Welcome!
Welcome to Radical Product, a collaboration between the 3 product musketeers, Aggarwal, Dutt and Kaytes, who have seen one too many products fail or fall short of its potential. These are our learnings, musings and advice on building the vision and strategy behind breakthrough, Radical Products.
What spurred us to start Radical Product?
We often see that in startups products are built iteratively in increments using the lean startup methodology (something we strongly advocate for) but without a cohesive product vision (herein lies the problem). Developing a product iteratively without an overarching product vision is reminiscent of an oil-drilling experiment by Behavioral Economist, Dan Ariely, that Radhika once participated in back at MIT. The experiment goes something like this: on the landscape shown on your screen you pick a starting point to drill for oil and you can continue to explore and drill anywhere on the screen — but you only have a limited budget and each well you drill consumes some of that budget. Some oil wells result in more oil, others yield nothing and at the end of the experiment you earn actual money based on the oil you drilled. The result was that those who had a goal for what they wanted to earn and knew what they could earn were more likely to explore across their screen and find the global maximum. Those who didn’t have such a goal and didn’t know what the maximum earnings could be, didn’t stray far from their starting points and only found local maxima but not the global maximum.
This is also what happens when we build products without a cohesive product vision. When we don’t know what we want, we are more susceptible to external forces and will keep pivoting and drifting and it will be harder for our products to reach their full potential. We’ll have customers telling us they want one thing, perhaps the CEO saying the opposite, our competition introducing yet something else. In the end, we have to differentiate between signal and noise and chart a path for our product.
Why the name Radical Product for the blog?
rad·i·cal (ˈradək(ə)l/) adjective
(especially of change or action) relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.
synonyms: thoroughgoing, thorough, complete, total, comprehensive, exhaustive, sweeping, far-reaching, wide-ranging, extensive, across the board, profound, major, stringent, rigorous
Our goal is to help you think of your product in a thorough, profound and different way so you can find the global maximum for your product and not settle for local maxima. Hence Radical Product.
What is Radical Product?
Radical Product is thinking comprehensively about the product, going to the root of great product strategy. In subsequent blog posts, we will share with you a framework to develop a product vision based on a cohesive product strategy that is aligned to your business strategy which in turn is aligned with the mission of your company. This framework will be based on a deep understanding of the customers’ pain points, market dynamics and, user-centered approach to design and development.
The Radical Product approach brings clarity to product feature priorities because the product manager has charted a path for where the product is going and the team has a sense of what needs to happen next and direction on what success looks like. When all this works the way it is supposed to, it looks like it’s magic and the product manager has a “gut sense”. But it’s not gut and here’s a blogpost that explains why products are not built on gut sense alone. This publication covers how you can develop this product sense through the Radical Product framework and scale it with your team.
Why a blog?
Just like our approach to building products, we have created this Medium publication with the idea of putting out a MVP based on our product vision for the book that is needed and yet to be published in business, that offers a framework for how you can build Product Intuition to build cohesive Radical Products. We’re testing this MVP with you and look forward to hearing your feedback!
