Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter

by R. Dutt

Overview

Iteration rules product development, but it isn’t enough to produce dramatic results. This book champions Radical Product Thinking, a systematic methodology for building visionary, game-changing products.

In the last decade, we’ve learned to harness the power of iteration to innovate faster—we’ve invested in a fast car, but our ability to set a clear destination and navigate to it hasn't kept up.

When we iterate without a clear vision or strategy, our products become bloated, fragmented, and driven by irrelevant metrics. They catch “product diseases” that often kill innovation.

Radical Product Thinking (RPT) gives organizations a repeatable model for building world-changing products. The key? Being vision-driven instead of iteration-led. R. Dutt guides readers through the five elements of the methodology (vision, strategy, prioritization, execution and measurement, and culture) to develop a clear process for translating vision into reality, and turning RPT skills into muscle memory.

This book offers refreshing solutions to the shortcomings of our current model for product development; be prepared to toss out everything you know about a good vision and learn how to measure progress to create revolutionary products. The best part? You don’t have to be a natural-born visionary to produce extraordinary results.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781523093311
Publisher:	Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Publication date:	09/28/2021
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	1,111,028
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

R. Dutt is an entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in four acquisitions, two of which were companies that she founded. She has built products in industries including broadcasting, media, advertising technology, government, consumer, robotics, and wine. Dutt advises organizations from high-tech startups to government agencies on building radical products that create a fundamental change instead of optimizing the status quo. She also teaches entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business. Dutt cofounded Radical Product Thinking as a movement of leaders creating vision-driven change and is a frequent speaker at business events and conferences around the world. She graduated from MIT with a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and speaks nine languages, currently learning her tenth.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Repeatable Model for Building World-Changing Products 1

Part I Innovating Smarter Requires a New Mindset

1 Why We Need Radical Product Thinking 15

2 Product Diseases: When Good Products Go Bad 30

Part II The Five Elements of Radical Product Thinking

3 Vision: Envisioning Change 45

4 Strategy: Connecting the Why with the How 62

5 Prioritization: Bringing Balance to the Force 78

6 Execution and Measurement: Taking Action (Finally!) 95

7 Culture: Radical Product Thinking Your Organization 112

Part III Making Our World a Little More Like the One We Want to Live In

8 Digital Pollution: The Collateral Damage to Society 135

9 Ethics: The Hippocratic Oath of Product 149

Conclusion: Radical Product Thinkers Creating Change 169

Acknowledgments 181

Notes 184

Index 196

About the Author 203

Editorial Reviews

Dutt’s powerful methodology offers a step-by-step approach for building successful products that doubles as a guide to infusing meaning in everyday work and packing purpose into every organization. This book belongs on the shelf of every leader and innovator.”
—Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive, When, and To Sell Is Human

“In Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter, Radhika Dutt offers a compelling and important antidote to the short-term thinking so prevalent in product design, and especially in redesign. She highlights how tinkering with established products and ignoring opportunities in large-scale product reinvention in favor of immediate financial performance is often a recipe for longer-term product misalignment and irrelevance. The book’s concepts are explained well, and the examples are helpful and illuminating. A book whose message is both timely and timeless.”
—David Schmittlein, John C. Head III Dean and Professor of Marketing, MIT Sloan School of Management
 
“Radhika has written an insightful book on how you can change the world around you through your products. She offers refreshing perspectives on how a purpose-driven approach can make products that are truly transformative. Anyone making a product—from business leaders to entrepreneurs to policymakers—will find this book a useful guide.”
—Ravi Menon, Managing Director, Monetary Authority of Singapore
 
“Radhika Dutt offers a great methodical process for radical product innovation so you can avoid the trap of making incremental optimizations that lead to local, myopic maxima. If you are using Agile-like methodologies to harness the power of iterations and incremental development, you need Radical Product Thinking to stay mission driven.”
—Giorgos Zacharia, President, KAYAK

“Radhika Dutt hits the nail on the head with Radical Product Thinking because what drives our brightest young talent to join one company over another is often not money but a powerful vision that guides every project in the organization. This is a book for our times that will help managers not only to compete for talent but also to leapfrog competitors by creating novel products that capture customer attention and inspire.”
—Fernando F. Suarez, PhD, Jean C. Tempel Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Chair, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group,Northeastern University

"In Radical Product Thinking R. Dutt has provided a thoughtful new perspective on innovation and entrepreneurship that should help leaders take a vision-driven approach that can more effectively and consistently impact the world in the ways that they intend."
—ClearPurpose

From the Publisher