Irina Achim
Radhika Dutt’s book, Radical Product Thinking, has been translated into several languages including Chinese and Japanese. She is an entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in five acquisitions, two of which were companies that she founded. She advises organizations from high-tech startups to government agencies on building radical products that create a fundamental change.
She is currently Advisor on Product Thinking to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, where she advises and mentors teams on product thinking as part of the organization's digital transformation efforts.
Radhika has built products in a wide range of industries including broadcast, media and entertainment, telecom, advertising technology, government, consumer apps, robotics, and even wine. She graduated from MIT with an SB and M.Eng in Electrical Engineering, and speaks nine languages.
Product diseases
Her journey on to writing Radical Product Thinking started with a discussion about product diseases with two ex-colleagues, with whom she experienced product diseases. The most common product diseases are:
- Strategic Swelling: This disease happens when you’re building a wide range of capabilities but lacking the focus to develop any individual capability to a breakthrough level. It means that in the process of trying to do everything for everyone, your product becomes bloated beyond recognition.
- Pivotitis: A disease you catch by changing direction repeatedly, constantly pivoting to pursuing the next shiny object. It leads to exhausted, confused, and demoralized teams.
- Hypermetricemia: It means focusing excessively on measurable outcomes to determine success, irrespective of whether those are the right things to measure. This disease is increasingly prevalent as you try to be more data-driven. Being data-driven is great, but only if you’re asking the right questions and measuring the right metrics.
- Narcissus Complex: this is the disease that happens when you’re focusing on your own goals and needs to such an extent that you lose focus on the change you’re trying to bring about. An example of this is when you love the feature you’ve built, so surely your customers will too.
"There are other diseases I describe in my book, Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. Product diseases are common when iterations and everyday activities are not driven by a clear vision and strategy."
Pivotitis - what can this do to a product?
In her product developing years, Radhika encountered one of these diseases on her own journey, an experience that she shares with us below:
"I'll give you an example of Pivotitis from my own experience. I once worked at a startup where we were looking to be the next Visa of the world. We discovered that it was really difficult to acquire both merchants and consumers, so eventually we pivoted to become a loyalty solution provider for merchants. We then realized that it was a really crowded market, so we pivoted to become a credit solutions provider from merchants.
In the span of three months, we changed direction so many times that as the Head of Marketing, even I didn't know what we were asking customers to sign up for.
This example shouldn’t discourage you from pivoting. The key to pivoting well and avoiding the whiplash effect is to have a clear and detailed vision for every pivot, so that all your iterations are driven by a clear vision and strategy."
Vision driven versus iteration-led products
When talking about developing a product, one can choose a vision-driven product or an iteration-led product. What are the main differences, Radhika explains:
"When you’re iteration-led, you focus on speed of execution with the idea that you keep iterating and trying different things until you find product-market fit. The problem unfortunately is when we iterate without a clear vision and strategy, our products become bloated, fragmented, and driven by irrelevant metrics. In other words, it manifests in product diseases which often kill innovation.
Being vision-driven means having a clear vision for the change you want to bring about and systematically translating this vision into action – it’s the essence of building a successful product."
Boeing if it were vision-driven
Radhika presents us a case study of what a vision driven thinking could have done to a story like Boieng.
"Let’s look at the example of Boeing. Boeing had the broad vision of aspiring 'to be the best in aerospace and an enduring global industrial champion'.
Unfortunately such a fuzzy vision is useless because it doesn’t explain what it means to be a global industrial champion. Is it about revenues? Market capitalization? Technical superiority? In the absence of a clear vision, your short-term business needs (or shareholder demands), dominate your decision-making.
Boeing focused on maximizing revenues by creating the 737 Max to compete with Airbus. The 737 Max was an iteration-led product, created by placing a larger engine on a decades-old frame which resulted in aerodynamic instability. The company then iterated by creating a software workaround which ultimately led to two crashes that killed 346 people.
Boeing had caught the product disease Obsessive Sales Disorder – the company continued to pursue short-term gains at the expense of the long-term vision.
- In alignment with that detailed vision, the company would then have kicked off a project to build a new narrow-body plane since the 737 was becoming an outdated platform.
- A vision-driven approach for Boeing would have meant starting with a well-articulated vision for the problem Boeing was setting out to solve.
- The product would have been driven by a detailed product strategy (i.e. an actionable plan), prioritization that balanced the long-term vision against short-term business needs, hypothesis-driven execution and measurement to make course corrections along the way, and a culture around safety that was conducive to aerospace innovation.
A vision-driven product would have been more successful for Boeing in the long run.
Vision driven mission in the government
Radhika is also advisor on Product Thinking to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), a role that caught our attention and the kind of collaboration that wanted to dig deeper in the details. So Radhika explains her role in the strong bond between the administration and the private sector.
"MAS is Singapore’s central bank and financial regulator and had started its journey in digital transformation. I was brought in in 2019 to help bring a vision-driven approach to teams as they built products and I’ve continued collaboration with the organization over the years.
One of the core tenets behind MAS’s digital transformation initiative is 'driven by empathy and centered on people'. In translating this human-centered approach into action, product teams at MAS use the RPT methodology to define a vision that’s centered on users and the change they’re setting out to create for them.
In execution and measurement, teams measure the success of their digital products by whether they’re creating the change they intended for their users.
In terms of your second question, more than a collaboration between government and the public sector, I think it’s about balance. The government, private sector, and communities function like the three stools of a leg – you need all three legs to be strong for stability. Governments need to be close to communities and be representative of communities so they can regulate the private sector adequately but also consider long-term well-being of communities by encouraging innovation in the private sector.
Each leg brings a different perspective: communities bring a human-centric perspective, the private sector brings a short-term view and the government must counterbalance this with a longer-term view. When the government starts to think too short-term like the public sector does, you start to see systems in the country disintegrate.
Radhika Dutt will be a speaker at the PROW conference in Timișoara, an event for which you can register here.
