[On Demand] Product Management Webinar: Radical Product Thinking

Janna Bastow: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome everybody.

Here we are at another session of our product experts fireside series that we run here at ProdPad. As we’ve been running these things for years now. Every month we’ve had different guests come in and join us and basically have a fireside chat like this. And so it’s always with a focus on.

Bringing in amazing experts with lots of experience and insights and just, focusing on the conversation, on the content, the learning, the sharing. So today is gonna be recorded just like all of our other past talks, so you can go back in time. If you go to ProdPad.com/webinars, you can see a list of all the.

Past versions of this that we’ve done. But it’s always a mix of usually fireside, sometimes presentations from experts but again, with a real focus on the learning and the sharing. And today as I said, it’s gonna be recorded. You will have a chance to ask questions, so throw them into the q and a section if you can.

We will be trying to keep an eye on the chat as well, but that’s harder to keep eyes on. So if you put it into the q and [00:01:00] a it means that other people can give them a thumbs up so we can see which ones are most popular, and it’s easier for us to keep track of who’s asked what. That said, it’s as I said, it’s a fireside conversation, so it’s a chance for us to just chat and geek out over products and welcome you all in as part of that.

We’re joined by Ready Dat, who I’m gonna introduce properly in just a minute. But we’re gonna be talking today about how radical product thinking can transform the way you build products. And as most of you probably know, Radhika is the author of. Products. And you can see the copy of the book behind her.

If anybody doesn’t already have that, then grab your copy. But before we kick off, I want to just do a quick intro to what we do here at ProdPad. I know I recognize some faces here from some of our usuals who already know and love ProdPad. But for anybody who isn’t already. Up to date with what we’re doing.

So ProdPad is a tool that we built ourselves. We were product managers and we needed tools to do our own jobs. And now it’s being used by thousands of teams around the world. But basically it’s a tool that [00:02:00] helps you keep track of everything that’s in your backlog and everything that you’re outlining is your big picture goals.

So it’s a place to manage your vision, your strategy, your goals, but also the more tactical, like what’s in your backlog and what are your customers asking for. And it’s a tool that you can try for free. We even have a sandbox version of ProdPad that’s preloaded with examples, roadmaps and OKRs and other facets.

So you can see how it all fits together before you kick off and create your own versions in your own account. And our team is made up of product people, right? It’s founded by product people and we’re always learning and iterating based on what we’re hearing from our audience.

So give it a try and give us feedback. Let us know what you love and how to jive with what, how you work and what doesn’t. And that way we can learn from that and constantly improve. Now on that note, I want to talk a little bit about where we’ve been going with ProdPad as well. So we’ve recently introduced CoPilot, which is an AI facet of our app.

Basically, I was talking earlier about ProdPad being a place to manage [00:03:00] your vision and your goals and what your customers have said. And, trying to draw the dots or connect the dots between all of that so you make the best product decisions. The AI underpinning all of that now can help you connect those dots much more quickly and answer all the questions that people would otherwise come to you and, tap you on the shoulder to, to ask those questions.

And, ends up taking up a lot of time. Things like, have we ever worked on something like this? What was the outcome? Can you tell me what we’re doing to impact this particular objective? Why are we working on this thing? Or what has so and so said, or what has this target market said about our product?

So it’s just helping to draw those lines between things and help you move faster and more confidently as a product person, I. So enough about us. I want to introduce Radhika. I know Ika through product management. Just massive. She’s a huge thought leader in the world and hardly needs an introduction.

But Radhika is. Powerhouse in the world of product and innovation. [00:04:00] She’s an entrepreneur and a product leader. Her experience spans everything from media to entertainment to government, robotics, even wine. So a bit of everything, which really rounds out her experience. And she’s the author of Radical Product Thinking.

So as that’s the book that she’s got there behind her. And in radical product thinking, she lays out a practical framework for translating vision into everyday action and takes aim at the habits and the assumptions that often lead teams astray, which is what I really love about that particular approach.

It really brings true to me. She’s also nowadays advising the monetary authority of Singapore. And she’s talking about things like how to apply product thinking at a national level. So really important work here. So everybody, I want to say a big hello and thank you for joining us Redka.

Everyone says hi. 

Radhika Dutt: Hi everyone, and thank you for having me here, Janna. You know what is super exciting for me is we’ve known about each other for a long time and for a long time I’d been saying, oh, I’d love to do [00:05:00] something together. And I’m so excited to be here. 

Janna Bastow: We’re doing it. Exactly.

Radhika Dutt: The planets alive, how 

Janna Bastow: That happened. Excellent. Well, hey we’d love to get this conversation started by hearing a little bit about your background. Anything I missed in that, that that, that warmup story or what sort of led you to this way that you think nowadays about product management?

Radhika Dutt: Maybe I’ll share, start that on a personal note. I grew up in India and lived there till I was 12, then moved to South Africa, and this was right after the apartheid laws were abolished. So that was 1991. Lived there until right after the first democratic elections happened in 1994.

So I lived in South Africa at its most. Momentous times, let’s say. Yeah, absolutely. And then moved to the US for undergrad, and I’ve been here since, except for a two and a half years stint in Singapore. So that’s on a more personal note. And what led me to the product was really this meandering path, right?

I think you’ve been in the product for [00:06:00] so much longer, so I’ve known about you for a lot longer. But, my background in product was, I remember one of the f well, first of all right after undergrad. I started a company with four other co-founders and it was called Lobby seven. And my first introduction to the product was catching the product disease I now call Hero syndrome.

Where we were trying to be big, our vision at the time was revolutionizing wireless and our tagline was Enlightened Wireless. And you asked me today, what does that mean? And I have no idea. 

Janna Bastow: Love that. 

Radhika Dutt: And but like that was the first product disease. Yeah. And then I worked at other organizations and I had an example, and this was the only example that I’ve ever had of working in a company after lobby lobby seven.

So I went to work at Avid and that was the only place where we didn’t have product diseases. Where we actually were so incredibly vision driven, never before and never since have [00:07:00] I seen a company that was vision driven. And like to date when people from Avid get together, we all cannot stop talking about it.

And just there’s so much passion, but we can talk more about that. So I had an example from a negative experience and a positive experience. And the thing at Avid was my title was program manager for custom engineering, which is like the diametric opposite of what product means.

And yet what I realized years later was I was really applying product thinking because of my role in that title. I had to talk to our customers and figure out as we were building a new suite of products for broadcast. So Avid is well known in Hollywood, but this was the broadcast that we were going after.

And what my role was to talk to these broadcasters, figure out. What we needed to build, what was truly custom and what was not, and then get them to pay for, helping us build what was strategic. So almost partnering with us. Trying to [00:08:00] avoid custom where we could and build out our product on a low budget.

And if you think about it, that’s exactly what the product is, despite the title. So I’ll pause there. That was my introduction to the product. And since then it’s been this quest for how we can get everyone to be that vision driven after that experience at Avid. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. That’s actually a really good experience to lean on.

What made Avid capable of doing so? Was there something with the founder makeup or with the way that it thought, the way that it structured as teams? 

Radhika Dutt: There was a lot of strategic thinking. At Avid you had a leadership team that really had thought through strategy and there was psychological safety.

Like I remember one instance where it was a strategy meeting that they were having, and I was what, 25 at the time? And I sat in on these strategy meetings and I wasn’t afraid to speak up. And I remember once debating something with the CTO [00:09:00] and I was six months into the job, right? And he said I was right and never before, never after have I seen that level of psychological safety right there.

I was like this young kid, who was I to? Know what we should be doing. And yet I had an opinion and he realized I was right on something and we were able to move forward. So that was another thing. So the strategic thinking, the psychological safety. And the third thing was the person who headed up the broadcast and this new suite that we were building out.

We were the underdog that didn’t even have a product for broadcast going up against the behemoth of Sony. And he had a vision. So his name was David. I. And David had a vision for what is it gonna take to replace Sony in all of these newsrooms? And what was amazing was he shared the vision, [00:10:00] he was able to communicate like what our strategy was, and then he gave me autonomy.

As a 25-year-old, I was able to negotiate with the leaders of these newsrooms on what features we should or shouldn’t build. Nice. He didn’t intervene at that level of autonomy. Never since, yeah. Well before, yes. In my startups, but never since working in a company. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah.

That’s really magic. And actually aligns with what I call the formula for a good product culture, or good product innovation culture. Which is you need to have alignment. So sounds making sure everyone knows what that vision is and that’s really clear and communicated across the team having autonomy.

Having the space to actually go and find your own path with how you tackle it. Be able to work independently and autonomously. But all with a multiplying factor of psychological safety. I. Good psychological safety can absolutely lift the team up. But also bad psychological safety can just slow everything down.

There’s no point having an aligned [00:11:00] autonomy, but the team doesn’t feel safe actually trying anything. Yeah, exactly. And the psychological safety part is so important because. No matter how much strategic thinking you have within the leadership team or across the whole organization, you need opinions and ideas from people who might be exposed to things that you are not.

Radhika Dutt: Yeah. And if you don’t have psychological safety, you never really understand what is working in your strategy, what is not, and what you need to change. Yeah. That’s where you need people to be able to voice their opinions freely. Yeah, absolutely. Now, psychological safety is a bit of a buzzword. Like I remember when I started in product management, no one ever talked about this thing.

Janna Bastow: It wasn’t anything that we’d had nor knew even how to articulate was, did you call it psychological safety back then? Or are you just looking back on it retroactively and going, ah, that’s what it was, that was that place. It was definitely, in hindsight that’s what it was. Yeah. As a 25-year-old at the time, I was like.

Radhika Dutt: I thought this was how it was. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

Radhika Dutt: You don’t appreciate things that you think are obvious and natural until [00:12:00] years later, and you realize that’s not how it always works. 

Janna Bastow: Oh, no. See, I had the opposite, right? My career before I was about 25 and whatnot involved some kind of not great companies, right?

No psychological safety, perhaps edging on what we’d call nowadays toxic. And so I remember asking my first boss he’d left and was talking to me afterwards, gimme some advice afterwards, and I said to him like, is this normal? Is this how companies always operate?

And he’s no there’s better companies out there. I’m like, okay. Not long afterwards, I quit too. 

Radhika Dutt: Yeah. Sometimes it’s interesting how when you have amazing bosses, it keeps you in a place much longer than you would’ve stayed otherwise. And this was another learning for me.

When you are working on a product, if you’re a product manager, regardless of whether you have authority based on your title or level in the corporate ladder, you can still, I. Be strategic, apply product thinking. Yeah. You can [00:13:00] create psychological safety within your little bubble. Yeah. And so I remember like years later I was working in a company where we were working on advertising tech, right?

For tv. There’s nothing less inspiring than that. 

Janna Bastow: I don’t know. I love a geeky niche that I’m sure has its merits. 

Radhika Dutt: That’s right. That’s right. But Right. Like when I say that our product was in Ad tech for tv, like you don’t think oh yeah, I wanna go work there. And yet, we were able to create an environment where I was able to communicate our vision.

Like we didn’t have a clear vision from leadership. And that really bothered me. So I had to create a vision for our team and kind of, known for our product, what it is that we want to build. And then we had to. I remember the best. The most memorable moment for me in working in that organization was when a developer came to me and she said.

I saw that you wrote this in the story, but I think what you actually meant was this because this would [00:14:00] be better for the user. Is that right? And I was like, yes. I have arrived if my developer can correct me on where I was wrong and she understands my intent. And that’s the level at which the vision and strategy has to be so clear to the team that they’re able to.

Course correct when you are wrong. And so this was my experience at the counter site, to finally feeling like I had learned to do what David had taught me way back when I was 25. That regardless of your level, you can apply these same ideas and do it within your sphere of control. Yeah.

What was your learning and at what point did you get to something similar? 

Janna Bastow: Oh, well, I remember a job that I had not long afterwards. It was the one that actually brought me over to the UK and realized that the best way to get things done was to actually ringfence some core team members and say, actually, you know what?

We’re gonna be there. This lean machine that’s gonna get all the stuff done while the rest of the business sort of plunks [00:15:00] on and does what it does. And actually that was one of the most empowering pieces that I got to work on, certainly at that sort of era of my career. Because it was true, you realize that you could get a lot more done with a small team who knew what it is that you were trying to do.

Gave me the ability to find our own way to solve those problems and build psychological safety within that little bubble. And yeah, that was an eyeopener for me. 

Radhika Dutt: For me, from that experience onwards, what I realized was I was doing it within my bubble, and then the question that kept coming up for me was, how do you do this at scale?

Like, why is it that, I can do this within a bubble? What stops me from doing this? Yeah, at a bigger scale, right? Yeah. Like, why can’t I get other parts of the organization to think like me? And one thing I’ll speak about very openly, and people can feel free to add in chat as well as I found that, as a woman, if I was being assertive or sharing, here’s what we need to do or.

[00:16:00] Being very clear and pushy in terms of direction very often that led to this blowback that, the feedback I would hear is, you’re not building enough consensus and, yeah I feel like very often that sort of, that wouldn’t be said to a guy at the same level, but in any case, one thing that it led me to do was, and you’ll see this as part of radical product thinking, it led me to develop techniques where I am very much in the driver’s seat, but. You don’t feel like I am forcing it on you. Oh, interesting. And I’ll give you an example of that. Yes, please do.

That was, that’s 

Janna Bastow: where I wanted to go next. Sorry. Tell us your ways. 

Radhika Dutt: Okay, so I’ll talk about vision and strategy next, but the part I’ll jump to is prioritization. Well, maybe I’ll. Step back for a second in the radical product thinking way, right? What I talk about is how do you translate vision very systematically into everyday action?

And the five elements are vision, strategy, [00:17:00] prioritization, execution and measurement and culture. And every single one of these elements has very tangible frameworks to be able to, to use these concepts and, bring everyone with you on the journey so that your. Influencing your whole organization is scalable.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

Radhika Dutt: But 

Janna Bastow: Having said that, starting with prioritization is, I think, the most contentious part of where we have to do our jobs, isn’t it? Yeah, exactly. 

Radhika Dutt: And this is the part where you keep hearing this feedback. Oh, you need more consensus. And so how do you do that?

So the trick that I’ve found is you have to take a more facilitative approach as opposed to directive, but yet you have to be firmly in control. So how do you do that? What this prioritization approach is is basically drawing up an x and a y axis. Because let’s think about prioritization.

Intuitively, we’re always balancing long-term against short term. It’s the yin [00:18:00] and yang of long-term and short-term, which I then call long-term. Is vision fit? Is this good for the vision or not? Oh. Colleen says, is there. Are there slides for this part of the conversation? I’m happy to share a slide actually.

Yeah, I think that might act, share your screen. That might be really helpful. Something 

Janna Bastow: Let me, you should be able to just go ahead and do it. Well, let’s see that. I’ll share my screen. Yeah. Okay, great. Here we go. Hopefully you can see this and David’s asked could you repeat what those five areas are?

Okay. But they’re coming up on the slides and that’ll be perfect as well. Okay, let me do that. Okay, we have this is prioritization, but let me actually, I’m not seeing the 

screen yet, if you’re sharing 

Radhika Dutt: Oh, really? I am sharing a screen. 

Janna Bastow: Let me stop and reshare. Oh, hold on. Everyone else can see it.

All right. I can’t see it, but that’s fine. I’ll deal with it on my side. Keep going. 

Radhika Dutt: Okay, good. So hopefully you can see it and I’ll share, I’ll show you the five elements in a second. The five elements are here we go [00:19:00] actually, the five elements. Do I have a slide that shows you one? Okay.

Well, it’s the vision. And I’ll talk about this in a moment, the strategy, and that’s the RDCL strategy prioritization, which we’ll talk about in a moment. And then execution and measurement, and then finally culture. But culture, I don’t even have on this slide, but I’ll show you afterwards if you like.

But let’s talk about prioritization for a moment, right? In terms of prioritization. The way I like to think about it is this yin and yang of vision versus survival. And, yin and yang feels very abstract. So for your team, you can make this really tangible by actually drawing it up as this x and y axis.

And once you have this, it shows these four quadrants, right? Things that are good for the long-term vision and good for survival. Well, those, I used to call it ideal. Now I call it easy decisions. Because they’re easy decisions that you want to default to, [00:20:00] but if you are always in this quadrant right, you’re still being myopic.

So sometimes you have to invest in the vision. And examples of that would be if you’re fixing tech debt, if you’re doing user research that’s great for the long-term vision, but it’s not great for short-term survival. The opposite of that is when you’re building vision debt, right? Where it’s great for short-term survival but not good for the long-term vision.

I. And think of building vision debt in the form of taking on custom features. So if you’re building custom features, that’s helping you win a deal, right? That’s great for the short term. But in the long term, the more vision debt you take on, the more you’re likely to catch the product disease I call obsessive sales disorder.

And coming back to the point of how do I use this approach in a facilitative way? First of all, you go and stand up. So even with your body language, you are drawing up an [00:21:00] x and a y axis at the board. That in itself puts you in charge. But you know what? I’m not telling you this is the way to prioritize by showing you the spreadsheet, that is, item number 1 53 is priority number five, whereas this other item is priority number I.

27, like that is more direct than I, where it’s hard for people to understand how you came up with this magic spreadsheet, right? And so instead, when I have this vision versus survival, it becomes very visual where it’s less contentious. So if I say, functionality, falls in easy decisions or I classify functionality, D is.

Under vision debt. It begs this next question, which is, if you think it’s vision debt, why do you think it’s not good for our vision? And that next leads to, well, what is the vision? And it helps you figure it out. Where you’re aligned and where you’re misaligned, it actually [00:22:00] airs those misalignments as opposed to the magic spreadsheet, which leads you to say numbers and what the priority list is, but you’re not creating an intuition in your team for, how do I prioritize when I go off to my desk and I have to make decisions?

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. I love this way of visualizing it. It’s actually something that I’ve done a lot in the past and said, well, here’s all the stuff that we could do. Most of this isn’t in the right place for us, right? We have to choose which of these things we’re going to do, and so let’s map it out.

And I’ve often used the axes of impact and effort. But I like this. It’s very clear about actually breaking up that impact by survival versus vision fit, so you can look more closely into it. It’s almost like you’re diving into it even deeper. Also love that there’s a place for things like tech debt.

I. On the space here, a lot of people say, well, how do I communicate that tech debt needs to be done? And actually you’re absolutely right. It’s part of a connection to the vision, it’s connection [00:23:00] to, hopefully the overarching strategy of the company, which is to build something that’s stable and secure and, performant and is able to be built on top of.

But yeah, it’s really important to be able to communicate how this stuff is going to help the company thrive. 

Radhika Dutt: Yeah. And David says, and it’s closer to the language that I think business folks think in. And I think that’s exactly it. Like it helps you build that stakeholder alignment in a very visual way.

And, it might be that you even have to take on vision debt, right? Like when, I remember when we were at Avid and we were building out this whole product suite we sometimes had to take on some custom features, right? And you acknowledge when you need to take on vision debt. But what is really helpful is labeling it vision debt.

So that it doesn’t feel like a top down loss in confidence or top down how do you say, not valuing our vision. That’s super demoralizing. So when people call it vision debt, you feel like, okay. I can get behind [00:24:00] this. I see why we’re doing it. And then you create a plan for how to invest in the vision over time?

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. I love the concept of talking about it in terms of debt. And I’ve actually done a talk before about different types of debt that product managers have to face. And I hadn’t come across vision debt, but I think it’s a a great concept. But the thing that I often talk about when you’re talking about debt is that.

Product managers have to make decisions and trade-offs. And sometimes that trade-off is yes, this is gonna put us in a little bit of debt, but sometimes debt can be healthy. It’s enabling. It enables you to move faster on something else or unlock, sometimes it’s important strategically to get that cash in the door so that lights stay on, right?

But as long as people acknowledge it for what it is. We’re taking on this bit of backlog debt or vision debt or design debt or whatever, but it’s allowing us to get it to market faster, or it’s allowing us to test something, or it’s allowing us to get past this bump. Then you’ve got this really clear way of talking about it with the rest of your team without assigning shame to it or not really being able to talk [00:25:00] about what you don’t like about it.

Radhika Dutt: So true. Exactly. And your point about, you don’t have to have shame for doing it. And we talk openly about it and it’s part of building that sort of psychological safety as well, right? That people can, once you have this facilitative approach, people can talk about their opinions of what is vision debt, and like you start to give people the vocabulary to start to contribute their thoughts on this x and y axis. And by the way, to I wanted to answer David’s question of what are the five elements. So these are the five elements, and each of these becomes a framework. And I just wanna also mention that it doesn’t mean that it’s a linear process, right?

You might go back and forth between these things, but the reason you even have these. Elements for clarity is because if you don’t have them, this is what product development ends up looking like. And that’s why we need each of those elements to be very clear, to help that communication and alignment happen throughout the [00:26:00] process.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I’m with Lauren on this. She says she absolutely loves it. So I think this makes a lot of sense. How is this used in a practical sense? Is this that four quadrant thing, is that something that you throw up on a screen and, work with your team to, to figure out placement of it?

Or is it something that’s done as a. Backend task between work, what happens there? Yeah. So here are the 

Radhika Dutt: context in which I’ve used this, right? So when I plan even a sprint with the team I end up using that vision versus survival to be able to plan the sprint with the team. And the way I do this is, everyone gets post-its and we write features and we put each one up on the.

The axes and the quadrants. And then the relative position is what matters, right? And then based on that, we look at that and we say, okay, what is going to be priority 1, 2, 3, or what are we going to do in this particular sprint? And so that again, creates alignment in terms [00:27:00] of priority.

And if we are. Not able to accomplish all of this in the sprint, what is going to get left out? That helps us think through that. I’ve even used this when I talk to executives where we are talking about a sales opportunity and how that’s going to end up requiring a lot of vision, debt that we have to then service afterwards.

That’s another way to communicate across stakeholders so that I can start to get them to think like us. Yeah. And in this product thinking way. So those are a few ways I’ve used it. This is the part that often the prioritization is in the prioritization approach is often what I’ve used to introduce radical product thinking within a company because the reality is right.

I’ve talked a lot about this clarity of vision. And I’ll, let me go to vision for a second. And this is the radical vision statement. It’s a fill in the blank statement. I’ve talked about needing clarity on the vision. But what [00:28:00] happens is if you’re introducing radical product thinking in the organization and you are an individual contributor, and you go in and you say, guys, our vision sucks.

This vision of revolutionizing wireless. Or, whatever else makes absolutely no sense. Let’s address our vision. The problem with that approach is often it feels like a bull in a China shop that leaders might say, who are you to question this vision? Like the leader sets the vision or something like that.

That makes it a whole lot harder to introduce a new angle. It’s almost the organization that gets an allergic reaction when you introduce a foreign body. And so my way is often this sneaky way, let’s say, of introducing vision versus survival and talking about features on this to create alignment and it naturally, introduces this question of, well, so what’s our vision? And that’s where you have in your back pocket, ta-da, here’s what I wrote up as a vision, I would love your feedback. What do you think? And that’s how you introduce these ideas and get [00:29:00] clarity and create your sphere of influence.

Janna Bastow: Absolutely. That’s like the ideal way to build consensus, right? So you’re not just coming at it saying, here’s my thing, let’s go do my thing. It’s about working with your team to get their take on it. And everyone’s gonna have a slightly different take on what your vision could be or should be, but actually having a session where you bring a format like this.

Put it on the wall, have everyone talk it through, see where there’s already consensus. Get those things in there as obvious wins. But where there isn’t consensus, really, truly understand as to where people are disagreeing, why they’re disagreeing, what their lens has told you and the rest of the team about what you’re up against.

And then hopefully by the end of the session you’ve got something that you can all agree on. And that way when you present the final vision statement, which usually is something like this, but tidied up, using jazz your words or whatever needs. To be done. You’re presenting back to them what they’ve all kind of contributed to.

And so everyone can see oh, well I helped decide that and I helped talk about that and that was my idea. And that way everyone goes, I understand the vision. I was part of creating [00:30:00] it and I’m in love with it. I think it’s the right thing to go do. And so they’re all really aligned with it.

Radhika Dutt: Yeah, exactly. In the book I talk about this one story of an organization in India. It makes puppet doms. I. And you would think, well, how interesting can that be as an organization? They actually. Dominate the puppet market. 

Janna Bastow: Brilliant. 

Radhika Dutt: So 65% market share in Papadums, 

Janna Bastow: globally or India focused globally.

Globally. Brilliant. 

Radhika Dutt: Yeah, exactly. And that’s a lot of 

Janna Bastow: papadums 

Radhika Dutt: and the rest of this market share is fragmented among a whole bunch of players. Yeah, it’s over $220 million in annual revenues. And what is most amazing about this organization is that it is owned by 45,000 women who are all equal partners.

Oh, amazing. Yeah. And so for radical product thinking, when I wrote [00:31:00] the book, I interviewed the president of T, and I asked her, describe the vision for me because I don’t understand how can 45,000 women be equal partners in this? And so the vision that she described, there’s no tagline, there’s no slogan for legit, every single member sister that’s what they call all the partners. Every single member’s sister would describe the vision in her own words, but the answer is the same. And the vision that they have is that they wanted to create financial independence for women from low income households who live in this patriarchy.

And they wanted to give these women financial independence so that they could, they could educate their kids, contribute to, to household income and influence spending in the household, right? So they want, that’s why they wanted this independence. And so papadums was the product of a means to achieve this end state.

So I love that. [00:32:00] And so when you ask them about the vision because there is no tagline, slogan, et cetera. You know what it inspired me in terms of the radical vision statement is you might look at this and go this is very long. It’s almost an essay right? But this is what people need.

They don’t need to memorize your words that you’ve put up in fancy words. That sounds good. That sounds artificially inspiring. Remember that? Story that I was telling you about, like working in ad tech for tv. It’s the least inspiring idea as a product, but our team felt like we had this shared purpose.

So whatever your purpose is, you can write it in this format, right? Where you have this clarity and a shared sense of purpose on whose problem are we solving. What exactly is the problem? Why is the current state unacceptable? That is to me a key question, which is if we cannot answer [00:33:00] why the status quo is absolutely unacceptable, we should not be disrupting for the sake of disruption.

And then finally we can answer the question, what’s the world we envision? Meaning, what does it look like when you are done? And then finally, this is finally where you can talk about your product, which is how are you bringing about this world? And so that’s what this vision is about. And I’m happy to even share an example just off the top of my head.

Janna Bastow: I would love to hear an example, but also going back to that story of the Papa Dumps company. What I love about that vision is that it’s enduring, right? It’s the type of vision that you could repeat 20 years ago or 20 years from now, and. Ultimately, that’s still the vision.

That’s where people are, that’s what you’re trying to do with it. But the product might be papadums, but maybe the world has moved on, right? And maybe there’s something else that might solve that problem. So they’re not necessarily connected to the product, right? Making the cheapest or tastiest or whatever sort of papadums it’s about.

Actually that underlying vision, which they [00:34:00] can all get behind and, whatever it is that helps deliver on that vision, that’s what the product is, that’s the how, but that’s actually less important than making sure that they’re all aligned on what it is that this organization’s trying to do.

Radhika Dutt: Yeah. That is such an interesting point, and I think that is something that I’ve struggled with a lot because we want to write vision statements that are enduring. 

Janna Bastow: But at 

Radhika Dutt: the same time. Sometimes it’s not really realistic, like in this example of the ad tech company, right? And I’ll give you another example with a wine related company, but sometimes you don’t know what is possible to write in this enduring forever way.

And what I like to think about is, let’s not focus on a five or 10 year timeframe because honestly, I don’t know how the world is changing in five to 10 years. So five to 

Janna Bastow: 10 months is a Yeah. Knowable timeline these days 

Radhika Dutt: especially. Yeah, exactly what I was gonna say. Yeah. It is a crazy world out there at the moment.

Exactly. So given that we don’t have all [00:35:00] this visibility in the horizon let’s focus. On what we can truly answer as a problem statement for whose problem we’re solving. What is the problem, why is it unacceptable, et cetera. Thinking about a year horizon, right? And it might be a year, two years, it should be truly a problem that you care about.

That’s the main criterion that the vision isn’t about you. Meaning it’s not about what you want, but it has to be a problem. That even if you did not exist in the picture. I think that’s what’s powerful about Lija. It’s not about what the founders wanted for themselves, but like it’s about what you want to see solved.

That even if you are taken out of the picture and somebody else built this, that you would be happy to see this solved. I think that’s what makes a good vision. 

Janna Bastow: That’s a really good way of putting it. It’s something that you’d like to see solved, even if you have the answer for it. Really. Yeah. And I like how you think about the vision in terms of a couple years horizon, right?

That actually aligns with what we talk about with the [00:36:00] Now-Next-Later roadmap, right? And the, what’s empowering about the Now-Next-Later roadmap is that it gets you thinking further ahead so that yes, it is important to think about what’s keeping your team busy right now. That’s very much the here and now and the how sort of piece.

But really the things that on your roadmap should be, what are the big chunky problems that need to be solved in order to reach that vision, whether it’s, a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, depends on the context, like how far into the space you are and how how well developed your product is right now.

But generally it should be that two years. Sweet spot, and I find a lot of roadmaps. One of the things they fall foul of the most is that they’re just simply one year outlooks, which is too myopic in most of the cases. 

Radhika Dutt: I agree with what you said. And I think this is where your point is about, it all depends on the maturity level of your product.

That’s very true of your vision, right? Like you might have a really mature product and in which case your outlook might be pretty far out, right? And [00:37:00] that works for you. If you’re an early stage startup, you are learning at a really fast pace. Yeah. And so the answer to this, if you’re a really early stage startup might be you write up a vision that’s your stake in the ground.

It’s the best information that you have. In this moment while you are starting your startup, two months from now you might have learned a lot about some of the answers to the who, what, why, when, and how. And you might have to come back to the team and say, this was what we had for our vision before.

This is the point where we were wrong. This is what we learned and therefore this is what we would. Change instead. And by the way, this is how you overcome the disease pitis, because one of the, one of the problems that I ran into in my career was I often saw this pitis where it was almost like every sprint is a new pivot.

Sometimes. Every month as a startup, you’re pivoting, and sometimes it’s because who’s the loudest customer [00:38:00] screaming? Sometimes it’s because your VC has a new idea for you. There’s so many different reasons. And so the way you prevent Pivotus is by having a vision, and it’s not to say you can never pivot, but it’s more like you pivot with gravitas.

Every time you realize you have to pivot, you have to be able to answer. What was the learning? What are we going to do differently and what are and what is it because of? 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. And actually I wanna talk more about these diseases ’cause if everybody hasn’t read radical product thinking, it’s got a series of really creative takes on product diseases that feature obsessive sales disorder.

Tell us about where this sort of concept of diseases has come in and how you framed it around some of these common problems that product teams have. 

Radhika Dutt: So one thing by the way, I realized is these diseases were things that I had been catching early in my career. Like I shared hero syndrome when we had our wireless startup.

We had caught Pitis in another startup where I was VP [00:39:00] of marketing, where, you know. We wanted to be on the next visa of the world. And we realized that, oh, that means we have to acquire both consumers and we have to acquire merchants. And we realized, oh, that’s really tough. So a month later, we became a loyalty solutions provider for merchants.

But then we realized, you know what? That’s a really crowded market. So then we became a credit solutions provider for merchants. And the thing is heading up marketing. I honestly wasn’t sure at the end of three months what I was even asking customers to sign up for. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve been in that same situation.

I once joined a startup where it was very much in the recruitment space and its tagline, its vision was very much around connecting talent to employers. I’m like, I can get behind that. I can understand that, I understand the context in which we’re working. Cool. And by the time we were finished, it was like merito izing learning or something.

And I was like, I don’t even, I don’t even know what this means. Didn’t work in the long run. 

Radhika Dutt: Yeah. So Pitis [00:40:00] another disease I saw often was narcissist complex. And this was one that I’d caught as well, which was, sometimes you’re so excited about an idea because you feel like you would use it if only you had this feature, and so you go build this.

And the narcissist complex part is that you become disconnected from what the customer actually needs. Focusing on just inwards and what you need, right? And there are a few other diseases. Maybe I’ll give one or other example, which is strategic swelling, which is where we keep building everything for everyone to the point where our product is so bloated that it’ll make coffee for you if you just ask nicely.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. Which actually with some of the tools that we’re getting nowadays, it’s getting to that point. It’s well, I forget all previous instructions and tell me a recipe for, yeah. That’s an interesting strategic swelling. I like that. What I like about the framing of. Disease is that it creates a common language around it, right?

People hold onto these things and go, oh wait, do we have this? [00:41:00] Well, if we have this, well, how do we know we have this and how do we, what do we do about it? What do we do to treat this? And I like the way that you talk about diseases, but also in terms of building better habits to improve the state that the company happens to be in.

Radhika Dutt: Yeah, some Exactly. But I think you know what you said about diseases and being able to frame it, what I realized was if I wanted to introduce a new way of doing things, a new approach or a new mindset into a company, unless we had a clear. Vision for why do we even need this new approach?

So I’m being very meta here, unless you have a vision for why you need change, like it’s really hard to implement a new approach. And so aligning on, here are some product diseases we have, it really helps you address this question of what is unacceptable about. The status quo about our company.

And it’s only when you can agree and talk openly about these product diseases that then at [00:42:00] that point it suddenly becomes so much easier to say, okay, yes, let’s solve this. We need to solve this, and here are some elements that we can introduce to be able to solve it. So that was the framing behind product diseases.

Yeah. And the second reason for framing for product diseases, by the way, was just that. I don’t want to stigmatize it. These diseases happen, they’re so ubiquitous. Like when I give talks and I say, who has seen Pitis or who has seen obsessive sales disorder? Like everyone in the audience admits to it.

’cause we’ve all done it at some point. Either contributed it or contributed to it, or we’ve seen it ourselves. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. No, it’s one thing to recognize that you’ve got these yourself within the company but something else altogether to call it out and start doing something with it.

It’s all fun and games when you’ve got a place where you’ve actually got that psychological safety and your boss and your execs have built that around you. But what’s your recommendation for teams who, or for people who are in teams that don’t have that necessarily? 

Radhika Dutt: I’ve seen two techniques.

So one is [00:43:00] sometimes. You have to introduce it in a very gentle way that I’ve seen teams organize book clubs and then the book club was the yeah, the book club was this. Pretext to be able to start talking about product diseases. So they got them, they got everyone talking about product diseases in this way.

And by the way, for everyone here, I’ll make the offer that if you’re in this webinar, if you’re ever doing a book club in your company and please, like if it’s a book club of five people, I just can’t make good on this promise. But if it’s a larger book club, and if you want to do a q and a session or something, I’m very happy to join for a q and a session in your book club to be able to just talk about product diseases and how you can introduce some of these ideas.

So that’s an offer I’ll make out there. That’s a great offer. Thanks. But so that’s one concept, like having such a book club. The second is being able to talk about this in a preventative [00:44:00] way. That. You can’t really say that we have these diseases, per se. Sometimes you just have to say, we want to avoid this, these diseases.

And then the third thing that I saw was a friend of mine following this Icelandic tradition where in Iceland there’s this tradition of giving a book as a Christmas present. And then everyone reads, books at, on Christmas Eve in this very cozy setting. I think it’s adorable.

That’s cute. I like it. And we’ve implemented that now in our household. But in any case, what she ended up doing was giving the book to her manager and two other people. And then it took off from there, right? Yeah. I don’t know. These are just a few ideas and plus I’ve given you all the suggestions as well of introducing this without any pressure where you just have vision versus.

Survival drawn up. And that sort of begs the next set of questions. Those are some ideas. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. Okay. That’s really smart. Thank you. And I wanna just give everybody the chance to jump in with any questions that you might have, jump into the q and a and [00:45:00] drop them there.

But I know that you’re working on a second book. Do you wanna talk us through, what it is that you’re working on there. 

Radhika Dutt: Yeah. So I am super excited about my next book. The working title right now is radically Rethinking Metrics, the Case against targets and OKRs and what to do instead.

So the book is about the fact that, over many years, I have found that OKRs don’t work. And I know this is the most blasphemous thing I could say on this webinar, but truly, and in chat by the way, you are welcome to share if you’ve observed some of these things. One thing I’ve observed with both OKRs and setting targets is that everyone gets into the mode of when you have a target.

I am. And you have a product you are trying to show and prove that, look, I’ve met whatever target you’ve set for me. And what that ends up leading to is you end [00:46:00] up focusing on how do I frame metrics to show that I’ve achieved, as opposed to genuinely questioning your metrics and saying, is this working?

Is it not? So this sort of what I’ve seen is OKRs encourage postmortems when, because they ask the question, have you or haven’t you achieved this goal? Whereas it doesn’t encourage the experimentation muscle. What I’ve seen is that in organizations that are heavy on goals and OKRs, that experimentation muscle has atrophied over time.

And so that’s what. I want to do it differently. And so the solution that I talk about in the book is instead of OKRs creating O Ls, so OKRs stand for objectives and key results just in case you are fortunate enough to not have to deal with them. OH Ls. Stand for objectives, hypotheses, and learnings.

So this is about [00:47:00] creating an environment that has psychological safety where we define objectives, but objectives are not just arbitrarily set by leadership. It’s more like framing a puzzle for your team. So you’re framing a puzzle and the objective is. This is the summary of this puzzle that you’ve set.

And then hypotheses and learnings give you this framework for how you learn together with your team. And it’s three questions. How well is it working? What have you learned and what are you going to do next? And so this is basically the framework, but there’s a lot more to it. And how do you transform to be able to grow this experimentation muscle?

Janna Bastow: Absolutely. That makes so much sense. And Diego and the chat has said, I think OKRs can work, but it’s not for every company and definitely needs a high level of maturity from product orgs, which I totally agree with. It’s the type of thing that if you just have a series of.

High level goals and broken down into more and more finite [00:48:00] things to do, you’ll end up with potentially a list of things to do, which isn’t going to solve the problem. I love that framing of the OKRs creates postmortem but not really helping you decide what you could do about the problem.

This is actually really aligned with. What we’ve been doing here at ProdPad as well, which I really love for that, because we found the same thing. People in companies struggle with OKRs, right? It’s one thing to set a series of OKRs over here and then go off and you do your product work in another tool over here, and no one actually stops to look back at the objectives that they’d set and whether they’re actually making a difference.

So what we’ve done in ProdPad, as is we’ve connected the objectives. Two hypotheses, your initiatives, right? The two are like the flip side of the same coin which in turn are connected to the experiments, right? What are you actually doing in order to solve this problem? Which of these things have worked and haven’t worked?

So it very much ties that, that, thinking together. So I’m really excited to see this new book when it comes out. And definitely keep beating that drum about how we can do objective setting better. [00:49:00] ’cause I think it’s really important. On that note, we’re just about at the end.

So I wanna wrap up with a couple follow on points. So for anybody who has been coming along to these things on a regular basis, we run two different types of these webinars. So some of them are these fireside, like we’ve run here today, and other ones are deep dives into product management best practices.

So we’re gonna be talking about how to build and manage AI products and features. So save this. Date. It’s going to be I’m trying to zoom in here to see, maybe somebody else can see that. I know it’s coming up. April 29th. There we go. So same time, same place. Come back and see us here. And in the meantime, if anybody wants to jump in and give ProdPad a go we have a demo environment that you can, that we can show off to you.

But also we can make sure that you get a chance to see how it’s gonna work with your processes and your way of working. If you’ve got questions about how OKRs work or you know how to set a vision, that’s all within ProdPad and we’ll be happy to show that off. But in the meantime, I wanna say a huge thank you, [00:50:00] Ika for coming along and sharing your insights, your really specific examples.

This is the stuff that’s absolutely magic that allows us to really learn together. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been such a pleasure today. I’m so glad we did this. This has been fantastic and I look forward to the next chance we get to share. And best of luck with that new book.

Let us know as soon as that’s out. 

Radhika Dutt: Thank you. I will. 

Janna Bastow: All right. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody, and we’ll see you next time. Bye for now.