Radhika Dutt is an entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in four acquisitions as a result of the products she built and advises organisations from high-tech startups to government agencies on building radical products (ones that create a fundamental change instead of optimising the status quo). She co-founded Radical Product Thinking as a movement of leaders creating vision-driven change. Radhika graduated from MIT with an SB and M.Eng in Electrical Engineering, and speaks nine languages while learning her tenth. In this talk from BoS USA Online, Radhika talks about where iteration goes wrong, why Lean and Agile fall short, and how to diagnose the most common product diseases and overcome them. There are some great discussion points and tools covered in this talk that you can use in your team too. You can see the video, slides and transcript of the talk at https://businessofsoftware.org/talks/radical-product-radhika-dutt-online/

1. Radical Product Thinking
The New Mindset for
Innovating Smarter
@RadhikaDutt

2. Think of a visionary who has had an
impact in this world

3. Did you think of one of these individuals?

4. Society teaches us
that our impact
must be heroic.

5. The rate of change
when only heroes
change the world.

6. The rate of change if each of us systematically
creates the change we want to see.

7. Until now, methodologies and business
books haven’t emphasized how we can
create change systematically.
Methodologies for building products and scaling companies
have focused on speed and using trial and error.

8. ● Build, Test, Learn, Scale
● Fail fast, learn fast
● Iterate quickly

9. Iterating fast is like having a fast car.
It gives you speed in execution.

10. Speedcan look like this...
Direction matters.

11. Speed + Direction = Velocity
Before launching into execution,
we must define the direction of our speed
+ =

12. What is RADICAL PRODUCT THINKING ?
It’s a methodology for
building world-changing
products...
...giving organizations a
step-by-step, practical approach.

13. Vision
What’s the end-state
you want to create?
Strategy
How will you
create that?
Execution &
measurement
How will you measure
and adapt?
Prioritization
In what order will
you deliver it?
Culture
What culture do
you need in place?
You can systematically engineer your change:
...and communicate your rationale across
your team and within your organization

14. VISION
Define your

15. A good vision doesn’t have to be a BHAG.
(Big Hairy Audacious Goal)

16. “Contributing to
human progress
by empowering
people to express
themselves.”

17. Your Vision should articulate...
● Who: Whose world are you changing?
● What: What does their world look like today?
● Why: Why does their world need changing?
● When: When will you know that you’ve arrived?
● How: How are you going to change it for them?
… the Who, What, Why, When and How

18. Use the Radical Vision Worksheet to iterate
on your vision until you’re happy with it
Today, when
identified group
want to
desirable outcome
,
they have to
current activity/solution(s)
. This is unacceptable, because
shortcomings of current solution
. We envision a world where
shortcomings are resolved
.
We’re bringing this world about through
broad technology/approach
.
(Who) (What)
(What)
(Why) (When)
(How)

19. It’s time to stretch our thinking on
product.

20. Envisioned Change: Financial
independence for women by
allowing them to earn a
dignified living.
Product: Pappadums that
taste like they’re homemade,
without requiring the effort.
Jaswantiben Popat
(1/7 founders of Lijjat)
Lijjat’s vision for change and its product

21. VISION
Define your

22. Lijjat’s radical vision
Today, when
identified group
want to
desirable outcome
,
they have to
current activity/solution(s)
. This is unacceptable, because
shortcomings of current solution
. We envision a world where
shortcomings are resolved
.
We’re bringing this world about through
broad technology/approach
.
women without education
from poor households)
run the household and
educate their kids
depend on their husband’s
income and can’t influence
spending
It limits their children’s educational prospects,
and repeats the cycle of poverty
women become self-reliant, leading
to their socioeconomic progress
High-quality pappadums (later other fast-moving
consumer goods), without ever taking charity

23. Defining your vision is only the first
step in engineering change.

24. STRATEGY
Develop your

25. Capabilities
C
Design
“What does our
solution look
like?”
D
R
Real Pain Points Logistics
“How do we
deliver it?”
L
“What do they
need for a
dignified living?”
“How do we
enable those
capabilities?”
1. Have work
ethic but low
education
2. Primary
caregivers in a
patriarchy -
can’t leave
home for long
Work from home
(not factories)
Earn daily wages
by rolling papads,
share in the profits,
equal partners
Pay every day -
transparent
accounting
Develop mindset to
share in profits
equally, maximizing
group earnings, not
individual gains
Logistics to get
materials to and
from 45,000
women.
Decentralized
quality control

26. PRIORITIZATION
Bring balance through

27. Prioritization means factoring in
the pesky problem of survival

28. GOOD VISION FIT
POOR VISION FIT
WORSENS
SURVIVAL
IMPROVES
SURVIVAL
INVESTING
IN THE VISION
IDEAL
DANGER!
BUILDING
VISION DEBT
Prioritization: Balancing Vision vs. Survival Risk

29. GOOD VISION FIT
POOR VISION FIT
WORSENS
SURVIVAL
IMPROVES
SURVIVAL
INVESTING
IN THE VISION
IDEAL
DANGER!
BUILDING
VISION DEBT
Prioritization: Balancing Vision vs. Survival Risk
Sharing in profit (or
loss) equally
Taking a loan
Investing in
educating women,
financial literacy
INVESTING
IN THE VISION
DANGER!
IDEAL
VISION DEBT
Not giving or
taking credit

30. EXECUTION & MEASUREMENT
Take a hypothesis-driven approach to

31. Lijjat measures success by the # of women to
whom they give financial independence.
Popular metrics such as revenues, market share, customer
reviews are important but aren’t indicators of
progress towards Lijjat’s vision.

32. A radical product is your
improvable mechanism for
engineering the change you envision.
Lijjat’s radical product has given independence to over 45,000 women,
commands 60% of the pappadum market, and over $220M in revenues.

33. But what if you’re not a founder?
How can each of us become
visionaries at work?

34. Margaret Hamilton
Software Engineer

35. NASA’s vision was to put man on the moon.

36. Unfortunately, this vision isn’t very
useful for a software engineer.

37. Margaret’s vision for
her work
Building ultra-reliable
software that can recover
from any possible error in
the process of putting a
man on the moon.

38. GOOD VISION FIT
(Putting man on
the moon)
POOR VISION FIT
WORSENS
SURVIVAL
IMPROVES
SURVIVAL
(Stakeholder
support)
INVESTING
IN THE VISION
IDEAL
DANGER!
BUILDING
VISION DEBT
INVESTING
IN THE VISION
DANGER! VISION DEBT
Pushing to fix an error
when NASA thought it
was unnecessary
Urgently fixing
an error while
astronauts were
stuck in space
Implementing her
approach to error
recovery on all
systems
Prioritization
IDEAL

39. You can apply these ideas anywhere
you want to create change.

40. Claudette Colvin
Student

41. Claudette’s vision
“I wanted a world where we all
had the same American Dream,
where we could live the same
American Dream as the white
people. I was tired of adults
complaining about how badly
they were treated and not
doing anything about it.”

42. GOOD VISION FIT
(The same American
Dream for all)
POOR VISION FIT
WORSENS
SURVIVAL
IMPROVES
SURVIVAL
(Personal
well-being)
INVESTING
IN THE VISION
IDEAL
DANGER!
BUILDING
VISION DEBT
INVESTING
IN THE VISION
DANGER! VISION DEBT
Not giving up her seat
Prioritization
Being a key plaintiff in
Browder v. Gayle
IDEAL

43. Vision
What’s the end-state
you want to create?
Strategy
How will you
create that?
Execution &
measurement
How will you measure
and adapt?
Prioritization
In what order will
you deliver it?
Culture
What culture do
you need in place?
You can systematically engineer your change:
...and communicate your rationale across
your team and within your organization

44. Key takeaways
1. We can avoid product diseases by being vision-driven
rather than being iteration-led.
2. Your product is your mechanism to create change - it’s
your entire solution (software, services, training, etc.)
3. Each of us can take a vision-driven approach to create the
impact we want to have, systematically.

45. Want to learn more?
● Get the book on Amazon
● Get the free toolkit from
www.radicalproduct.com
● Message me on LinkedIn

46. Questions?
www.radicalproduct.com
@RadhikaDutt