#183 - Radhika Dutt - 'Radical Product Thinking', the art of creating world-changing products

This podcast interview focuses on the art of transforming our visions into reality - and with that create products that create meaningful change. My guest is Radhika Dutt, Author of 'Radical Product Thinking'.

Radhika is an entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in four acquisitions, two of which were companies that she founded. She is an Advisor on Product Thinking to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Singapore’s financial regulator and central bank. She teaches entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern’s D’Amore McKim School of Business and is an advisor to several startups. She graduated from MIT with a Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering, and speaks nine languages, currently learning her tenth.

Radhika co-founded Radical Product Thinking as a movement of leaders creating vision-driven change. She was on my podcast in December 2019 as a consequence of that. Recently, she released her book 'Radical Product Thinking' - and that was the perfect reason to interview her again. We explore what's broken in the way we build software products - and the challenges that lead to excessive cost, compromised growth potential, demotivated teams, and so on. We discuss in detail how you can recognize looming problems, and what you can do differently to fix them once and forever.

Here are some of her quotes:

It's not that companies don't have a vision, you can have varying degrees of good visions. But it's incredible how expensive it is when your vision isn't quite right, or you haven't uncovered these misalignments.

And the cost of not having this alignment is what really keeps coming up in organizations. You see it at every step where somehow your vision becomes disconnected and you start running into what I call 'product diseases', which is where innovation kind of dies on the vine.

And that's really the cost of them. Not starting with a deep enough detailed enough vision.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. The methodology to create a remarkable vision and translate it into everyday action.
2. What signals to look for to understand whether you have a sizeable innovation problem
3. The simple framework to avoid vision debt in your organization and how to empower everyone to successfully apply it
4. How to engineer a culture of innovation by approaching it as if it was a product

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Radhika Dutt
• Website Radical Product Thinking