#94 - Radhika Dutt - On a new approach to build world-changing products

This podcast interview focuses on driving product innovation by applying the concepts of Radical Product Thinking, and my guest is Radhika Dutt, Co-founder of the Radical Product Thinking movement

Radhika is a product development executive and entrepreneur. She participated in 4 exits, 2 of which were companies she founded. She’s a global citizen having lived or worked on 4 continents - speaks 9 languages and has an engineering background from MIT.

She is the author of the Radical Product blog, which is also the name of her movement of leaders creating vision-driven change.

Radical Product Thinking is a systematic approach for cultivating change-makers in our organizations and building world-changing products.

And this triggered me, hence I invited Radhika to my podcast. We explore some of the common mistakes made in product management and software development, and discuss how Radical Product Thinking can be the recipe for any software company to become remarkable at what they do, and thereby deliver an impact never held possible before.

Here are some of her quotes:

When I was building my own startups, I made many mistakes. And I learned from these mistakes. I also worked at companies where they were making similar mistakes. Rarely, there were companies that weren't making these mistakes.

We have come to believe that the way you build products is just to iteration: try something, try something else. And that's really how you build products. And what was driving me was, it doesn't have to be that way. Because what happens is you keep pivoting, and you lose momentum along the way. So, it doesn't have to be that way. Or can we build products that are successful more systematically. And that's how radical product came into being.

Radical product thinking means that you can think of anything as your product, that your product is really a mechanism to create change. And so, whatever change you're trying to bring about in the world, you can build a product that is engineering that change.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. That iteration is a very good concept in software development, as long as you know what your north star is.
2. Why product market fit is not the holy grale. The big question is if that product market fit is creating the change you intended to create. If not – question your vision
3. How focusing your solution on someone rather than everyone is going to give you the focus to deliver real impact