Radical Product Thinking Book Launch Event
The Radical Product Thinking book is now on bookshelves! The book gives organizations a methodology for systematically building world-changing products. Join me on October 14th for Productized’s Radical Product Thinking book launch event. We’ll be celebrating with a Q&A and a behind-the-scenes look into the making of the book.
I remember a winter afternoon many years ago, as I sat in my car and called an ex-colleague, Geordie Kaytes to vent for a few minutes. I had been building products for over 17 years and this was another occasion where I was seeing the same pattern of good products going bad.
I had joined a company with incredible market potential. But I was seeing this potential squandered by the product disease Strategic Swelling — our product was overgrown and bloated with features to try to serve many different markets, without addressing any one at a breakthrough level.
Methodologies such as Lean and Agile have taught us to harness the power of iteration so that we can execute faster — they give us the equivalent of a fast car. Over the last decade, we’ve continuously invested in building a furiously fast car, but our ability to set a clear destination and navigate to it hasn’t kept up.
This is not to dismiss the importance of having a fast car, but a fast car alone doesn’t guarantee that you’ll arrive at your destination. When our iterations are not driven by a clear vision and strategy, our products become bloated, fragmented, and driven by irrelevant metrics — they catch product diseases.
To build a world-changing product, you have to know where you want to go and the change you want to bring. Building world-changing products requires being vision-driven instead of being iteration-led.
To understand the difference between vision-driven and iteration-led products, let’s compare two products that used these two approaches: the Tesla Model 3 and the Chevy Bolt.
The difference between these two cars originates in the vision behind them. Tesla’s Model 3 was driven by a vision for change — building an affordable car that didn’t require a compromise from the driver to go “green”. In contrast, when GM designed the Chevy Bolt, it was driven by the vision of achieving a business goal: beating the Tesla Model 3 to market with an EV that would have a range of more than 200 miles between charges.
Tesla’s Model 3 was built as a radical product, i.e. it was Tesla’s mechanism to create the change they wanted to bring to the world (for Tesla, accelerating the transition to electric cars by making them more affordable). This clear purpose was translated into every aspect of the car.
Renowned automotive expert, Sandy Munro, explained in an Autoline After Hours interview, that he had conducted a thorough teardown exercise to compare the two cars. For starters, when you look under the hood, the Tesla Model 3 looks very different from a gas car. Munro gives an example of Tesla’s vision-driven innovation: a smaller, cheaper, and more powerful engine.
Munro says he had heard about the Hall effect in electric motors that can make the motor 40% faster, but had never seen this used in EV engines. In his teardown comparisons to date, Tesla was the only carmaker using the Hall effect for its engine. It required Tesla to invent manufacturing processes that Munro had never before — he shared admiringly in the interview that he couldn’t figure out how Tesla was producing some of these components.
On the other hand, the Chevy Bolt looks much like a traditional gas car under the hood. When you look at the cooling system specifically, it has three systems for cooling — one each for the cabin, the engine, and the battery. Tesla, on the other hand, devised a single system they called the Super Bottle, to both heat and cool the entire car so that it was the most efficient it could possibly be.
Renowned automotive expert, Sandy Munro, explained in an Autoline After Hours interview, that while creating a single cooling system has been talked about a lot in Detroit, each system was someone’s domain and fiefdom and it would have required “crossing over too many lines.” The result is that the cooling system was only a minor incremental change to what Chevy already had.
As a vision-driven product, Tesla’s vision was translated into every element of the car, from the engine to the cooling system. This is the essence of Radical Product Thinking: building a vision-driven product means systematically translating your vision for change into your everyday activities.
A vision-driven approach results in clear business benefits too. Munro summarizes his findings describing the Bolt as a “good car.” But he was far more excited by the Model 3: “This car is totally different. This is not inching up. This is revolutionary.” And while the Chevy Bolt was selling well, Tesla’s Model 3 turned out to be a breakthrough vehicle that has been outselling the Mercedes C-Class, BMW 3-Series and Audi A4 combined.
Methodologies over the last decades have emphasized an iteration-led approach to building products. Vision statements that proclaimed the company’s aspirations “to be #1 or #2 in every market”, or “to be the leader in <insert industry jargon here>” were touted as being visionary. To achieve these goals, our mantras for building products have emphasized iteration: try something in the market to see what works and iterate to achieve the nirvana of product-market fit.
But as you can see from the example of Tesla Model 3 vs. Chevy Bolt, what we’ve been missing until now is a clear methodology for being vision-driven so we can systematically translate a vision for change into every aspect of our product. Without such a methodology, it seems that building world-changing products is reserved for rare individuals like Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs, who seem to have an innate gift for having a vision and knowing just how to achieve it.
Without such a methodology, when our everyday activities aren’t driven by a clear vision and strategy, we see a pattern of product diseases that make good products go bad. It’s time for a radical new approach for building successful products and avoiding these diseases.
This was my realization as I sat in my car that winter morning, venting to my friend and ex-colleague. The Radical Product Thinking book was driven by this vision. It’s a book written for those of us who have experienced product diseases and see that our iteration-led approach to building products and scaling companies isn’t helping us create the impact we want to have. Radical Product Thinking was envisioned as a mechanism to create change in the business world: to share the know-how, practical tools as well as inspiration for building world-changing products.
Join me at Productized’s book launch event for Radical Product Thinking for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at how the book came to be and the vision-driven leaders I interviewed along the way.
