- Speaker #0
Welcome to this week's episode of Mastering Agility. Today, we're talking about common diseases and products with none other than Radhika Dodd. She's here to challenge how we approach product management, rolling out pitfalls like hero syndrome, hepatitis, and obsessive sales disorder, and how they can affect your product management. Radhika shares how to balance long-term goals with short-term survival, tackle vision debt, and why internal products deserve just as much love as external ones. Radhika is the author of Radical Product Thinking, former chief of product, director of product management, and even founded a startup she refers to as the Pandora of Wine. Let's get into it. Radhika, thank you so much for joining us today on the Mastering Agility podcast. How are you doing? What has been the highlight of your week so far?
- Speaker #1
I'm doing well, and it's great to be here. It's great to meet both of you. The highlight of my week, let's see. Um, it's been a week where I have been super excited about how my clients have been applying radical product thinking. And I got these messages from people, one in Colombia, one in Germany, saying, you know, how they've been tasked to apply radical product thinking at their company. And over the weekend, like there was a whole workshop on radical product thinking in India that I didn't even know about, like people are organically using this. So the highlight of my week has been to really see this taking off as a global movement and like hearing from people that I don't know like it's happened but it's increasingly happening which is beautiful to see
- Speaker #0
I can imagine and I can only imagine how proud that must make you I see the big smile on your face tell us what what radical product thinking is about what makes it radical so yeah the radical concept came up
- Speaker #1
because I was realizing that a lot of the conventional wisdom that we have had for ages, right, it just turns out to be mistaken. And I'll give you a few examples. Like, one of the things that we've learned about what is a good vision, we've learned, like, you know, the vocab was you have to have a BHAG, a big, hairy, audacious goal. And, you know, if you listen to all these vision statements, they go like, you know, democratizing, blah, being the leader and blah. And then there's, you know, one of my favorites, which is contributing to human progress by empowering people to do blah, blah. Like, you know, what does that even mean? Right. It all sounds wonderful. You're told that it's supposed to be inspiring, grand. But if you look at it, it's like telling your team, you know, I want to build a big, big castle. And then they go like... Oh, how do I build it? Do you have blueprints? Do you know what am I building for? And, you know, we're not giving them what they need. And so that is one element of what is radical, right? Setting aside all of this conventional wisdom for what you're supposed to do and the radical product thinking way, you write a really detailed vision saying, what is the problem statement? Why does it need to be solved? And. Once you solve it, what does the world look like and how are you bringing this about? This sort of clarity that your team needs, this is not what we often talk about. But this is just one example. If you look at every element of radical product thinking, the next step is strategy. This is where I see fluffy two-page documents like, we're going to focus on our core, be more customer-centric. I don't even know what these sorts of fluffy strategy documents mean. What am I going to do differently as a person on this team? when I have a strategy like this. And so these are the kinds of things that I took. And then, you know, me and two ex-colleagues, we decided like, okay, we need a framework that really helps teams not make the same mistakes that we had made. Like all of these mistakes that we learned from through hard lessons, what if we could instead give people the step-by-step process for how do you build better products? And so that's what was radical and what radical product thinking is about.
- Speaker #0
You mentioned now that I really enjoyed this. There's so much to unpack in this whole answer, but what did you notice? How people are applying this? What are the wins that people are getting?
- Speaker #1
So the number one win that people talk about is the level of clarity that they then have, the alignment that it creates in the organization. Once you have this level of a detailed vision, you suddenly realize that To be able to bring your team together. What brings them together is not an artificially inspiring vision, like, you know, empowering users to blah, blah, or, you know, democratizing justice when you're actually building something for lawyers. Like you don't need bullshit inspiration. Like you can have real statements that actually defines the problem and what you're doing. And it turns out that that is so refreshing. Like it gives people both the clarity and you go like, ah. okay, I know what I'm actually doing. I believe in this, right? And this was the revealing experience for me. I was once working on a product that does quotes for TV advertising. I promise you there's nothing less inspiring than that. And yet, right? Because we had this level of detail, it created this alignment and a shared sense of purpose. And it felt like you were translating systematically a vision into action. And so the result was that we avoided what I now call product diseases.
- Speaker #0
What are product diseases? I have my assumptions. I can pretty much sum some up for you, but I'm really curious how you would put that.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. So the way I define product diseases is they happen when there is a break in the chain somewhere. in translating a vision all the way into action, right? And so I'll give you a few examples of product diseases that I have caught myself. And I think hopefully for our listeners, it's going to resonate too. One of the first diseases that I'd ever caught, right, was hero syndrome. And like this was about 25 years ago, and I swear it's just as prevalent today as it was quarter of a century ago, right? Because when... That was my first startup. It was called Lobby7. And our vision was enlightening wireless. We were going to revolutionize wireless. And this was back in 2000. And so if you ask me today, what does that even mean? We had no idea. But we knew we wanted to be big, right? And that's what hero syndrome is about. It's when you know you want to be big, and that's the focus on going big on scale. But you don't have this clarity of what's the problem you're even setting out to solve. So we see this so much in Silicon Valley, but honestly, even in big companies where even leadership goes like, we want to be ubiquitous. I'm like, yes, we want to be ubiquitous, but where are we going to start? So that's one example of a product disease. Another really common one that I've caught or have had to experience is pivotitis. So this happens where we keep... just wildly swinging from one idea to the next. Like it just, the company seems to be pursuing the next shiny object, right? And I remember I was once the VP of marketing at a startup and we were trying to be the next Visa of the world. And it sounded great, except, you know, a month later we realized, you know, that's really hard because you have to acquire both merchants and you have to acquire customers. So we said, okay, we're going to pivot. So we pivoted into being a loyalty solutions provider for merchants. Like a month later, we realized, you know what? That's actually a really crowded market. So let's pivot. So then we became a credit solutions provider for merchants. And honestly, like by the third month, right? And all of these pivots as the VP of marketing, like I didn't even know what I was getting people to sign up for on the website. Right. And so... So that's pivotitis. And for some of our listeners, they might be even experiencing pivotitis in the form of like every sprint. And by the way, this is like one of the dangers of being so agile. Like every sprint can look like a pivot when it's like driven by whoever is the customer that's screaming the loudest. And I'll give you one last example because this is my favorite disease and I've contributed to this.
- Speaker #0
It sounds so good, your favorite disease.
- Speaker #1
That's right. When you put it that way. So it's obsessive sales disorder, right? So it happens when your salesperson has this glimmer in their eye and they tell you, you know, if you just add this one custom feature, and I promise we're only going to turn it on for this one customer. You know, if we just add this feature, we'll win this huge mega million dollar deal. And you go like, okay, you know. All of our OKRs, it's all about growing revenues this year. Let's do it. And so pretty soon, right, you say yes to a few of these things. And by the end of the year, you have this entire stack of contracts that you have to make good on, right? And your roadmap, that's all it's driven by. So that's obsessive sales disorder. And it's my favorite disease because I have contributed to this. And the good thing about recognizing all of these as diseases is that we actually learn to avoid them, right? Like once you can finally name the disease, that's when you can cure it. And there are other diseases I talk about in the Radical Product Thinking book.
- Speaker #0
I like that so much. And again, there's so much to unpack here. Let's go back to do that first one. people not really understanding the problem that they're trying to fix is that one of those typical things that you see recurring like stakeholders coming in you mentioned listening to the loudest voice and we're not really going we don't spend enough time that we don't nurture the whole discovery process to figure out what is truly the problem that we're trying to fix here what is value what does that mean you
- Speaker #1
know what i've observed is you This fundamentally, the root cause is some of the culture that has been established that came out of Silicon Valley, right? Like if we look at what are the mantras of building products that came out of Silicon Valley, it was all about, you know, fail fast, learn fast, move fast, break things. But above all, it was all about iterate quickly. And let's look at like, how did this develop? Because this seems like if you actually think about it intuitively, this idea that Just keep trying different things and see what works. You go like, who thought of that? Like, what kind of stupid idea is that? But where does it come from, right? The idea is if you look at the VC business model, they'll invest in 10 startups and they need only one of those to be successful. For everyone else, like they really want you to fail quickly because if... You don't, and you're this middling company, you know, they don't want to waste more money pouring that on you. And so if the idea is, I want you to fail fast, well, then the message to you is try lots of different things and quickly figure out what's working or not, and then, you know, move on, right? But that works well for the VC business model. It doesn't necessarily mean that it works for entrepreneurs. And so, you know, we have... had this idea and culture in Silicon Valley, and that is then permeated everywhere else, because you look at a few cases that are successful, and there's survivor bias, and we forget the whole graveyard of failures, right, that resulted from this approach. And so if you look at this approach and go like, okay, hang on. So the problem is you're saying, just keep trying things in the market. What got de-emphasized in that is having this clarity of What is the problem? Why does it need to be solved? So the idea was just try something in the market. If it takes off, you know, then you can keep iterating on it. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that iteration is all bad. It is important. There is nuance here, right? Like iteration is helpful. It helps you get to where you want to faster. But your iterations have to be driven by a clarity of vision and strategy. If you know kind of... roughly, it's like saying, okay, I'm going to get into the car and start driving. I'll just drive, you know, and hopefully I'll get there. But you might end up in Montreal, you might end up in Florida, like, where do you want to go? And what you're saying about discovery, you're saying, well, let's ask customers. But even that, right, to me, asking customers is like saying, let's stop and ask for directions, which is great to do. It's important. But the step before asking for directions is... where do I want to go? And why am I going there? I'll pack differently if I'm going to Montreal versus if I'm going to Florida, like one is much colder, the other is much warmer. Having the sense of where am I going and then asking for directions is more useful.
- Speaker #0
I like that. Jim, how does this resonate with you? Because you've been in a ton of these businesses as well, and I can almost see the frustration dripping from your face.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, I've got a lot of questions. You mentioned the VC model, and this may be an unpopular opinion, and I'm curious what you think, Radhika, but I try and eliminate VC-type thinking when I'm helping most of my clients. Because, you know, I've heard this everywhere, and Sundar, I don't know if you have either, but, you know, like, oh, we want a product manager or product owner to think about, think like a VC.
- Speaker #1
Oh, God, no.
- Speaker #2
No, because VCs have a ton of one of the T's, which is treasury money. they don't have the time or the talent. You know, like if you're a product owner, you can only think like of a VC if you've got a lot of money and a lot of places to give it to simultaneously to see if it pays off. So, um... I just see that everywhere I go. But there is many aspects of thinking like a venture capitalist that are applicable, right? Challenging value, rapid innovation, getting to know quickly. All those are probably good things. But pivotitis is... I'm curious what you think the leading cause... If you think about a TV commercial, the leading cause of pivotitis is what?
- Speaker #0
Who is patient zero of bifiditis? Right.
- Speaker #1
It's the lack of clarity in a vision, right? Let me talk about a key concept that I think about, you know, when you're a leader. When you're a leader, you're balancing intuitively. This is how we typically sort of grow up. We're balancing intuitively long-term versus short-term, right? And we learn this. all through our careers. We start off from college saying, okay, am I going to party tonight or study for the exam tonight, right? That's long-term versus short-term trade-offs. And as we grow up, we learn to get better at figuring out what is the right trade-off, right? And so when you think about pivotitis, to me, you're basically, you haven't figured out that axis of what is a good vision. Like what exactly is your vision? So when you keep switching these priorities, what ends up happening is without that clarity, sometimes you might just sort of violently whiplash across this entire Y-axis of, is this good for the vision or not? And that leaves your team completely confused. Like sometimes you might do things because a customer is screaming loudly, but if you don't have this clarity of your Y-axis, like what is your vision? Then you say, oh, this customer is screaming loudly. Let's just do it. You know, the CEO sits next to someone on an airplane and they have a brilliant idea for what you should do. They come back and tell you, oh, we should do this. Again, like if you look at the Y axis, is this good for the vision or not? Like they haven't thought in detail enough about is this good for the vision? Like if your vision is, you know, something like being the leader in data storage, you know, it's so broad. Anything might fit under that. If it's like... you know, revolutionizing robotics, right? And this used to be the vision of a startup. Like anything goes, this problem where anything goes, where your vision is not acting like a filter, that's what causes pivotitis. Like when you have no clear compass of where on the y-axis are you falling, the only compass you have is your x-axis, which is survival. or short term, right? And that's all that is driving your actions. And so what you really need is the two dimensions, both long-term and short-term. And if you don't have that clarity of vision, you'll always be swinging everywhere.
- Speaker #0
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- Speaker #2
About a year ago, I was given a humbling reminder of, and maybe you can use this. So if so, please take it. But it's a form of pivotitis with what let's call a... non-purge disorder. So it's pivotitis with an NPD comorbidity, which stood for non-purge, meaning they don't get rid of anything. So I had done some consulting and training and work with a bunch of product owners in this one organization. And I thought they all got it. And for the most part, they did. But then when I went back for a visit a few months later to check in on things and have some other meetings, one of the product owners was really... frustrated. He asked me to go to lunch. We went to lunch and tell me what's going on. And he was pivoting, like you said, almost every iteration, right? Every two weeks, every month. giving the team new things. And I'm like, okay, understood. What's the problem? Because I didn't want to leap to a conclusion because I'm trying to work on that. And he's like, well, they're not getting the other things done. I go, what other things? Well, the things I was asking them to do three sprints ago isn't done. And I asked, so what he was doing is he kept pivoting to, as he would say, turn his sails into the wind. But he was having the mental assumption that they were still going to go do all the things. He asked them to do sprint minus four, go sprint minus three, and whatever harebrained idea he came up with the next sprint. And I'm like, oh. And he genuinely thought that was the intent, is that every two weeks he can have a new idea. And even if the other idea was only 50% done, the team's still going to get that done and whatever his new idea was. Have you seen this kind of... assumption in pivoting that like that or did i run across an anomaly here to that one might start with can i smoke whatever he is too it was good it was strong that
- Speaker #0
might be the cure for it it starts smoking but your other point
- Speaker #1
Maybe this is where it's like thinking like a VC, you know, I'm just going to throw enough money at it. You know, if I throw enough money at it, you'll get it all done, right? But that's not how it works either, because it's not a matter of how many resources you can throw at it. But, you know, what is interesting is you saw this at a product manager level. I mean, that is really rare. I usually see this at a CEO level. where the CEO has this new idea and they think that the team will get done whatever they're supposed to, plus this new idea. And then they get frustrated that they feel like, oh, this team is really slow. I mean, in this case, maybe this is product manager trying to act like the CEO, or they're not close enough to development to actually see what's happening. I mean, it's surprising. I honestly haven't seen this at a product manager level, but I see this all the time at a CEO level, right? I think this is where there's this assumption that if we just add enough resources to it, everything is going to be just fine. We sort of have to question it. I like what you called it, this non-purge disorder. And the way I used to frame this as a product disease was strategic swelling, right? Like what you're really getting is, you know, we have to do everything. And- Every feature is important. I remember there was one boss I had. He used to say, you're asking me to choose between my children if I asked him to choose which feature was important. Seriously, these are not your children.
- Speaker #2
Right.
- Speaker #1
But yeah, fascinating.
- Speaker #0
What kid did he choose?
- Speaker #1
He didn't. That was the problem. Like it... And it created this really toxic environment where it pushed the entire engineering team to not then speak up and say, look, we're not going to get XYZ done because of this. The reality is whatever it is, like it's not going to get done anyway. There's this lack of clarity because now I don't know which kid you want me to choose between. And so it just pushes all sorts of failures underground. because nobody wants to get yelled at in such an environment, right? It doesn't solve any problem, but it created a toxic environment.
- Speaker #0
Now, let's say you get a list presented of 57 priorities. I can already see you smile. I see your thoughts. Tell me more.
- Speaker #1
This is something I see so often. And every approach to prioritization that I had seen until the radical approach. was dealing with exactly this problem. We have, you know, 57, in some cases, 257 items in the backlog. How do I prioritize this? And the way we go after it, right, whether it's Rice or Moscow and all these different approaches, the idea is you have a set of principles or whatever you're valuing. It might be revenue, whatever definition of impact, confidence, effort, etc. Like, Whatever those factors, it might be principles in terms of what is important for your product. But the basic concept is you enter it all into a spreadsheet. And this magic spreadsheet spits out that this item is number 25, this item is 125, and this item is number 5.
- Speaker #0
Mathematically proven.
- Speaker #1
Exactly. But here's the problem with it. If you go talk to anyone on the team and you ask them, why is this item number five and this item is number 55? They go like, well, because the spreadsheet said so. And so the problem is, as a product manager, your influence is limited to that spreadsheet. And whenever someone is looking at that spreadsheet, whereas in. The whole point of radical product thinking and the approach to this vision versus survival, what was the problem statement? Why did I feel like we need yet another approach to product prioritization? It was because I was realizing that we have to get away from magic spreadsheets. We have to be able to communicate intuition and get our teams to think like us. As a product person, you have to make those choices. You're going to have to choose between... which of these many kids do you want? You can only have one at a time or a few at a time, whatever. But like you can, you have to choose. Like it's fallacy to think you can't. So how do you choose? And the idea is, you know, whatever trade-offs you're going to make, help your team see that visually. And so when you draw this vision versus survival, the X and the Y axis, now all of a sudden you have these four quadrants, right? The four quadrants are things that are good for vision, and survival. Those are the easy decisions, as I like to call it. Then you have the quadrant, which is investing in the vision, right? That means it's good for the vision, but it's not helpful in the short term. It's not helping you survive. So examples of that would be if I'm fixing technical debt, if I'm spending some time doing user research or discovery, right? That is investing in the vision. Or building like long-term features that would really help, but in the short term, there's no revenue coming out of it. And the opposite of that is when you're creating vision debt. This is where it's great for short term survival. This is like the custom feature that's going to win me this big deal. And then it's bad for the long-term vision. And if I do too many things in this vision debt quadrant, that's when I catch obsessive sales disorder. And so the idea is, you know, rather than telling my team that this is item 57, I want to give them this intuition. Like here is how I'm balancing vision versus survival for every single sprint. You know, if we're taking on vision debt and you feel like it's so necessary, well, acknowledge it, you know, at least so that this way your team doesn't feel like you don't give a damn about the vision. Like you explain that, you know what, our bank balance is so low, we've got to take on this vision debt. and winning this customer deal is the most important thing. It's a valid choice, right? But acknowledge when you're taking on vision debt, acknowledge when you're investing in the vision. And having this visual means that a developer now is able to listen to you and you've influenced their thinking. When they go off and they're coding and they have to choose how they're coding this up. they can decide what are the right trade-offs, right, for vision versus survival because they understand from you.
- Speaker #2
I have a couple questions on this. First of all, I wrote down vision debt on both of my notebooks, my paper notebook and my brand new remarkable paper pro. Nice. Hashtag not sponsored, but big fan, couple weeks in. So should I understand that you don't like this spreadsheet-driven approach to... prioritizing things because I'll be honest I put in our little backstage chat like I feel seen because I do have a tool that I use that sounds an awful lot like what you're describing but I think a couple key things might appeal to you but I'm curious.
- Speaker #1
Go on I would and yes you're exactly right I hate spreadsheet driven approaches because it limits your influence.
- Speaker #0
Do you feel seen or do you feel uncovered?
- Speaker #2
Well, yeah, my birthday suits out there, right? And it's not beach body season here in the US. It's winter. So anyway, we're going to get the parental advisory label again, if we're not careful, Sunder. So I have a dimension. So if you think about that spreadsheet, you got the rows of maybe the things you want to build, and you've got the columns. I call some of those columns dimensions. What do you want to weigh against something else? Or what do you want to fill in? to help you figure out what you should do. And one of those is strategic alignment. So what does this thing relate to our vision and our strategy? And if multiple things do, do some of them relate more than others, which tends to be weighted to make them pop towards the top of that list.
- Speaker #0
Maybe that's not a silver bullet, but does that help you maybe like not think less of me for using such a tool?
- Speaker #1
I promise there's no judgment regardless.
- Speaker #0
I can see it. No, I'm just kidding. That's fine. Go ahead. Judge away.
- Speaker #1
No, really. I feel like as product people, right, we're trying to come up with the best tools to be able to communicate. what we want our teams to do. And our hope in putting together spreadsheets is anyone should be able to look at the spreadsheet and know what our priorities. And so I don't judge the prioritization approach via spreadsheets. I just feel like it's not as effective. But you know, this point of strategic alignment, I agree with that. I think it's an important element. I think when it's one of the many factors, right, like, it's you sort of run into the same issue, which is how do you create an intuition in your team for what do I do? What are the right choices? And so the strategic alignment that I really prefer is instead of talking to my team about that in a magic spreadsheet, which then by the way, the magic spreadsheet, the problem with it is it's only the product team that's using it. It's entirely too detailed for stakeholders and for management to look at this magic spreadsheet. Like no one has the patience for it at that level. And so the reason I use the vision versus survival is because I implicitly want to get that strategic alignment. I want to be able to show management that, look, here are the features that we're going to be working on or the initiatives. You know, even if it's sales opportunities, like I can help you visualize that on a vision versus survival. and the end goal is you know if we haven't had those discussions about what is our vision because you're still stuck in this idea of revolutionizing wireless or something like that you know I can draw up vision versus survival and before I show it to management I'll go take a first pass at defining the vision for myself as a product person I'll go you take a first pass at also defining what survival is. Is it revenues? Is it maybe stakeholder support? There may be many different perspectives on what determines survival, right? And so once I decide or define this for myself, I have clarity as a product person. Now, when I go to stakeholders, I can communicate where I'm putting these features. And so rather than make this alignment, strategic alignment, something that is an element of the spreadsheet, I want the buy-in because we're all talking about it. And it might lead management to ask that next question. Well, when you say vision fit, like why isn't this a vision fit? And that opens up the opportunity for me to say, well, this is how I wrote the vision. If you disagree, feel free to correct me. It's a very sort of low-key way. of challenging vision, right? As opposed to going in and saying, listen, your vision of democratizing blah, blah, just really sucks. You're sort of begging them to ask the question, well, how do you define the vision then? And there is your opportunity. Ta-da, this is what I think.
- Speaker #0
Sundar, I'm remembering when we had Chris on from SVPG, and I think we asked him... something around the product operating model and who should be doing these type of things. And if I remember right, his experience and Marty's experience was they were seeing more like chief product officers or VPs of product management things. So when you think about some of these disorders, maybe especially pivotitis, which you said the number one cause of pivotitis is four out of five coaches or consultants agree. It's lack of strategic or vision type things. Who should be doing that in your experience in most companies? And don't just say the C-level, right? Because that's like Sundar saying, it depends. I get it. It's got to go to the top. But day to day, who's working with the teams and the product managers to understand or maybe not create, but at least influence that strategy?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, and I wouldn't say C-level actually. So here's the radical part, right? I think the chief product officer, for example, can create it for a whole product portfolio, say. But, you know, like think about some product portfolios. They're so broad that... Such a broad vision statement, again, becomes meaningless for the individual product people. So let's look at the AWS vision. If you have like that's a whole portfolio and there are tons of products under that, right? And so at a chief product level office, chief product officer level vision, great. It's good to have this unifying vision. But in all honesty, every single product manager should have a detailed vision for their particular product. And so the way I see this cascading, right, is at a CPO or a VP of product level, you might have a vision for your portfolio. And for every single product manager should write down a vision for their particular product. And if everyone is using the radical product thinking format as an example, right, it's a fill in the blank statement. And it allows you to define who like. Whose world are we changing? What exactly is their problem? How are they solving it today? Why does this need to be solved? Why is the status quo unacceptable? Then what is the end state you envision and how's your product bringing it about? And if you want, I'll give you an example of this for a startup that I had. But the point is, if every product manager writes this fill-in-the-blank statement, then at a VP of product level, I can look at all of these vision statements written in exactly the format, the same format. And it's almost like an API between teams. And I can at one glance, get a quick look at where are these product teams aligned, and where are they misaligned, etc. So that's how I see the cascading of product visions.
- Speaker #2
Now, I'm equally curious because I get this question myself a lot. How often should you revisit, check in on your vision itself? What is it again? Where are we? Like, are we progressing? Because often when I enter an organization and ask them, like, do you have a product vision? Yeah, we do. All right. Then what is it?
- Speaker #1
Let me see if I can find it. That's my favorite answer. I forgot, but I know we have it here somewhere.
- Speaker #2
It's somewhere, you know, on this dusty shelving confluence.
- Speaker #1
Exactly. You know why that is? It's because until now, our focus on vision statements had always been memorizing the right words. And which is one of the reasons that we created this fill in the blank statement so that you're not focusing on the words, you're really focusing on answering these really deep questions. So here's an example of the vision statement, right? And by the way, actually, before I get to the example, I'll first answer how often should you revise it? If you're not looking at your vision statement every year during your strategic planning season, you're truly missing out. Like every time you're doing strategic planning, it's so important to look at it. But the answer to this also, I'll say, depends because if you have a really early stage product, like when I've done startups and your pace of growth is, sorry, your pace of learning is exponential, like every couple of weeks or three weeks, even a month. I've learned a whole lot more than I knew at the beginning of that month. And I've had to look back at the vision and go like, oh, no, no, no. This we completely proved to be inaccurate. And so you might need to look at it almost like a working hypothesis that you keep editing over time. And by the way, I know the next question coming up is like, how do you avoid pivotitis if you're going to keep revisiting the vision? And it's because you're. now going to revisit the vision with Gravitas. It's not like you're just doing whiplash, like, oh, this customer is screaming loudest. I'm just going to do this. It's more like you're going to take your vision and you're going to show it to your team and go like, okay, you see this fill in the blank. This is what we discovered was wrong because of this learning. This is what we think we need to do differently. And therefore this is our new vision. Now it's no longer pivotitis because you're pivoting with Gravitas.
- Speaker #2
Both Jim and I are experienced consultants and trainers, therefore we know how important it is for organizations to have the fundaments in place before delivering high-value products. And this starts with understanding the theory behind whatever framework, method, or process organizations apply. And this is where Xebia comes in. Xebia is a pioneering software engineering and IT consultancy company, transforming and executing at the intersection of domain and technology to create digital leaders for our people. clients, partners, and communities. As a gift for our Mastering Agility audience, they provided us with a discount code MA10 when signing up for their open enrollment classes to get 10% off. Go to Xebia.com slash academy to find the entire curriculum of courses. That is Xebia, X-E-B-I-A dot com slash academy to find all their courses. Is the Lamborghini case, is that a good example of such?
- Speaker #1
Oh, tell me about the Lamborghini case.
- Speaker #2
Lamborghini, they started building tractors initially and ultimately... getting more competition from like Ferrari, et cetera, they started building more sports cars and ultimately being in the position that they're in now. Like they didn't necessarily do a completely different thing, but they still pretty much have the same vision that they used to have, except now they have a different literal vehicle of delivering it.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. And you know what? It doesn't, we don't have to stick to the same vision, right? Like the reality is, so let me give you this vision statement example. So So here's an example for a startup that I had. I had it in, I found it in 2011, sold it in 2014. The vision would go today when amateur wine drinkers want to find wines that they're likely to like and learn about wine along the way, they have to find attractive looking wine labels or find bottles that are on sale. This is unacceptable because it leads to so many disappointments. And it's hard to learn about wine in this way. We envision a world where finding wines you like is as easy as finding movies you like on Netflix. We're bringing about this world through a recommendations algorithm that maps wines to your taste and an operational setup that delivers these wines to your door. Now, the thing is, right, I told you absolutely nothing about the whole startup, what we were doing, etc. But hopefully after this vision, you knew exactly what we were doing and why we were doing it. And to your point, you know, going from tractors to sports cars, we were starting out in the wine business, right? But over time, you know, once we conquered the wine business, we could have done this for cocktails or it could have been other kinds of beverages. We could have we could have expanded then. So I call that the vision evolution. So we don't have to think about our vision horizon for like five, 10 years. Instead, think about like, what is the market you want to conquer in the next one to two years?
- Speaker #0
I have a question. So doing what I do, and Sunder and I do very similar things a lot of times, I think a lot of people get what you just described. Like they can take this Mad Libs type approach and be like, yes. in a workshop setting or when we're sitting down at the lunch table, they can get it. And they can be like, yes, I can write some of those for my product or write one. The number one cause of apathy in product managers for me is an overwhelming weight that they feel of the million things that they're going to have to do to even take two steps towards that vision. Their brains immediately go to security reviews and legal. forms to fill out and this HR process and this other architect that's got to give them the Roman thumbs up, right? So how do you help them go from an awesome, compelling vision like that, that they can use as a filter to decide what to do next without just all that, this is, I'm never going to get there because I can't see past all these other hurdles.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, you know, on this, I actually have a beautiful example that makes me happy to think about because there was a client that I started working with maybe two and a half years ago. And, you know, when I started working with them, this is exactly how product managers were feeling that all I work on is stuff that I don't feel is all that important that, you know, this is just whatever. uh, customers screaming the loudest. I'm just working on that. It's whatever sales says we need to work on to be able to win this deal. Um, and over time, as the startup has matured a bit, you know, if you think about this vision versus survival, when they started off, it was most of the stuff they were doing fell in the vision debt category. And over time I look at, you know, we did strategic planning just a couple of weeks ago. And I was seeing, wow, you know, there are so many things that we're planning to do this year that fall in the investing in the vision category. And just seeing this picture and the transformation over the last two years, right, just felt so satisfying. So for such product managers, right. I think the first step is acknowledging and getting acknowledgement even from management to say, not just management, but like other team members, that you know what, you're right, we're working on all this vision debt, and it's weighing our souls. Because anyone who's passionate, you know, it is soul sucking when you keep feeling like all I'm working on is vision debt. And the only people who can survive that context is when you give up that passion. And like, you know, Who are we if we don't have that passion in life, right? And if we don't bring that into work. And so the key I've found to make things less soul-sucking is to just acknowledge, first of all, we are taking on vision debt and how much of it we're doing. And over time, you start to chip away at it. You start to show that, you know, let's in this sprint do this thing in the... easy decisions quadrant. Maybe we're doing this thing in the investing in the vision quadrant. And you start to do this slowly and over time. And depending on your company, it may take a little bit of a longer time, but it gives you the vocabulary to talk about vision debt, investing in the vision, et cetera, even to be able to push back with management or be able to have discussions that helps you see why you have to do the soul-sucking stuff to be able to get to that next level or. you'll be able to find other champions who can also get behind this message, who feel the same level of passion for your product, right?
- Speaker #0
So, sorry, Sander, did you want to chime in?
- Speaker #2
No, I want to ask you, if I feel you correctly, you have an opinion on this.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, because I have a couple examples and I was just writing down, what have I seen companies do to get over this? And we had on a guest, Sundar and I did last year, and we talked a lot about this innovation theater and dojos or labs or all these special little places we pick people up and we go put them in, remove all those rules and say, we truly want you to innovate. And I think there's good and bad ways about that. But the things I wrote down is. What I see is shadow IT, right? So when people have a really awesome vision that they truly believe in and they've got a team that's ready there to build it with them, they'll get shit done with credit cards and all this stuff. And then at some point, they're just kicking the can down the road and it's going to come back and they're going to have to deal with all that debt. And maybe then, now they've pissed off people, maybe the debt's massive, whatever. But what I've learned that way is... or in the innovation lab type of way is if you get people so excited about what you're building, management and leadership has a pretty magic wand when it comes to making all that stuff start to disappear at lesson. Ring fencing, if you've heard that term or just whatever, like just picking people up and saying, don't do this in the building. Don't do this. You don't have to follow the rules, but we're going to make it so you don't hurt the company and hurt infrastructure and all that stuff. I've seen that go well. I've seen that go terribly. delegating it. This maybe is an unpopular opinion to you two. I don't know what, I don't know, Sunder, how you would respond if somebody asked you this question, but I tell many people, just get the shit off your plate. Like, if it's got to be done, there's no other option that we can pull. I don't want you doing it. I need you doing the really important stuff. You need to delegate, outsource, find someone else that... is not doing the type of impactful work that you are to fill out all those forms in triplicate and to go to the cab meeting and go to the governance group and whatever. And then I think under any of those possible solutions, if you can create a compelling vision or if you can get someone above you to fight for you, I've seen a lot of that red tape get eliminated very quickly.
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. It does require you to do... some degree of risk assessment, also checking in how much buy-in is required. Like if you have low buy-in required, there's low risk, just do it. If you have a lot more buy-in needed, or there's a lot more risk, then you might want to discuss some stuff. But if there's low buy-in required, you can still delegate it to other people, right? You don't have to do everything. And that kind of ties into the hero syndrome as well, where we want to do everything at once, preferably yesterday, like every stakeholder in the history of stakeholder management. Everything needs to be done yesterday. But then how are you going to do that? Because it's such an unrealistic expectation, both of yourself, but also from the organization. You're not going to be able to do all that stuff.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, you know, and there are some organizations that I work with where that delegation may or may not be possible, right? Like I, there's an organization where I'm working with where the product manager has to go through all of this bureaucracy. And it's a lot of work. But honestly, like they cannot delegate it to anyone else, just because of how they're structured. In these particular cases, right? I think your best bet is the buy-in aspect. If you can get management to really see why something is super important, why they should do something, I agree with this point that, Jim, if management gets so excited, somehow just these things magically find their way to being able to make it happen. And I think this is where, for a lot of the product managers, the vision versus survival approach for me is much more exciting because like I'm not trying to show you a spreadsheet about what is our what are our priorities if you can create that excitement just based on sharing the narrative of how exciting this is what's the value that you're going to bring and kind of how this is investing in the vision versus taking on some of the vision debt which is what we've done like showing a few examples of vision debt versus what we really need to be doing, right, in investing in the vision by taking on this new thing. Like, that's the kind of, like, the high-level picture we really need to convey to be able to get that sort of enthusiasm going.
- Speaker #2
I'm curious about what you said on they can really not change this. Because I'm really curious about your opinion on this. Is it, in that sense, a lack of burning platform that they just don't feel the necessity to actually change that structure? Because I, in my mind... If you have created this structure, you can also change it, right?
- Speaker #1
So in some organizations that are really old organizations, if you want to do away with some of this bureaucracy, there's going to be a whole change management process. Like I'm talking about the super, the really large and old organizations where as a product manager, you're supposed to go through all of these. steps and sponsors and this and that right like uh there are sponsors for projects and this level of red tape that you have to go through um and in that case you can't just delegate it to another product manager or someone who's under who's who's like you know um how do you think hierarchy yeah exactly exactly you can't delegate it away to them because you have to be the one getting all of that buy-in. And it's more that eventually in an organization like that, yes, you can perhaps create change, but it's a change management affair. And as a product manager, that's not the first thing that you're going to go in and go like, I'm going to change all of these processes for being able to cut through this bureaucracy, right? Like you might be stuck in that. It's how can I make the best case I can in that setting?
- Speaker #0
I can relate to this in a hundred ways, but I've been realizing more and more over the last five years that most of the way that I help people is change management. 10, 12 years ago, it was doing the basics, right? It was the basic frameworks, Scrum, Kanban, all that, like helping people get started and all that. But now it's to tear down these institutional processes and status quo type thinking. I do have one kind of really quick tactical question. I would like to hear both of you answer this because I think you have a lot to share is, should, like we talked a lot about product. Like I've heard the three of us have said product a hundred times today. We've had a lot of guests on product, product, product. Should we try and apply product model type thinking or product type thinking to internal? IT projects, internal IT products, internal this, etc. Or is that a mistake?
- Speaker #1
Do you want to start, Sander?
- Speaker #2
Oh, go ahead. I'm waiting for you. I'm very curious about your opinion.
- Speaker #1
So internal, to me, internal products are equally important. Like, you know, there's almost this shame that I see sometimes in working on internal products, right? And when I've worked with teams that work on internal products, and I asked them to write the vision, they often struggle with it, because they say, you know, but remember that vision, the fill in the blanks that I talked about, and I said today when, and this is the fill in the blank, like, who's the end user? And they feel like, But I feel like I have to say that the end user is that external customer. But that's not reality. My customer is internal. And my response is always like, why do you feel this compulsion that it has to be that external user? Why can't we be honest about it? Because that is your vision statement. It is important. It might be an internal user. We shouldn't reduce the importance of that any. All of what we talked about are... all of these concepts of vision, strategy, hypothesis-driven execution and measurement prioritization. Every single one of those elements is just as applicable to an internal product.
- Speaker #2
I completely subscribe to what you're saying and oftentimes it's even easier to have a quicker feedback loop with your internal users and your customers because you know where they're at. The boundaries between them are a lot vaguer than we have at external ones. You have to to book some time, you don't know where to find them, you don't know who they exactly are, because that creates a very easy way to jump in and check in what they are doing and just sit next to them and observe because you don't need more security checks, etc. You don't have to go through the whole process. Interestingly, in a couple of weeks, we'll have a recording on this specifically how to deal with internal versus external products with Emily Tate. And I'm very curious how... This is going to tie into that. Now, there's a million different questions I would like to ask you, but I also want to be mindful of your time. So what I've done now as a brain fart is I quickly pulled up ChatGPT and asked ChatGPT for the product management question of the day. And it said, what is the biggest misconception about product management that you've encountered and how do you usually address it?
- Speaker #1
Aha, actually. So the... biggest misconception of product management is that a product is a physical or digital thing, right? And that goes to the very foundation of how we define product. You know, being radical starts with that. I think the way, so the way I define product is that your product is your mechanism for creating the change that you want to bring to the world. So when you think about it in that way, that your product is the mechanism for creating change. Anything can be your product. And I'll give you examples, which is, you know, if you're creating a service, that service is to be able to create whatever change that you see for customers, right? And so that service is a product, which is kind of counterintuitive. If you're doing volunteering, if you're doing activism, even parenting, whether you're freelancing, whether you're... building, whether you're a research organization, right? Anything can be your product when you start to think about product as a mechanism for creating change. And I think this is a fundamentally different way of thinking about product, because if we think about product in this way, the next sort of pillar of the philosophy is then that you have to envision the change before you start to create that change. Like you cannot create change without knowing what is the change you want to bring about. That brings us to the vision. And then finally, the last pillar is that you then can engineer that change very systematically. This is where our engineering thinking comes in, that it's not about just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. You can very systematically engineer that change. And that's how we bring it about. And by the way, avoid product diseases, which brings us all the way to the back, to the beginning of the conversation.
- Speaker #2
Are there any exciting products that you are working on that you want to share?
- Speaker #1
I'll give you a sneak preview of the next book that I'm working on, which I'm super excited about. So the working title of this next book is Radically Rethinking Metrics, the case against targets and OKRs and what to do instead. And it's going to be a radical take that really challenges something that is so religious, right? I think, Jim, we were talking about this earlier where... goals and OKRs that become like this religion, we dare not question because we assume that it works. It's taken on faith. And so this book is going to be sacrilegious from that perspective and really challenge the fundamentals of goal setting. And by the way, if our listeners are keen to hear about the book, and if they want an opportunity to participate in case studies, I'll send you a link that you can share with our listeners.
- Speaker #2
Please do. Yeah. And if they want to know more, if they want to follow you or follow your progress on this book, where can they find you?
- Speaker #1
So I'm on LinkedIn. I always love to hear from people. So if you're using radical product thinking as well, I'd love to hear how you're using it and just, you know, your story, basically. So feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. And also you can read the first book, which is Radical Product Thinking, The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. It's on Amazon and other bookstores.
- Speaker #0
Wonderful. I'm definitely going to share those in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. I'm definitely looking forward to learn more about your new book because challenging status quo and this whole approach to how many organizations treat their OKRs, their goals, their targets, and so on, the metrics. There's a lot to improve for many organizations. So I'm definitely looking forward to that. And hopefully we'll have you back by then. I really enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for being here.
- Speaker #1
Likewise, this was so much fun. I loved our conversation and I'm looking forward to being here again.
- Speaker #0
Definitely will. Awesome. Thank you so much, Radhika.
- Speaker #2
That is all for today. Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, let us know by hitting that like button. Share it with friends and colleagues, sharing a message on LinkedIn, joining our warm and welcoming Discord community, or attend recordings as a virtual audience. You can find all the relevant links in the show notes. We hope you'll tune back in for the next episode of the Mastering Agility Podcast.
