R. Dutt - Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter

Dutts powerful methodology offers a step-by-step approach for building successful products that doubles as a guide to infusing meaning in everyday work and packing purpose into every organization. This book belongs on the shelf of every leader and innovator.

Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive, When, and To Sell Is Human

In Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter, R. Dutt offers a compelling and important antidote to short-term thinking so prevalent in product design and especially in redesign. She highlights how tinkering with established products, ignoring opportunities in large-scale product reinvention in favor of immediate financial performance, is often a recipe for longer-term product misalignment and irrelevance. The books concepts are explained well, and the examples are helpful and illuminating. A book whose message is both timely and timeless.

David Schmittlein, John C. Head III Dean and Professor of Marketing, MIT Sloan School of Management

R. Dutt offers a great methodical process for radical product innovation so you can avoid the trap of making incremental optimizations that lead to local, myopic maxima. If you are using Agile-like methodologies to harness the power of iterations and incremental development, you need Radical Product Thinking to stay mission-driven.

Giorgos Zacharia, President, Kayak

R. Dutt hits the nail on the head with Radical Product Thinking, because what drives our brightest young talent to join one company over another is often not money but a powerful vision that guides every project in the organization. This is a book for our times that will help managers not only compete for talent but also leapfrog competitors by creating novel products that capture customer attention and inspire.

Fernando F. Suarez, PhD, Jean C. Tempel Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Chair, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group, Northeastern University

Dutt has written an insightful book on how you can change the world around you through your products. She offers refreshing perspectives on how a purpose-driven approach can make products that are truly transformative. Anyone making a productfrom business leaders to entrepreneurs to policymakerswill find this book a useful guide.

Ravi Menon, Managing Director, Monetary Authority of Singapore

RADICAL PRODUCT THINKING

Radical Product Thinking

Copyright 2021 by R. Dutt

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First Edition
Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-5230-9331-1
PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9332-8
IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9333-5
Digital audio ISBN 978-1-5230-9334-2

2021-1

Cover designer: Adam Johnson
Book editor: PeopleSpeak
Interior designer: Reider Books

To Arya and Rishi,
May you change the world in ways that inspire you, big or small.
Youve already changed mine.

A Repeatable Model for Building World-Changing Products

F or more than a century, building world-changing products seemed to be reserved for a small group of visionaries, such as Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson. These leaders were lionized for being able to set monumental goals and knowing just how to achieve themthey seemed to have an innate gift for being vision-driven.

It was clear that to succeed at building world-changing products, these leaders had a visionmost organizations have learned from this and have vision statements. Yet taking an idea from concept to reality seems elusively difficult, and only a few organizations (and individuals) seem to have a knack for delivering visionary products.

Despite knowing that its important to be vision-driven, its easy to default to being iteration-led. If youve ever experienced being iteration-led in an organization, you know that it feels like youre tinkering and focusing on the short term but ultimately missing out on the large-scale opportunity. It turns out that a vision alone isnt enough to be vision-drivenit requires a new mindset.

To understand the difference between vision-driven and iteration-led, consider the development of the 737 MAX, which had to be grounded worldwide in March 2019 after two newly delivered airplanes crashed within five months, killing 346 people.

Boeings 737 platform first entered airline service in 1968. After 40 years of iterations on the 737, engineers at Boeing knew that the plane was nearing the end of its life span. Its low frame, which was a highly desirable feature in the early days of manual loading and unloading of cargo, was now limiting the size of the engine that could fit under the wings. Even in the 90s, Boeing had to make increasingly desperate attempts to fit larger engines on the 737the engine in the Next Generation series, for example, had to be egg-shaped to fit under the low frame.

At this point, Boeing could have pursued a long-term vision and committed to designing a completely new airplane to replace the 737. But on the heels of having invested billions in research and development to develop the new Dreamliner, it was tempting to keep milking the 737 cash cow, Boeings bestseller since the 70s. Boeing management delayed addressing the market demand for a new narrow-body aircraft.

In 2010, archrival Airbus filled this void with the A320neo, which offered 20 percent better fuel efficiency. When American Airlines, Boeings biggest and most important customer, decided to add the A320neo to its fleet, Boeing had to act fast. In August 2011, Boeing decided to create the 737 MAX by iterating on the existing 737 platform. While engineers rolled their eyes at having to upgrade the 737 yet again, it seemed to address Boeings short-term business goals. This iteration would allow Boeing to launch a certified product in roughly half the time and at 1015 percent of the cost of designing a new plane from scratch.