that we have right, that we have right. We've learned that to achieve success, to build great products, we have to have, you know, these grand goals, that goals are the key to building anything grand, right.
Radhika Dutt: 37:13
And the reality is it's such a religion because we've never sort of proven it out or really investigated Is this truly the case? Like it's not a scientifically proven thing? In fact, there is a ton of research that shows that there are so many downsides to goals. And so this book is about challenging this religion, and it's slightly blasphemous in that you know, when you look at all the evidence and say, okay, if we start to question this religion and say maybe this is not what actually works, then what would we do instead? And so what I found to work really well is, instead of goals, where you know goals, basically they get a whole team to work on proving to you that, look, I've achieved what you set out for me, that you know, I get in the mode of demonstrating to you ta-da, look, I did what I said I would right, so then I can get my next promotion or whatever else, whereas if you ask the question, it's in the form of a hypothesis, where you say okay, I think this is the case. I don't know if this is true or not. We need to measure and figure out is this working? If not, what do we do? And so when you have that sort of a question, now I'm not just working on proving something to you, but I actually am motivated by figuring out the answer. It's like solving a puzzle, and then we share learnings together so that we can build something even better.
Radhika Dutt: 38:45
And so, instead of goals and OKRs, the model that I talk about in the book is about OHLs, or objectives, hypotheses and learnings. So that's the brief summary, but it's going to be an entertaining and very thought provoking read and I'm looking forward to it coming out in 2026. But in the meanwhile, I would love to engage our listeners that, if you want to participate in the book and be featured in the book, you know there's a questionnaire that you can fill out, that we'll give you a link to with this podcast, and I would love to hear your story about your experience with goal setting, what has gone well, what has not gone well, and you might be featured in the book.
Lily Smith : 39:28
I think it's so interesting because there was such a movement to OKRs and we do a variation of this called OGSMs, which just is hilarious. Whenever I think about it, I'm like I don't care what it's called, what like, what's the plan? But yeah, it's. It feels like there's been a real obsession about it, and I do. I think there's a lot of positives around this, but I also know so many stories where it's gone wrong and it hasn't worked for people or it's like just taken ages for everyone to get on the same page of like why are we doing this and what is it even for? And you know having those conversations of like we're just trying to understand what we're all doing in this organization, who's doing what and why we're doing it rather than going okay, so it needs to be objective. Key result we can only have three. We can only have three of those. There's all this work that everybody's doing that we're not putting up on this thing and oh my god. Anyway, I'm really excited about the book.
Radhika Dutt: 40:34
I think you know there's a whole conversation to be had around all of those topics that you just brought up and we're at the end of the podcast, but I would love to have another chat, maybe in a few months, and let's tackle this topic of goals and OKR definitely all that's wrong with it and kind of our observations over the course of our careers yeah, that sounds awesome.
Lily Smith : 40:58
We will welcome you back again soon. Thank you so much for a wonderful chat and, uh, yeah, look forward to talking to you again.
Radhika Dutt: 41:08
Thanks so much lily always such a pleasure and I'm looking forward to chatting again.
Lily Smith : 41:23
The Product Experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day.
Randy Silver: 41:29
And me Randy Silver also host by night, and I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.
Lily Smith : 41:38
Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
Randy Silver: 41:43
And our theme music is from product community legend Arne Kittler's band Pow. Thanks to them for letting us use their track. Thank you.
