How a Radical Product Vision helps you build successful products and avoid product diseases

Radhika Dutt at UXDX Community: Social Products and Rethinking your Product's Vision. Video: https://youtu.be/lB8_TgOqvnQ

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Is customer delight the goal?

[00:00:00] Thank you so much, and I'm really excited to be here. True to the name radical, we are going to be challenging a lot of conventional thinking in this next hour, and what I want to share with you is where some of this conventional thinking goes wrong, and what we do instead.

[00:00:19] Let's start by challenging this first idea, which is so pervasive: that your product is successful when you reach this nirvana of customer delight. What we've learned is that if your product is delighting people, that's when it's successful. There are all these words that get thrown around, words like: we have to be user-centric, customer-driven, we have to transform to be product-led. There's design thinking thrown around. But the main idea behind this is that to be customer-centric, we have to give customers what they want by iterating quickly.

[00:01:02] When I work with companies, the quote I hear so often from leaders and executives is, "We have to ask customers for feedback, and then we have to be lean and agile to deliver it." Many of our companies have gone through agile transformation recently, and a lot of that agile transformation was with this purpose of being able to deliver whatever the customer is asking for, by being agile so we can be faster at delivering it.

[00:01:34] When we step back for a moment, what we realize is it's really time to call BS on this. The nirvana for our product should not be customer delight, and I want to give you a real example of why that's the case. I want to show you a real-life example where being agile and delighting customers doesn't guarantee a successful product.

The Nack story

[00:02:00] I want to share the example of a startup called Nack [?]. This was many years ago. The founder of Nack, Paul, had come to me and he was telling me about his startup. He had been inspired by the suspended coffee movement, which started in Italy about a hundred years ago. If you haven't heard of suspended coffee, the way it works is you pay for two coffees. One is for yourself, what you drink, and the second is paid forward for someone who could use a random act of kindness. Paul was inspired by this suspended coffee movement, and he built an app so that people could pay it forward and give what he called random acts of coffee.

[00:02:47] He started Nack to do that, and Paul shared his numbers with me. If you looked at his numbers, they looked fantastic. He had an ardent group of daily active users, he had high NPS scores, and he even had organic growth, which, as product managers, is about as good as it gets, when you get organic word-of-mouth growth.

[00:03:12] But Paul was not happy. Why? Because there was one metric that he realized was really not good, and that was a key indicator. That one metric that he was really looking to was how many people are actually using the app to spread kindness and buy someone else a coffee, and it turned out it was zero. Everyone was coming to the app to actually get free coffee. They were all there to get free coffee. No one was actually spreading kindness. So what went wrong?

Product diseases

[00:03:51] It turned out that Paul had caught many product diseases, and these product diseases are so easy to catch. They really are ubiquitous, and I've caught so many of these diseases along my own journey. Let's do a checkup, where I'm going to share some examples of these diseases that Paul had caught, and feel free to share in chat if you've seen these diseases.

[00:04:21] The first disease is obsessive sales disorder. Obsessive sales disorder happens when we are focusing on the short term. We're trying to delight customers in the short term, but in the long term it's not really getting you closer to your vision. In this case, Paul was giving customers what they wanted, and what they wanted was more free coffee. He was even investing his own money in funding coffees and the app, and customers just wanted more and more and more. That's obsessive sales disorder. In your company you might be seeing a version of this where maybe you're working on custom features and random features that customers might be asking for, but you feel maybe that's not right for your long-term vision for your product. That's obsessive sales disorder. Feel free to share in chat if you've seen this disease before.

[00:05:24] The next disease is hypermetricemia. Hypermetricemia happens when we're obsessed with metrics and analytics and moving metrics up and to the right. In this case, all of Paul's metrics were looking fantastic, but those weren't the right metrics to be measuring in the first place. It didn't matter how much time people were spending on the site, or the number of ardent users that he had. What really mattered was: was anyone using this app to actually spread kindness, to pay it forward, to buy someone a coffee? That's hypermetricemia, where we're obsessed with metrics without really thinking about whether this is the right metric to be measuring in the first place.

[00:06:09] The next disease is Narcissus complex. This happens when we're so focused on our own goals, we're focused on looking inwards at our needs, and we're so inward-focused that we become disconnected from what the customer actually needs. In Paul's case, for example, Paul felt like if he just had this feature to be able to pay for someone's coffee, well, he would use this app to buy someone a coffee. So he figured if he just had a payments feature to buy someone a coffee, others would use it to spread kindness, and it turned out that's not how it is. Especially if you're in a very engineering-led organization, you might see Narcissus complex, where we're thinking of some shiny object that, if we just released it, customers are going to love. That's an example of Narcissus complex.

[00:07:07] So why do these diseases happen? They're so pervasive. I've seen these diseases across every industry and size of company I've worked at. I've worked in broadcast, media and entertainment, robotics, advertising, even wine, and I've worked in various sizes of companies, all the way from startups to government agencies and multinational companies. What I've found is that these diseases are common across industries and sizes of companies because they're a symptom of not being vision-driven. Meaning, when our iterations are not driven by a clarity of vision and strategy, that's when we catch these product diseases.

Know where you want to go before you drive fast

[00:07:56] So what do we do instead? And why does this happen? Let's look at how iteration fits into this whole picture. The analogy I like to give, and this is a very visual analogy, is that being lean and agile is the equivalent of having a fast car. It is absolutely great to have a Ferrari or a McLaren. It does help you get to where you want to go faster. I am absolutely not criticizing customer feedback in any way; customer feedback is important to get. In this analogy, customer feedback is like sitting in your fast car and stopping to ask someone for directions to make sure you're heading the right way.

[00:08:39] But when we stop for a moment and think about it, what we realize is we're in the driver's seat, and before we get into this fast car and start driving, and before we stop and ask for directions, we have to know where we want to go. We need to know the destination, and roughly how we're going to get there. Only then are we going to be able to get there faster.

[00:09:07] This is where radical product thinking comes in. Radical product thinking is a methodology for building world-changing products, and the way it's structured is that it gives you a step-by-step, practical process that helps you build these world-changing products. It's a book that's available in bookstores, anywhere books are sold. What it gives you is this system to engineer the change you want to bring about.

[00:09:38] What I mean by that is, if you want to engineer change the radical product thinking way, it means starting with clarity of vision: what's the end state you want to bring about? Then translating that into a strategy, meaning a set of actionable steps to translate this vision into reality. Then into a set of priorities, then into hypothesis-driven execution and measurement. And finally you can apply all of these ideas to engineer the culture you need for innovation. In the radical product thinking way, each of these elements is designed as a tool that you can use to communicate and bring your entire team with you on the journey.

Unlearning what a good vision is

[00:10:23] Until now, with everything that I've said to you, you might hear this and say, "Well, I've heard words like vision and strategy, I've heard about prioritization. What is new about this? I don't hear anything radical." So let's get ready for something radical. What I want to shake up for us is that we need to unlearn so much of what we know about what a good vision is, because it's just really toxic. We've learned that a good vision is big, hairy, audacious, unchanging. It has to be memorable, so that it's a slogan. All of these ideas need to be shaken up, because they're based on ideas where we think that a vision comes from a leader at the top and everyone else is just following along, and that's not how creating change works. So we need to forget all these old ideas about what a good vision is and rethink things.

[00:11:27] Let's try this exercise. Here's why these broad, unchanging visions are not good for any organization, and the example I'll use is Nack's vision. I could have written Nack's vision as follows: contributing to human progress by empowering people to spread kindness. What is wrong with this vision? Because this is what we're taught is a good vision. It's broad, it sounds inspiring, it's short, memorable.

[00:12:01] Let's do this exercise. Give me wild and crazy ideas for products that could be described by this vision. Since I'm asking this question, I'll give you the first example. This idea of contributing to human progress by empowering people to spread kindness could describe my parenting philosophy. I am empowering my kids to spread kindness, and that's contributing to human progress. This could also be the vision for a company that is nudging people to donate to charities, so an app that nudges you to donate to charities. It could be a vision for a social media company.

[00:12:52] Literally anything goes. When you have a vision that's so broad, your vision is no longer acting like a filter. You can pretty much hold up any feature and say, "Should I do this or not?" and this vision says, "Sure, go for it." What you need instead is a filter that says, "Actually, no, don't do this." What we need is not this broad and fluffy vision. What you want is a vision that articulates the who, what, why, when and how.

[00:13:22] Meaning: whose world are you changing? And it's not everyone's. What does their world look like today, meaning what is the problem, and how are they solving it today? The next question is: why does their world need changing? Because honestly, maybe it doesn't. Then you can ask the question: when can you say mission accomplished? And finally, this is where you talk about your product: how are you bringing this about? What is your product doing to be able to bring about this change?

[00:13:58] To answer these questions, the radical product thinking way, the RPT way, gives you this fill-in-the-blank statement, so that you can focus on these questions instead of being stuck on finding the right words. There's no reason to wordsmith. Your vision has to be authentic and deeply felt. It has to be a conviction; it doesn't have to be a slogan.

Nack's vision and strategy

[00:14:25] With that, let's talk about how we applied this at Nack. We started with a vision, and in thinking about our vision, we really had to rethink our product as a mechanism for change. The change that Paul envisioned was spreading kindness and getting people to pay it forward, and the product was just an app to be able to get people to participate in these random acts of kindness, or random acts of coffee. So that was this vision, thinking about a product as a mechanism to create change. Once we had thought about the product as a mechanism for change, we could write this radical vision statement.

[00:15:09] This is how it would be. Today, when people who often go to coffee shops, so notice it's not everyone, it's people who often go to coffee shops, want to spread kindness around them or say thank you to someone, they have to remember to pay it forward, and they have to overcome this awkwardness if they're trying to pay for a stranger. This is unacceptable because it results in these acts being rare and not a habit. We envision a world where spreading kindness is easy and it becomes a habit for people. We're bringing about this world through an app that makes it easy to create random acts of kindness, by buying someone a coffee to brighten their day.

[00:15:51] This vision is describing what we want to bring about, and maybe a year or two later we're going to change this vision, and maybe we expand beyond people who go to coffee shops. So don't think about your vision as this unchanging behemoth. Your vision can be very specific, and you change it as you need to, as market needs change, as you discover what your users actually need.

[00:16:18] Once you have a vision, that's good, but you then need a strategy to translate that vision into a set of actionable steps. In the radical product thinking way, a strategy is detailed. Again, it's not this fluffy two-page document where you say, "We're going to invest 10 million in this initiative and it's going to result in a 50 million dollar ROI." That's not helpful to anyone. A good product strategy answers four questions, and the easy-to-remember mnemonic is RDCL, radical, which stands for real pain points; that's the R. Meaning, what's the pain that makes someone come to your product? This is where you do user research and customer journey mapping.

[00:17:06] The D answers the question: what's our solution to solve that pain? This is where you apply design thinking. Next you think about your capabilities, meaning what's the underlying engine that allows us to power this design? This is where you think about technical infrastructure, perhaps partnerships, relationships. All of these are elements of your engine. And then finally you think about logistics, which is, by the way, the most often forgotten part of strategy. We always think, "Let's just build the product first, then we'll think about the business model or how we'll sell it." But instead those have to be comprehensive elements of your strategy. You need to think about your business model, how you are going to support this product, how you will train people on it.

[00:17:50] In the case of Nack, we had to start by asking: what's the pain point? What makes someone engage with this product? In that case, as a user, I'm joining to claim a coffee that someone sent me, but I hesitate to buy someone a coffee. I've just never done this before. So what's the solution to this? The solution is we need to get users to experience this joy of giving someone a coffee, and we need to get them to experience this joy before we can teach them to pay for someone else's coffee. That's the solution.

[00:18:27] In terms of capabilities, we had to think about what's the engine that's going to power the solution, because we don't have infinite funding to keep giving away coffee. In terms of capabilities, Paul went and established partnerships with brands, so that we could deliver a feature that basically meant that each user gets two coffees, not one. One coffee is the coffee they consume; the second coffee they must give to someone else. This way we're teaching someone to gift a coffee, and then later we'd add the payments feature so that you can buy someone a coffee. Finally, in terms of logistics, we changed our pricing model. We made our pricing a percentage of a brand sponsorship fee, and these were brands that wanted to get behind this message of spreading random acts of coffee.

Prioritizing vision against survival

[00:19:24] That was our strategy. Next, we have to prioritize all these things we have to do into a set of next steps. Prioritization is where you deal with this pesky problem of survival. We talked about the long-term vision; well, now you have to survive long enough to achieve that vision. What does that mean? It means that you have to think about priorities like the yin and yang. This is what we intuitively do, but it's good to make it explicit. The yin and yang is the long term versus survival, which is short term. For your team, it's important to display this yin and yang, and the easiest way to do that is to display it as an X and Y axis, so you can communicate how you think about the yin and yang.

[00:20:10] Your Y axis is vision fit: is this good for the vision or not? And the X axis is: is this good for survival or not? Things that are good for vision and survival are easy decisions; that's ideal. But if we only focus on those easy decisions, just what is ideal, then we're still being myopic, because sometimes you need to invest in the vision. That's when it's good for vision fit, but it's not helping you in the short term.

[00:20:43] The opposite of that is when we're doing things that are good for survival, good for the short term, but they're not good for the long-term vision. Remember we talked about obsessive sales disorder? Every time we are doing things like custom features, maybe it's not good for the vision, but it helps us win that deal. That's taking on vision debt. It's like technical debt, but on the vision side, and too much of that leads to obsessive sales disorder.

[00:21:13] How did we prioritize things across these quadrants? We started by investing in the vision. We realized that we had to throw out the complete code base and restart development. The code base was just such a mess, so we had to start by investing in the vision. Then we built this feature of giving people two coffees each, one to drink and one to gift. But to support that ideal feature, we had to take on vision debt. We had to build some functionality so that brands could see their marketing campaign and how many people they had reached through this campaign, and without that, brands weren't going to get interested. So we needed to take on a little bit of vision debt to be able to support the rest of what we were doing.

[00:22:05] That is how we prioritized things. This approach to prioritization, by the way, really helps convey to your team how you think about these trade-offs, so that even when you're not in the room, when your developer is making decisions without you, they can think like you. This helps you spread your influence. Oh, and one last feature was the ability to take a payment from the user. It wasn't helpful in the short term, but it was good for the long term. We needed to start to teach them to pay for buying someone a coffee.

Hypothesis-driven execution and measurement

[00:22:42] Those were the priorities. Then we translated it into hypothesis-driven execution and measurement. What do I mean by that? We could write a hypothesis on our strategy, and that hypothesis was: if the experiment we run works, then this is the outcome that we expect, because this is the connection. Our hypothesis was: if we train users to give a coffee that's sponsored by brands, then, by gifting this free coffee, users are more likely to spend their own money to spread kindness, because they'll start to enjoy spreading kindness through coffee.

[00:23:26] That was our key hypothesis, and there were two metrics we then started measuring: the number of people who are gifting free coffees from brands, and the number of people who are spending their own money to gift coffee. What did we find? If you remember, initially zero percent of people were paying it forward. But once they had learned to gift a free coffee, we were finding that 27% of people, and this was just on the first try, were now spending their own money to buy someone a random act of coffee.

[00:24:08] The key point here is that all of those popular metrics, such as daily users, time spent on site, NPS scores, I'm not saying they're irrelevant. Those are things that are important to measure, but they weren't indicators of progress towards Nack's vision. So a key metric that we measured was the percentage of users who are using their own money to spread kindness.

[00:24:35] The key takeaway here is that we need to build radical products, and the definition of a radical product is that it's your constantly improving mechanism for engineering change. We talked about delighting customers at the very beginning. Where does delighting customers fit in? Delighting customers is only a means to an end. It's a means to create the change that you want to see. If you piss off customers, it's going to be hard to create change, because nobody will engage with your product. So yes, delighting customers is important, but only as a means to create the change you want to see.

Lijjat: a vision-driven organization

[00:25:16] Now that I've given you the example of Nack, what I want to share with you is that you can apply this anywhere you want to create change. I want to share with you a truly inspiring example, one that means a lot to me. I interviewed the head of this organization for my book, and I think the whole story of how incredibly vision-driven this organization is, is something for all of us to learn from.

[00:25:44] The example I want to share with you is an organization that makes papadums. If you've eaten papadums, which are the lentil crackers you get in Indian restaurants, often eaten with chutney. Most of us have eaten papadums, but it's unlikely that you would know the secret that there's actually one organization that dominates the papadum market. This organization has 60% market share in papadums, and the rest of the market is hugely fragmented. They have over 220 million dollars in annual revenues, and the most important fact: they're owned by 45,000 women who are all equal partners.

[00:26:29] Let me share the story of Lijjat and how it started. Lijjat started in 1959, and it was started by seven women. The change that they wanted to create was that they wanted to earn a dignified living. These women lived in a patriarchal society, and they were dependent on their husbands for income. They couldn't contribute to household income because they weren't educated, and their only skill, they felt, was cooking, so they didn't have job prospects. But they wanted to educate their kids, so that they could raise that next generation out of poverty.

[00:27:11] These seven women got together and decided that they would make papadums, which are, by the way, really a labor of love. Papadums are hard to make. My grandmother knew how to make them, but I've never seen my mom make them, for example. These women got together and decided they would make papadums, they would sell the papadums, and whatever they got out of it, they would split the profits or losses equally amongst themselves. That's how this started, with seven women. They started rolling papadums on their building's terrace, and soon these seven women became 25, and at the end of a year they became 300 women, and soon they no longer fit on the building's terrace.

[00:27:53] Today papadums are still made by Lijjat member sisters, but they have a huge operational system, where buses pick up women from different pickup locations, then they bring them to these centers to pick up dough. The member sisters then take the dough back home and they roll papadums at home. The next day they come back, they drop off the papadums they rolled, they pick up the next batch of dough to roll, and then they get paid for what they rolled. Every six months they share an equal percentage of profits.

[00:28:37] If you talk to any of these Lijjat women, you don't hear a slogan. What you hear is a deep, heartfelt conviction. Each person shares a vision statement in their own words, but it's the same thing that they all say. I wrote this down based on what the president of Lijjat said. The change that they envision is bringing financial independence to women by allowing them to earn a dignified living, and papadums are just their mechanism for creating that change.

[00:29:08] I wrote their vision in this format after listening to the president of Lijjat, so their vision would say: today, when women without education from poor households want to run their household and want to educate their kids, they have to depend on their husband's income, and they can't influence household spending. This is unacceptable because it limits their children's educational prospects, and it repeats the cycle of poverty. We envision a world where women become self-reliant, and it leads to their socio-economic progress. We're bringing about this world through high-quality papadums, and later other fast-moving consumer goods, without ever taking charity.

[00:29:56] That was their vision. But as you know, vision is only the first step in engineering change. They needed a strategy, and that means asking: what are the real pain points? What do these women need for a dignified living? There are two main pain points. One is that they have a high work ethic but low education. The second pain point is super important, which is that these women are primary caregivers in a patriarchy, which means they have elders or kids to take care of at home, and they cannot leave home for very long. So these women couldn't go and work in factories, for example.

[00:30:33] The design meant that these women needed to work from home, so the entire operational model for Lijjat is based on these women being able to work from home. In terms of logistics, they had to adopt training, for example training to think about decentralized quality control. A lot of the capabilities were also about how you have this mindset for sharing profits equally, but I'll let you read about this in the book. This was also applied to prioritization, how you apply all of these ideas in your priorities so that you can create change very systematically. It involved investing in the vision, rarely taking on vision debt, and doing more things in the ideal quadrant, as well as investing in the vision. In terms of how Lijjat measures success, it's by the number of women to whom they give financial independence, and that's about 45,000 women.

[00:31:34] The key takeaway is that you can engineer the change that you want to bring about by taking the systematic approach. If you'd like to learn more, you can get the Radical Product Thinking book, you can ask about workshops and radical product thinking training, you can download the free toolkit on radicalproduct.com, and lastly, you can message me on LinkedIn, and I would love to answer your questions as well.