“Product Diseases” Mentioned in Radical Product Thinking

I recently read an incredible book titled, “Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter” by R. Dutt.

The main message of the book is like the following:

• Product development based on KPI, Agile and so forth is useful, but we will fall into some bad situation such as product bloated, fragmented and directionless if we use only these tools.
• It’s important to introduce what Dutt calls “Radical Product Thinking” to avoid the above mentioned situation.
• Radical Product Thinking is a method wherein a company’s vision for a product is realized by implementing strategies that are designed to bring it about.
• We can realize it through 5 elements of Radical Product Thinking: Vision, Strategy, Prioritization, Execution and Measurement and Culture.

In this article, I would like to introduce product diseases that described in the book. The background is that I would like you to explain why a clear vision is important for your company by these problems.

For more details, please buy the book and read it!

Product Disease

The author introduced various product diseases that can potentially prevent the product from becoming a success.

The product disease is a situation and symptom that a product gets into product bloated, fragmented and directionless by no clear vision.

The following are examples of product diseases.

Disease 1: Hero Syndrome

• Overview: Focuses only on things that have big impacts, while ignoring what we wanted to realize originally.
• Example: Executives of Beepi focused on strength of impacts and prioritized getting capital gain and top line revenue. Resolving customer issues is not naturally prioritized. This caused some customer problems such as pulled over due to omission of temporary number update. Finally the company was sold for its parts.
• Prevention: To avoid focusing on only its impacts, but also be kind to yourself and make the change that you envision.

Disease 2: Strategic Swelling

• Overview: Loses what we should do truly as we said yes to ides or requests after another.
• Example: The late ‘90s Yahoo’s home page had too much contents. The company implemented anything that customers might want while Google focused on one feature: Search.
• Prevention: To recover from the strategic swelling, we need to decide a priority by having a clear purpose.

Disease 3: Obsessive Sales Disorder

• Overview: Disregard a long term benefit by meeting a short-term demand, such as fateful words “The customer said to buy if we add one small feature to our product.”
• Example: The populist agenda of curbing immigrants is an example. The working-age population in the United States is projected to decline in 2035 without immigration, but politicians suffering from Obsessive Sales Disorder makes promises to restrict immigration for votes today.
• Prevention: Sometimes trading off for surviving the short term is not unreasonable, but we need to take care the long-term benefit too.

Disease 4: Hypermetricemia

• Overview: Measures everything and focuses on only what it can be measured, then leads people not to think whether these are essential for making important impacts.
• Example: The author wanted to know how failures decreased by the responding in the previous company, but she couldn’t check how much improved because recording the data was too much data with all video image and operators deleted it.
• Prevention: Needs to decide which metric we should measure by clarifying a vision andstrategy.

Disease 5: Rocked-In Syndrome

• Overview: Continues to use a specific technology or approach just because we are familiar or it did not have a problem. It is commonly known as the Innovator’s Dilemma.
• Example: IBM in the 70’s thought to deliver personal computers, and contracted with the startup to ask development of the operating system. This startup is know as Microsoft. IBM was locked in to the hardware and failed to become a leader in the software. Finally IBM’s PC division was sold off to Lenovo and Microsoft’s profit ballooned over the following decades.
• Prevention: Focuses on the issue that we should solve not focuses on specific technology or approach that might not relate to the issue.

Disease 6: Pivotitis

• Overview: Causes exhausted, confused and demoralize teams by wild swing in product offering and customer segments.
• Example: The author lost how to appeal its benefit to the customer in the previous company as a leader of the marketing division because of continuous pivots.
• Prevention: Works toward a clear vision and avoid to keep pivoting.

Disease 7: Narcissus Complex

• Overview: Looks inward and think only about what we need to such an extent that we forget about the change we envision.
• Example: At the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, some hospital administrators strongly discouraged doctors and nurses to wear masks in a hospital elevators and hallways because they featured wearing masks scares patients who think that the hospital had a COVID problem.
• Prevention: Avoids to measure ourselves only by our benefit to us instead of the impact on the customer.

These different diseases can also be manifested together in a single product and do not necessarily exist independent of each other.

Let’s be careful about these diseases and be sure to have a clear vision about the products we want to design!

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.