How to Build Successful Products with Radical Product Thinking by Radhika Dutt by Kazuki Nakayashiki

How to Build Successful Products with Radical Product Thinking by Radhika Dutt

Kazuki Nakayashiki

Nov 1, 2024 11:13 PM

Summary

Introduction and Background (00:01 - 00:32): The episode features Radhika Dutt, an entrepreneur and author of "Radical Product Thinking." Dutt has a background in product strategy and has been involved in multiple startup acquisitions.
The Origin of Radical Product Thinking (00:59 - 03:29): Dutt explains the concept of Radical Product Thinking, born from her experiences and mistakes in product development. The book aims to provide a systematic process for building successful products by addressing common "product diseases."
Vision and Its Importance (06:44 - 09:14): Dutt emphasizes that a strong vision should answer meaningful questions about who it aims to help, the problem being solved, and how success can be measured, challenging conventional fluffiness in vision statements.
Managing Vision Over Time (09:57 - 20:19): She discusses how to maintain an agile and relevant vision by ensuring alignment among team members and focusing on deep understanding rather than rote memorization of vision statements.
Balancing Short-Term Needs with Long-Term Vision (21:22 - 30:15): Dutt provides strategies for product managers on how to effectively balance daily actionable tasks with overarching long-term goals, emphasizing the need for communication and visually mapping priorities.
User Research and Innovation (36:21 - 38:55): Dutt cautions against asking users what they want, instead advocating for understanding their past behaviors to better innovate and create relevant solutions.
Legacy and Impact (53:17 - 54:49): Dutt expresses her hope that her work helps others create meaningful change in the world, stressing that the focus should not just be on professional accomplishments, but also on inspiring people to improve various aspects of life.

Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of Glass Talk. Today, we are excited to welcome Radhika Dutt, author of Radical Product Thinking, A New Mindset for Innovative Smarter, and her book has resonated globally, being translated into several languages including Chinese and Japanese. Radhika is a seasoned entrepreneur and product strategist who has been involved in five successful acquisitions, including two companies she founded.

She advises organizations ranging from high-tech startups to government agencies and helping them build products that drive fundamental change. With a rich background spanning industries from media, telecom to robotics and consumer apps, Radhika's insights are invaluable. Please join me in welcoming Radhika Dutt. Thank you for joining Radhika today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here and to talk with you.

Thank you. So, first of all, you know, we are a huge fan of your book, Radical Product Thinking, and I think, you know, the book helped many founders, product managers a lot, you know, and we are, you know, one of them. So, but, you know, in your words, you know, we, I want to know, you know, what is product radical thinking because, you know, some of our audience may not be familiar with, you know, the concept, you know.

Yeah, thank you. And by the way, it's always so rewarding to hear that the book resonated for people and it's been helping people make change. So, I'll share background and why Radical Product Thinking even came about. Really, to summarize it all in just a few words, it's a book that's based on a lot of the mistakes that I've made as I was learning to build products. When I was an entrepreneur or when I was building products,

just, you know, all the hard lessons that I've learned, it's basically summarized and packed into this book to help people build products better. So, just, you know, to elaborate on that, my first startup was something that I'd founded with four other co-founders and we were still in our dorm rooms at MIT when we founded that startup. It was called Lobby 7. And, you know, when I think back to that startup, it was our vision at the time was revolutionizing wireless.

And if you ask me, what does it mean to revolutionize wireless? Honestly, we have no idea. We just wanted to be big, right? And that was when we encountered the first product disease that I now call hero syndrome, where you're focused on being big without really knowing what problem you're trying to solve in the first place, right? And, you know, after that startup, we ended up building other startups. And maybe I didn't encounter the same product disease,

but it was other product diseases that I ran into, like pivotitis or obsessive sales disorder. And I talk about these in the book. And, you know, every time I learned to build better products and learned to avoid these diseases, at a certain point in my career, I realized that I had learned from these hard lessons, but now I had to watch others make these same mistakes that I'd been making. And so that's what led to this burning question.

The question, you know, is it that we're all doomed to just learning from trial and error and learning these hard lessons to figure out how to build good products? Or can we offer people a very systematic step-by-step process for building successful products? And I was sharing this burning question with a couple of ex-colleagues of mine and talking about these product diseases. And, you know, they had faced some of these same experiences.

And so that's when radical product thinking was born because we came up with a framework to really help people translate a vision into strategy, priorities, execution and measurement. And we put out this framework for free and people started using it organically. And that was just wonderful to see that people were just organically finding it and using it. And that's when, you know, eventually the radical product thinking book came out

because people were asking, well, you know, we're using this framework. How do I know if I'm using it correctly? And so the book was born as a voiceover, basically, to help people use this more effectively in building successful products. I see. And was it like, you know, you had an idea, you know, writing books, but, you know, writing book takes time, right? And how long did it take for you to write? You published, you know, back in 2017, 16-ish, right?

Well, the framework, we put it out there in 2017. But that was only the raw framework in PDF format, right? The book came out in 2021. I started writing it in 2018. And it took me three years, basically. And so, you know what you said about writing a book? I think, yes, it takes an obsession to write a book. But I'm really thrilled at how it came out. I feel like it offers, it's the kind of book that I wanted to write.

You know, very often you read a book and you go like, wow, well, this could have just been a blog post and it's been stretched into 10 chapters. Instead, I feel like the radical product thinking book, every chapter could have been a book by itself. And it really condenses a lot of deep thinking into one book. And so, I'm grateful for all of the experiences that led to writing a book like that. You know, that's really what I wanted in a book.

Yeah, so three years. Yeah, I know. It's amazing. And so, is there any reason you named radical product thinking for the title? I'll tell you the two stories why. So, one is that there is a lot in the radical product thinking book that challenges conventional wisdom. And I'll give you just one small taste of it for our listeners. You know, in the radical product thinking way, there are five elements of radical product thinking

that help you translate a concept into reality. And the five elements are vision, strategy, prioritization, execution, measurement, and culture. But when I say these words, like vision, strategy, you go like, oh yeah, you know, we've heard vision before and everyone needs a good vision. Except this is the part that's radical about it. In the radical product thinking way, a vision isn't, you know, big and broad.

Like, you know, it's not one of these fluffy statements, like to be the leader in, or, you know, something like revolutionizing. It needs to be truly a deep and meaningful vision that answers whose world are you trying to change? What is their problem? Why does the world need changing? Because maybe it doesn't. Then you can answer, what is the world, like when can you say you've arrived? And then finally, how are you bringing it about through your product?

And so I'll give you an example of such a vision statement. Here's a vision for the startup that I founded in 2011 and sold in 2014. Today, when amateur wine drinkers want to find wines that they're likely to like and learn about wine along the way, they have to find attractive looking wine bottles or find wines that are on sale. 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 about this world through a recommendations algorithm that matches wines to your personal tastes and an operational setup that delivers these wines to your door. Now, this is a radical vision because I haven't told you anything at all about the startup that I had. And yet, when I shared this vision with you,

you knew exactly, hopefully, what we were doing and exactly why we were doing it. And so this is why it's called radical product thinking because it challenges a lot of conventional wisdom. And instead of having such fluffy ideas about vision and strategy, it makes it very tangible. So that's the first reason. And the second reason, I will say, is that radical was my nickname in high school. And I thought I should just embrace it.

So there we go. Yeah, that's what I thought. It's so easy to remember. So radical thinking. Radical product thinking. Interesting. And in the book, you are strongly emphasizing the importance of the visions. So vision-led products. And so I have some questions about visions. People set up visions at this moment, but in the future, like 10 years, 20 years, probably the vision will be outdated. So how can companies or how will companies be able to catch up the vision

which is not outdated? So, yeah. How to Build Successful Products with Radhika Dutt � Glasp Talk with Radhika Dutt � Glasp Talk with Radhika Dutt � Glasp Talk

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with Radhika Dutt � Glasp Talk with Radhika Dutt � Glasp Talk Memorizing it all. For instance, you saw that when I was sharing the vision statement for that wine startup. Every time I think of that vision statement, I might use slightly different words. It's not the words that are important. What's important is truly the answers to the who, what, why, when, and how, and how you fill in those blanks.

And so, when you answer those profound questions, you create so much alignment across the team that what you actually want is you don't want anyone to memorize the statement. You want them to describe it in their own words in a way that makes you realize, like, I want to make sure that they've internalized it. That's how you know that your vision is really spreading. Yeah, thanks. That's so interesting. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I learned a lot.

But so, yeah, at some companies, at some startups, so, like, you know, even if, like, employees are, like, you know, CPO, product manager, funders, you know, decide, so, vision and mission, it's so difficult to apply it, like, you know, in, like, daily actionable, like, you know, things, daily action, right? So, how do you advise, like, you know, funders and product managers to apply, so, what they decided as a mission, so, to apply, so, like, you know, daily behaviors?

Yeah, and I think there are two elements to what you said, because what you brought up, I mean, it's so interesting. I think, so, one thing we have to think about when a company has a vision, mission, value structure, right? Very often, if you're a product manager who is way down in the hierarchy, you know, you might not be able to go there and say, okay, you know, I don't think we should deal with vision, mission, it's outdated, you know, we should use this new approach.

Like, you may just not have the power to be able to say that. And even if you have that power, you know, it might just be that you're being this bull in this China shop where nobody appreciates this direct challenge to vision, mission, etc. And so, the way I've often approached this is very tactfully and gently, where you don't directly challenge the vision. So, instead of that, I use the vision in my prioritization.

So, let's say I'm the product manager, and I'm coming to you with some ideas on how I want to prioritize things in my product, rather than challenging your vision as my boss, I'd come to you showing an X and Y axis. And there, I would talk about prioritization. So, the Y axis that I draw up is the vision statement that I wrote up for the product, right? And so, I don't even necessarily have to tell you as my boss what this vision is that I wrote up, right? Because I'm not trying to directly challenge your vision.

So, I write this vision statement for the product, and I draw up a Y axis, and I call this, is this a good vision fit or not? And the X axis is, is this good for survival or not, right? So, basically, what I just drew up is the yin and yang of long term, which is vision, and the short term, which is survival. And so, now I'm making this yin and yang very explicit and visual. And things that are good for both vision and survival, those are the easy decisions, right? Those are the decisions that

generally people are not going to protest. They'll be like, yeah, let's do them. Then there are decisions that are good for the vision, and they're not that great for survival. So, example of this would be if there's technical debt we have to fix, or I need to spend some time refactoring code, or if I need to do some user research, that's investing in the vision, because it's good for vision, but it's not, let's say, bringing in short-term revenues.

And the opposite of that is when I'm creating vision debt. This is good for survival, so maybe this is like a custom feature that is going to bring in sales, so it's good for survival, but it's terrible for the long-term vision. So, it's vision debt. And so, now when I talk to you as my boss, and I'm telling you about all these different features that I'm thinking about, I will put some things, you know, like I will categorize things as investing in the vision versus vision debt versus what is ideal,

right, or easy decisions. And as I'm talking you through all of these things, you know, it makes prioritization decisions less contentious, because it begs the question, are we aligned on the vision? And that's when, you know, you would say, well, I think this is a good vision fit. And it gives me an opportunity to say, well, you know, here's how I think about the product vision. I don't even call it the company vision, right.

I talk about it as the product vision, and here's how I'm thinking about it. Like, do you agree on this as the vision? And that opens up this dialogue, like I'm not directly challenging anything, but like sharing some thoughts that I've been working on. Or maybe we're not aligned on what is survival, you know, and you might discover that maybe survival isn't about financial survival. Maybe it's stakeholder support, where, you know, if our CEO is going to disapprove of this, maybe that is what survival is about, right.

So, it helps you create this alignment by using your vision for prioritization purposes, and it allows you to sort of sneak in the concept of challenging the vision without directly doing so. I like that, like, XY, like, you know, axis and metrics. Interesting. So, yeah, so like, you know, vision dates, or, you know, yeah, I understand it, but so as a product manager, or like founders, at some point, so we need to have, like, you know, you know, iteration.

So, or like, you know, I mean, we understand that, you know, vision is pretty important, and long-term vision is important, but at some point, in short term, so we need to do something which is for, like, beneficial, which is beneficial for our business, right. So, how do you balance it? So, every time we cannot work on, like, long-term vision things, but yeah, vice versa, we cannot work on only short-term things, right. Yeah.

Any framework? That's a great question, right, and I think this is what product managers typically struggle with, like, and in a sense, like, when you think about that X and Y axis of vision versus survival, I think your question boils down to what's the right balance between investing in the vision, vision debt, and, like, the easy quadrant, right, and the answer to that is, I think that truly depends on your particular company and the situation that you're in, not even the company, but that product team that you're in, and I'll

give you a couple of examples. You know, when I was running my startup, and we were bootstrapped, so we had very little funding, and so survival to us was financial survival, and we had to be super careful with how we were using money, and so sometimes we took on more vision debt because that was the only way of surviving, so, you know, for us, the right mix was taking on more vision debt and more of ideal quadrant because we had to survive to be able to live long enough to achieve

our vision, right. On the other hand, you know, when I was working in, on the other hand, in my current work with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, right, when I work with the Central Bank of Singapore, I mean, the organization is a public organization, and it's not a matter of finances. It's not, survival isn't about financial survival. They're not trying to make a profit. They're supported by the government, but at the same time, survival means making sure all the

stakeholders are in alignment, so that's how we define survival, and in that case, you know, we can actually invest in the vision more, and, you know, we are able to take more time, let's say, or not worry about the financial, just trying to constantly make a profit, right, like we're able to do the right things in terms of investing in the vision to think more longer term about how do we create the right experience for financial institutions,

etc. So, you know, the most important element of how do you find this right balance for your team and your organization is the communication. Being able to drop this x and y axis and talking about, you know, how you would prioritize it, and your stakeholders might push back or they might support whatever you're saying, like, you know, I think we can, in fact, do maybe more of investing in the vision, or they might say, look, we have to win this deal, and we have to take on vision debt,

but the good news is, right, at least as a group, you're all actually acknowledging how much vision debt you're taking on. What causes the disease like obsessive sales disorder is when you have no idea that you've taken on vision debt, and you just keep on taking vision debt without acknowledgement from everyone. So, that's why this communication is so helpful. It helps you keep track of how am I creating this balance. Yeah. So, insight.

Thank you, but it's a great question from you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so, yeah, to us, so, yeah, I mean, so, we are, like, balancing, so, like, short term, so, like, also long term. So, as I mentioned, our mission and vision are pretty, like, Long-term vision. We are not sure how long does it take to achieve it or realize it. But we cannot only focus on short-term things. Yeah. But you know what you just said about vision and mission being so long-term.

One of the things that I found is when you have a vision and mission that is so long-term, like that 5-10-year horizon, that faraway horizon that you can't see, one of the things that happens is when it's that fuzzy, your short-term business needs come more into focus as a result. So if I think about like how you intuitively start balancing, if I'm not drawing up vision versus survival, when everything, you know, when my vision is so

fuzzy and not in focus, what is in focus is your short-term needs. And that's why you end up making more short-term decisions with a fuzzy vision and mission. Thanks so much. Yeah. We understand the situation. And so I think in the book, so you mentioned like a company you worked for like Avid, like, you know, as a broadcasting company in Hollywood. So in that sense, so in that part, so you mentioned that, so you are trying to digitalize a flow.

So instead of like VHS or videotapes, so to like digital ones. And so, yeah, you mentioned that, so you were persuading on convincing so customers to buy like a digital workflow instead of in a videotape. So yeah, we are kind of struggling with like, you know, we are going, we want to like preach our mission and the vision. So to customers, but so for customers, they are like demanding like, you know, utility, so short-term utility. I want this highlighter.

I want this PDF uploader. So yeah, we tested like, you know, our landing page, like, you know, we just showed, showcased our long-term mission, vision, but so, you know, customers didn't, yeah, they resonate with us, but so they don't sign up. So yeah, I'm just curious how you, how you like, you know, overcome that situation. That's a great question. I think that boils down to building a very clear product strategy.

I think the vision gets you so far in terms of clarity. I think the next step is creating clarity by really understanding, by building a clear product strategy. So in the radical product thinking way, a good product strategy makes, it requires you to answer four questions and the mnemonic is radical or R-D-C-L. The R stands for real pain points. So first you have to uncover who are the personas who are going to be using your product and what is the pain that makes them

come to your product? And then once you've identified that, you can ask the next question, which is the D for design. You can say, okay, for each of those pain points, what's the solution in our product that addresses it for them? Then comes the C for capabilities, which is what's the functionality or what's the underlying infrastructure or the engine that allows us to deliver on the promise of the solution or the promise of the design.

And the last is L for logistics, which is where we think about the business model, pricing, support, training, etc. So now going to this question that you said, that you've shared a vision and the vision resonates, but people are still asking for all these features and pushing for certain features. I think what that points to for me is really building a more detailed R-D-C-L strategy. Sometimes when that happens, maybe it's that we haven't really understood our personas,

because there might be personas who need different things. It might sound like, it happened to me that when I was working in a particular robotics or warehousing company, we were targeting different verticals, different industry verticals. For example, if you're building warehouses for beverages like Pepsi, or if you're building it for, let's say, frozen foods, the functionality in the end at a high level sounds similar.

You're like, well, both companies need packages moving in and out of their warehouse. But when you look at the details, the actual business drivers, etc. are very different. And so that leads to very different products. And so I think similar thing here, when you look at the pain points and the personas, uncovering really through perhaps user interviews, what is the pain and how are you going to solve it, might lead to more definition than the vision. And maybe that's the next step to pursue.

I see. At the same time, this is my question, but sometimes people don't know what they really want. So meaning people sometimes are short-sighted. So let's say, especially in consumer space, application or software space, let's say Airbnb, the early days when they launched and asking money for business, most of the people told them, who want to stay in a stranger's house? Like, why would I stay at someone's house? But now Airbnb is a really big market,

tapping into a really big market. But early days, people don't know what they really wanted. So in that sense, how do you balance the innovation or innovative approach to solve the real problem of pain point? I mean, potential pain point to the real existing pain point? Yeah, great question. And this is one of the things that I really work with teams on when I do workshops on the RDCL strategy.

The technique here is not to ask users what they want, because they cannot know. We also cannot ask users, would you use this? Because they won't know the answer to this. Like, it turns out that humans are terrible predictors of their future actions. We also can never be relied on to dictate the right requirements or to say, like, I want this functionality, right? So what can we do instead? This is where user research comes into play, that we as product people, we have to ask questions in such a way that we are

relying on evidence from past behavior. And so we ask questions about past behavior. We ask questions in completely neutral ways so that I'm not going to bias your answer. So if I ask you, for example, will you stay at this? Let's say I'm building an app that encourages you to go to the gym, right? And I ask you the question, will you go to the gym if I do this? Right? You know what I'm hoping to hear. And you will most likely tell me, yes, I will go to the gym.

The answer of whether you're going to the gym or not, it can't be relied upon for me as a product manager, right? And so I have to ask you questions based on what you actually did. Like, did you go to the gym yesterday? Or last week? How many times did you go? That is a better predictor, right? Then I can ask you other questions, like in terms of how you, or like, you know, which kinds of things, which kinds of nudges you have actually clicked on.

Or like, you know, observing what you've done in terms of accepting rewards. There is a set of things that you can do to, first of all, understand what a user needs and then test out whether they will do something or not, right? And so you do as much of this user research followed by user testing, and then you put out your solution and launch it, right? And so it's never based on asking users what they want, but it's rather understanding their workflow or mental models enough that you can then build

based on what their intent is and based on, like, what will fit their user workflow and mental models. Thank you, yes. By the way, like, this whole thing of user research, I've found that it's actually a very rare and hard skill to build. Like, I find a lot of user research, like, asking questions because we want to know what people think. Like, we want their feedback. But we often ask it in terms of, let's get your feedback in terms of what we've built.

And so we really have to figure out the distinction between user research, which is purely exploratory research to truly understand workflows, mental models, and separate that from user testing, which is where we test solutions. I see. That was what we were actually, yeah, working on this season. Yeah. Thank you for the feedback. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for the advice. And also nowadays, you know, like AI is, you know, trendy and chatty, but it is, you know, people, many people using chatty, but the answer be cold and so on.

And how do you think AI impact product managers role or job or product development? Yeah, so interesting as a question too. I think right now we overestimate the impact of AI on product managers. I feel like if you, so for example, you know, one angle that I've seen is product managers using AI to say, you know, what are the metrics I should be measuring for my product, right? And I think that's a very dangerous line to go down because AI can often tell you lots of things that you could be measuring all based on popular metrics based on what others are measuring.

But the reality is, right, the vision and strategy are really what should be driving what you measure. So if you think about your vision and strategy as hypotheses, what you measure is really derived from those hypotheses. And every metric is basically a way of telling, is my strategy working or not? And what should I change within my strategy? And so when I think about measurement in this way, or, you know, even when I look at the concepts of vision, strategy, et cetera, AI isn't really going to help you be that vision driven product manager.

You know, at best, you can use AI to write out different marketing messages and see what resonates. Like, I don't really see AI as helping the product management function. In terms of how AI can be used by product managers, I think on that front, like, to be able to include it within their product, this is the other fad, right, where everyone wants to use AI in their product. And that's the expectation from a lot of investors. Like, if you don't have AI in your product, you're kind of left behind.

Even that, I feel, you know, there are, it's a lot of development to have decent enough AI in your product that makes enough of a difference. And if you are building all of that, you have to have this clarity of what exactly is your vision in terms of the problem that you're setting out to solve by using AI in your product. In terms of a strategy, it should be clear enough that it really is solving for something.

And if it's not, it seems a little worthless to try to include it, right? There's one last piece that I will say. Using AI in your product, right, it's more likely to introduce biases within your product to create unintentional consequences. There are so many instances of this where, you know, there was AI that was giving people really terrible advice on dieting or recipes and things like that, where, you know, you really don't want to introduce such hallucinations within your product.

And so one thing to think about carefully is what is the impact you want your product to have on society? And if there are biases in AI, which you should assume there are, you know, how will that affect that impact? How will it change the impact you're going to have on society? And would you still be willing to take that risk? And sometimes the answer is no, it's not worth it. And that's something to consider.

I think all of this goes to the question of, as a product manager, you know, what's the legacy you want to leave behind through your product? Like, what's the change you want to leave in society? And if AI can harm that, don't do it. You know, be very careful with how you introduce AI into your product. Like, AI too has to be very vision driven in how you include it. I see. And by the way, do you use AI in your workflow, like working with companies?

Sorry, I'm just curious how you use AI. Great question. Yeah. I don't. I've tried, actually. I've tried to see if I could use AI for marketing purposes and to, you know, help me craft blog posts or to craft even LinkedIn posts. And I haven't been able to use it effectively in the sense that I hate what AI created. It just sounds like a bunch of, you know, wordy trash that I just end up discarding. And to me, like, that is a big piece of my brand, which is I want to write really thoughtful blogs or thoughtful LinkedIn posts.

And AI doesn't fit into my product strategy or my vision, which is why I don't end up using it. But I wish I could, honestly. Because I wish I could use it. It would make just marketing so much more scalable for me. And it takes me time to write blog posts and LinkedIn posts. So, I really wish I could use it. It's just not the right thing for me. Thank you. Yes. And so, moving to your, you know, like, your daily, like, information consumption.

And because, you know, we are building the tool for knowledge management and note-taking and so on. So, like, do you use any, like, a journaling app or note-taking app? Because you know a lot of things, right? You have a lot of ideas. You learned a lot from your experience. Do you keep notes somewhere? Or synthesize ideas somewhere? Great question. Fascinating. I'll share a little bit about my workflow. So, yeah, often I – so, when I read news, I will pick out stories that I actually feel are very interesting or that convey a certain point about being vision-driven or lack thereof.

And my workflow is that I'll send myself an email linked to, you know, what I read and why it was interesting. And then the other piece of my workflow is on a regular basis, you know, I might write in my notebook, like, a whole passage. And I find it kind of meditative to write with a fountain pen and on a notebook where I kind of write up these ideas and describe, you know, concepts to myself. And the last thing is, you know, I also use blog posts or work on blog posts to process some of these ideas and use these stories that I emailed to myself to be able to process kind of what are the main ideas that I've learned from them and how we can apply these ideas in our work.

I see. And I saw a lot of example – in your book, you know, you used, you know, Boeing 737 or, you know, many examples that you used. And do you search for the ideas you send to yourself, you know, then to write it? And, I mean, in your writing process, you're writing a book. And how did you, you know, get many ideas or examples and crystallize it into a book? Yeah, great question. So I end up searching – well, not searching later, but it's more like I continue to create a collection of stories that I then email to myself.

And then when I'm writing a book, for example, I do a search of emails from me to me. It's a little less workflow. So in fact, if you look at it, it's a little more workflow. I'm more open to it. So I search for these emails that I have written from myself to myself. And then I scour through those to be able to see, you know, what are some interesting stories that illustrate my point. And then I will – I'll use those in whatever I'm writing up.

And for PM, you know, product managers, do you have any tool recommendations for them? Like aspiring product managers, product managers, like let's say, oh, like Notion has this feature so that Kanban is better for something XYZ or Google Docs is enough. Do you have some preference or recommendation on tools? Oh, great question. I think, you know, this has been something that's not – that a product manager often doesn't have a choice on.

Like you come into a company and it's pretty much whatever the company already has. So it's mostly like, how do you just sort of get on with it? So I think I've developed personal preferences for what I like or don't like. But even those preferences, they are so completely shaped by, you know, the organization and the complexity of the product in itself. Like when I was running my own startup, we used Pivotal Labs because I think the features and the stories were just easier for us to deal with in that format.

And then, you know, later when we – when I was working on Radical Product Thinking, we worked on Trello. But then, you know, when we were working in the robotics company, we used Jira. So I've used all of these different ones. But, you know, and I can say Jira is my least preferred one in terms of just the complexity of user interface. And it has a ton of features. But I also see that it has – Our audience are aspiring product managers or senior product managers,

CPO, or sometimes founders. Do you have some advice to those people in terms of career or their work and product thinking? Yeah, I think the one thing that I've found in my own experience is that it's really easy to get stuck in a tactical role, whether you're a leader or an individual contributor. The pressures of short-term business needs are such that it very often pushes you towards a tactical role and being

more reactive in your role. And so the question is always, how do you take on a more strategic role as a product manager or as a product leader? And a lot of my work more recently focuses on, how do you level up? And a lot of that has to do with being able to create this clarity of vision, being able to help your team understand how to systematically translate the vision into reality. And so along those lines, there is a new course on vision setting that I've co-created with Pendo

and Mind the Product. And it's a free radical product thinking course on vision setting. And then there are live online workshops where people can learn to translate that vision into strategy and priorities and into execution and measurement and culture. And the live workshops actually give you also personalized feedback so that as you're working on your specific product, that you know how to do this.

So those are the things that I've currently been working on in terms of really helping people level up. But I think the summary of all of it and what I was trying to say is, I think the challenge, the biggest challenge for leaders and also individual contributors is don't let yourself just be always sucked into this tactical role. And it's a question of making sure that you can be vision driven. And if you constantly communicate your rationale for how you're thinking, you're able to then spread your

influence across the organization more. And you can really level up as a result and get other people to think strategically as well. Wow, that's a great advice. Yeah, thank you so much. And lastly, you know, since Grassroots is a platform where people can share what they are reading and learning as a digital legacy, and we want to ask you what kind of legacy impact do you want to leave behind for the future generations? So it's a big question.

It is, and I love that question. So to me, you know, what I really wanted to do with radical product thinking was to really allow people to create the change that inspires them. So if there is any legacy, it isn't about like, you know, the fame of the book, or it's not about the fame of the methodology, but rather, like if people can really learn how to create change in a way that inspires them and leave the world a little better than when they found it.

That's really what I hope to achieve. And so, you know, when I wrote the radical product thinking book, like one of the reasons I was so obsessed, and it took me these three years to write the book, was really because I wanted to focus on like, you know, how do you create the change that inspires you? And it can be in so many different ways. It's not just being vision driven at work. But you know, whether it's thinking about the volunteering that you're doing, or political activism, or,

you know, even parenting, if you think about it as a product, you can apply these same ideas to a vision, strategy, priorities, etc. Even to parenting, right? And so that's what I really wanted to leave behind to like, have people be able to be vision driven in what they're taking on. It's a beautiful statement. And thank you so much. And yeah, again, thank you so much for taking time and joining today.

Thank you. I really enjoyed this conversation. And thank you so much for all the insightful questions that you've asked. Thank you. Yes.

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How to Build Successful Products with Radical Product Thinking by Radhika Dutt

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