Audio Files

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Kei

Kei

Oct 3, 2025 7:15 PM

Summary

  • Introduction and Background (00:06 - 00:32)

    • Radhika Dutt, author of "Radical Product Thinking", joins the podcast. She has extensive experience as an entrepreneur and product strategist with a focus on helping organizations create impactful products.

  • Radical Product Thinking Concept (01:26 - 05:28)

    • Dutt defines Radical Product Thinking as a methodology developed from her own product-related mistakes, aiming to provide a systematic approach to product development that avoids common pitfalls like "hero syndrome" and "pivotitis".

  • Vision and Its Evolution (10:37 - 12:33)

    • Dutt emphasizes that a product vision should be viewed as a hypothesis that evolves over time, recommending that companies revisit their vision regularly to ensure it remains relevant.

  • Importance of Detailed Vision (14:12 - 17:08)

    • She argues for a singular, clear vision over multiple confusing visions and suggests that a good vision should be actionable, supporting effective decision-making in prioritization and alignment.

  • Balancing Short-term and Long-term Goals (26:23 - 29:26)

    • Dutt discusses the challenges of balancing immediate business needs with long-term vision, recommending clear communication and prioritization frameworks to navigate this tension effectively.

  • User Research and Innovation (35:01 - 39:07)

    • She stresses the importance of using past user behavior as a guide for product development rather than relying on users to articulate their desires, promoting user research as an essential component of understanding potential pain points.

  • Legacy and Impact (53:30 - 54:31)

    • Dutt shares her aspiration to inspire others to create meaningful change through Radical Product Thinking, and encourages individuals to apply the principles of vision-driven approaches in various aspects of life beyond business.

Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of Grasp Talk. Today we are excited to welcome Radhika Dutt, author of Radical Product Thinking, A New Mindset for Innovative Smarter, and her book has resonated globally, being translated into several languages, including Chinese and Japanese. Radhika is a seasoned entrepreneur and product strategist who has been involved in five successful acquisitions, including two companies she founded.
She advises organizations ranging from high-tech startups to government agencies and helping them build products that drive fundamental change. And with a rich background spanning industries from media, telecom, to robotics and consumer apps, Radhika's insights are invaluable. So please join me in welcoming Radhika Dutt. Thank you for joining Radhika today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here and to talk with you.
Thank you. So first of all, you know, we are a huge fan of your book, Radhika Product Thinking, and I think, you know, the book helped many founders, product managers, a lot, you know, and we are, you know, one of them. So but, you know, in your words, you know, we, I want to know, you know, what is product radical thinking? Because, you know, some of our audience may not be familiar with, you know, the concept,
you know, yet. Yeah, thank you. And by the way, it's always so rewarding to hear that the book resonated for people, and it's been helping people make change. So I'll share background and why radical product thinking even came about. Really to summarize it all in just a few words, it's a book that's based on a lot of the mistakes that I've made as I was learning to build products. When I was an entrepreneur or when I was building products, just, you know, all the hard lessons
that I've learned, it's basically summarized and packed into this book to help people build products better. So just, you know, to elaborate on that, my first startup was something that I'd founded with four other co-founders, and we were still in our dorm rooms at MIT. When we when we founded that startup, it was called Lobby 7. And you know, when I think back to that startup, it was our vision at the time was revolutionizing
wireless. And if you ask me, what does it mean to revolutionize wireless, honestly, we have no idea. We just wanted to be big, right? And that was when we encountered the first product disease that I now call hero syndrome, where you're focused on being big, without really knowing what problem you're trying to solve in the first place, right? And, you know, after that startup, we ended up building other startups.
And maybe I didn't encounter the same product disease, but it was other product diseases that I ran into, like pivotitis, or obsessive sales disorder. And I talk about these in the book. And you know, every time I learned to build better products and learn to avoid these diseases, at a certain point in my career, I realized that I had learned from these hard lessons, but now I had to watch others make these same mistakes that I've been making.
And so that's what led to this burning question. The question, you know, is it that we're all doomed to just learning from trial and error, and learning these hard lessons to figure out how to build good products? Or can we offer people a very systematic step-by-step process for building successful products? And I was sharing this burning question with a couple of ex-colleagues of mine, and talking about these product diseases, and you know, they had faced some of these same experiences.
And so that's when radical product thinking was born, because we came up with a framework to really help people translate a vision into strategy, priorities, execution, and measurement. And we put out this framework for free, and people started using it organically. And that was just wonderful to see, that people were just organically finding it and using it. And that's when, you know, eventually the radical product thinking book came out,
because people were asking, well, you know, we're using this framework, how do I know if I'm using it correctly? And so the book was born as a voiceover, basically, to help people use this more effectively in building successful products. I see. And was it like, you know, you had an idea, you know, writing books, but you know, writing book takes time, right? And how long did it take for you to write? You published, you know, back in 2017, 16-ish, right?
Well, the framework, we put it out there in 2017. But that was only the raw framework in PDF format, right? The book came out in 2021. I started writing it in 2018. And it took me three years, basically. And so you know what you said about writing a book, I think, yes, it takes an obsession to write a book. But I'm really thrilled at how it came out. I feel like it offers, it's the kind of book that I wanted to write. You know, very often,
you read a book, and you go like, wow, well, this could have just been a blog post, and it's been stretched into 10 chapters. Instead, I feel like the radical product thinking book, every chapter could have been a book by itself. And it really condenses a lot of deep thinking into one book. And so I'm grateful for all of the experiences that led to writing a book like that. You know, that's really what I wanted in a book.
Yeah, so three years. So yeah, I know. It's amazing. And so is there any reasons that you named radical product thinking for the title? I'll tell you the two stories why. So one is that there is a lot in the radical product thinking book that challenges conventional wisdom. And I'll give you just one small taste of it for our listeners. You know, in the radical product thinking way, there are five elements of radical product thinking that help you translate a
concept into reality. And the five elements are vision, strategy, prioritization, execution, measurement, and culture. When I say these words, like vision, strategy, you go like, oh, yeah, you know, we've heard vision before, and everyone needs a good vision, except this is the part that's radical about it. In the radical product thinking way, a vision isn't, you know, big and broad, like, you know, it's not one of these fluffy statements, like to
be the leader in or, you know, like revolutionizing. It needs to be truly a deep and meaningful vision that answers whose world are you trying to change? What is their problem? Why does the world need changing? Because maybe it doesn't. Then you can answer, what is the world like? When can you say you've arrived? And then finally, how are you bringing it about through your product? And so I'll give you an example of such a vision statement. Here's a vision for the startup that I
founded in 2011 and sold in 2014. 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 bottles or find wines 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 matches wines to your personal tastes, and an operational setup that delivers these wines to your door. Now, this is a radical vision because I hadn't told you anything at all about the startup that I had. And yet, when I shared this vision with you, you knew exactly, hopefully, what we were doing and exactly why we were doing it, right? And so this is why it's called radical product thinking because it challenges a lot of conventional
wisdom. And instead of having such fluffy ideas about vision and strategy, it makes it very tangible. So that's the first reason. And the second reason I will say is that radical was my nickname in high school, and I thought I should just embrace it. So there we go. Yeah, that's what I thought. It's so easy to remember. So radical thinking. Radical product thinking. Interesting. And in the book, you are strongly emphasizing
the importance of the visions, right? So vision-led products. And so I have some questions about visions. People set up visions at this moment, but in the future, so like 10 years, 20 years, so probably the vision will be outdated. So how can companies, or how will companies be able to catch up the vision which is not outdated? So yeah. How can companies recallingly update it? Yeah, I think one of the things that we've
learned about a good vision, and this is conventional wisdom, is that your vision has to be everlasting. And which is why we come up with vision statements like to be the leader and blah, blah, because we think this way we never have to change our vision. But I think exactly like you were saying, I think, well, markets change or your customers change, times change, and your vision has to evolve with it, right?
And so we need to rethink this idea that your vision has to be everlasting. It really should not be constant. So in the radical correct thinking way, you really should actually revisit your vision every year at the very least to see is this still accurate. And actually, if you're an early stage startup or if your product is not mature, you should be revisiting it much more often than every year. For an early stage startup, I'd say even like every month
or at least every quarter, you should be looking at your vision and saying, is this still valid? And so how do you go about doing that? One of the ways is to, first of all, start to think about your vision as a hypothesis, that it's not something that is unquestionable, that this is your best guess in this current moment in time. And so you write out this fill-in-the-blank statement. And by the way, one of the reasons
the radical product thinking version of a vision statement is a fill-in-the-blank statement is so that you don't fall in love with your own words, but it's OK to change them, let's say, a few months down the line, right? So you fill it in. And then as you execute, you might discover that, oh, it actually turns out that maybe the who I was targeting, that it turns out to be wrong, that those are not the people who need this whole solution.
It's actually these other people. Or you might discover that the problem that they have right now, it's slightly different from what you actually thought originally. And so whatever this new learning is, you rewrite your vision statement based on that. And this way, you can share it with your team. And you say, this is what we thought was the right answer. This is now what we see is the correct answer. And so based on that, here's what
we're going to do differently. Basically, it means that the updated vision allows you to pivot without catching the product disease I call pivotitis. And so this is how, as a company or as a product team, you can continue to evolve your vision. And it helps you bring your whole team with you on the journey. I see. And in that sense, do you recommend the startup founders or PM to have two visions? One is, as you mentioned, three months, six months,
kind of a short-term vision. But sometimes having a long-term vision helps the company or team align with what they do. And how should the team, if we have only short-term vision, and if it changes a lot, sometimes employees feel, oh, what's happening in the company? And then how should we adjust? Great question. I think what you ask is so fundamental to the dilemma that we have about how short-term or long-term
should your vision be. I think the first thing that I'll say is, if you think about the song Freddie Mercury sang, it says one vision. He sang one vision for a reason, that it has to be one vision to rule them all, as opposed to having lots of different visions. Having multiple visions creates always more confusion. So that's the first thing. The second thing, then, is when you write a vision, I think it should be a vision that usually carries you
through probably for one to two years. Don't feel like you have to write a vision that is valid for five years, because the reality is you don't really have a five-year. The vision for five years can get very fuzzy, right? And the fuzzier your vision, the harder it is to make it actionable. And so this is why, think in the one to two-year horizon, and then know that, as a team, you're going to be revisiting your vision anyway.
Every time you do strategic planning, you should be looking at your vision and saying, is this still valid? This is how you keep evolving your vision. And this question that you were asking, don't you need a long-term vision to keep everyone aligned? I think, let me reframe this question a little bit, because the broader your vision and the more high level, the better it is at giving you the five-year timeline.
At the same time, that makes it a lot less actionable. So when you look at that trade-off, what I've always found is that having a clearer vision is what helps your team actually translate that into reality. So if I think about building a house, I could draw you really beautiful renderings of a house, but that rendering isn't going to help you actually build that house. If I actually give you a construction floor
plan for what I want this house to be, it may look pretty, but it actually is what you need to go build that house. So I would err on the side of having more detail to be able to create that alignment. And so how do you make sure your team doesn't feel like, oh, you're changing your vision all the time? The interesting thing that's actually counterintuitive is that it's pivotitis or diseases like pivotitis
that make your team feel like you're constantly changing your mind, I have no idea what the vision is. And so when you catch product diseases like pivotitis or obsessive sales disorder, pivotitis is the disease where you keep being on pivoting from one idea to the next. Obsessive sales disorder is when anything that any customer wants, they ask for a custom feature, you're like, yes, OK, we're going to do it.
And this is how it feels to your team that you're saying yes to everything, I don't understand what's the vision here. On the contrary, when you have details in your vision statement, and if you end up saying even six months down the line, a year down the line, that we need to change our vision, you're really helping your team understand what is it that has changed. You're conveying the rationale for why that vision needs changing, what you've learned,
and therefore what your next experiment is. So you're really bringing people with you on the journey, so it creates less instability for your whole team. So I'd always go with a more detailed version. I see. But at the same time, this happened to me at the first company I started. But sometimes, I was confused about the difference between mission and vision. And do you have some thoughts on mission? How the company or team should have mission
or align with mission? Yeah, great question. I think the whole concept of vision, mission, values, it's truly outdated, that we really need to rethink things. You know what I said about one vision to rule the model, or one ring to rule the model, Freddie Mercury stuff? All of those ideas, they all point to one direction. It's having one thing to create alignment as opposed to multiple things. And what I found is vision, mission, values, all of these,
they're trying to create more details in this cascading order. And there's a better way to do it, which is, and this is what I often do with organizations. At a leadership level, you write out your vision in the same radical product thinking format to the best of your ability. If as a company, let's say you're Amazon, that vision that I described, that just, sorry, that vision that I said that describes the who, what, why,
when, and how, that becomes very broad. Because Amazon, it targets consumers, but then their AWS, for example, targets businesses. So if you have to write this vision statement, it's like, we do everything for everyone. So it's not really useful. And so I would write a vision statement for a portfolio of products. So maybe, for example, you would write such a vision statement for AWS. And then within AWS, you have different product managers
who are managing different aspects of AWS. And each product manager would write a vision statement for their product. And their vision aligns with AWS's vision. So in this way, you start to cascade your vision statements. And the one last thing I'll say is, we focus a lot on, until now, on memorizing vision statements. And that's part of kind of why this aspect of changing vision statements is scary for employees.
Because it's like, oh, does this mean I have to memorize a new vision? And really, it's not about. but memorizing it all. Like, for instance, you saw that when I was sharing the vision statement for that wine startup, every time I think of that vision statement, I might use slightly different words. It's not the words that are important. What's important is truly the answers to the who, what, why, when, and how, and how you fill in those blanks.
And so when you answer those profound questions, you create so much alignment across the team that what you actually want is you don't want anyone to memorize the statement. You want them to describe it in their own words, in a way that makes you realize, like, I want to make sure that they've internalized it. That's how you know that your vision is really spreading. Yeah, thanks. That's so interesting. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I learned a lot.
But so, yeah, at some companies, at some startups, so even if employees, like CPO, product manager, funders decide vision and mission, it's so difficult to apply it like daily actionable things, daily action. So how do you advise funders and product managers to apply what they decided as a mission, so to apply daily behaviors? Yeah, and I think there are two elements to what you said, because what you brought up, I mean, it's so interesting.
I think so one thing we have to think about, when a company has a vision, mission, value structure, very often, if you're a product manager who is way down in the hierarchy, you might not be able to go there and say, OK, I don't think we should deal with vision, mission. It's outdated. We should use this new approach. You may just not have the power to be able to say that. And even if you have that power, it might just be that
you're being this bull in this China shop where nobody appreciates this direct challenge to vision, mission, et cetera. And so the way I've often approached this is very tactfully and gently, where you don't directly challenge the vision. So instead of that, I use the vision in my prioritization. So let's say I'm the product manager and I'm coming to you with some ideas on how I want to prioritize things in my product.
Rather than challenging your vision as my boss, I'd come to you showing an X and Y axis. And there I would talk about prioritization. So the Y axis that I draw up is the vision statement that I wrote up for the product. And so I don't even necessarily have to tell you as my boss what this vision is that I wrote up, right? Because I'm not trying to directly challenge your vision. So I write this vision statement for the product and I draw up a Y axis
and I call this, is this a good vision fit or not? And the X axis is, is this good for survival or not, right? So basically what I just drew up is the yin and yang of long term, which is vision and the short term, which is survival. And so now I'm making this yin and yang very explicit and visual and things that are good for both vision and survival. Those are the easy decisions, right? Those are the decisions that generally people are not going to protest.
They'll be like, yeah, let's do them. Then there are decisions that are good for the vision and they're not that great for survival. So example of this would be if there's technical debt we have to fix or I need to spend some time refactoring code or if I need to do some user research, that's investing in the vision because it's good for vision, but it's not, let's say, bringing in short term revenues. And the opposite of that is when I'm creating vision debt.
This is good for survival. So maybe this is like a custom feature that is going to bring in sales. So it's good for survival, but it's terrible for the long term vision. So it's vision debt. And so now when I talk to you as my boss and I'm telling you about all these different features that I'm thinking about, I will put some things, you know, like I will categorize things as investing in the vision versus vision debt versus what is ideal, right?
Or easy decisions. And as I'm talking you through all of these things, you know, it makes prioritization decisions less contentious because it begs the question, are we aligned on the vision? And that's when, you know, you would say, well, I think this is a good vision fit. And it gives me an opportunity to say, well, you know, here's how I think about the product vision. I don't even call it the company vision, right?
I talk about it as the product vision and here's how I'm thinking about it. Like, do you agree on this as the vision? And that opens up this dialogue, like I'm not directly challenging anything, but like sharing some thoughts that I've been working on. Or maybe we're not aligned on what is survival, you know, and you might discover that maybe survival isn't about financial survival. Maybe it's stakeholder support where, you know,
if our CEO is going to disapprove of this, maybe that is what survival is about, right? So it helps you create this alignment by using your vision for prioritization purposes. And it allows you to sort of sneak in the concept of challenging the vision without directly doing so. I like that, like XY, like, you know, axis and metrics. Interesting. So, yeah, so like, you know, vision dates or, you know, yeah, I understand it.
But so as a product manager or like funders at some point, so we need to have like, you know, you know, iteration. So, or like, you know, I mean, we understand that, you know, vision is pretty important and long-term vision is important, but at some point in short term, so we need to do something which is for like, which is beneficial for our business, right? So how do you balance it? So every time we cannot work on like long-term vision things,
but yeah, vice versa, we cannot work on only short-term things, right? Yeah. Any framework? That's a great question, right? And I think this is what product managers typically struggle with. And in a sense, like when you think about that X and Y axis of vision versus survival, I think your question boils down to what's the right balance between investing in the vision, vision debt and like the easy quadrant, right?
And the answer to that is, I think that truly depends on your particular company and the situation that you're in. Not even the company, but that product team that you're in. And I'll give you a couple of examples. When I was running my startup and we were bootstrapped, so we had very little funding. And so survival to us was financial survival. And we had to be super careful with how we were using money.
And so sometimes we took on more vision debt because that was the only way of surviving. So for us, the right mix was taking on more vision debt and more of ideal quadrant because we had to survive to be able to live long enough to achieve our vision, right? On the other hand, you know, when I was working in... On the other hand, in my current work with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, when I work with the Central Bank of Singapore,
I mean, the organization is a public organization and it's not a matter of finances. Survival isn't about financial survival. They're not trying to make a profit. They're supported by the government. But at the same time, survival means making sure all the stakeholders are in alignment. So that's how we define survival. And in that case, you know, we can actually invest in the vision more. And, you know, we are able to take more time, let's say,
or not worry about the financial, just trying to constantly make a profit, right? Like we're able to do the right things in terms of investing in the vision to think more longer term about how do we create the right experience for financial institutions, et cetera. So, you know, the most important element of how do you find this right balance for your team and your organization is the communication. Being able to drop this X and Y axis and talking about, you know,
how you would prioritize it and your stakeholders might push back or they might support whatever you're saying. Like, you know, I think we can, in fact, do maybe more of investing in the vision or they might say, look, we have to win this deal and we have to take on vision debt. But the good news is, right, at least as a group, you're all actually acknowledging how much vision debt you're taking on. What causes the disease like obsessive sales disorder is when you have no idea
that you've taken on vision debt and you just keep on taking vision debt without acknowledgment from everyone. So that's why this communication is so helpful. It helps you keep track of how am I creating this balance. Yeah. For insight, of course. Thank you, but it's a great question from you. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah, to us. So, yeah. I mean, so we are like balancing. So, like, short term. So, like, survival also long term.
So, as I mentioned, so our mission and vision are pretty like. a long-term vision, but we are not sure how long does it take to achieve it or realize it. But we cannot only focus on short-term things. Yeah, but you know what you just said about vision and mission being so long-term? One of the things that I've found is when you have a vision and mission that is so long-term, like that five, ten-year horizon, that faraway horizon that you can't see,
one of the things that happens is when it's that fuzzy, your short-term business needs come more into focus as a result. So if I think about how you intuitively start balancing, if I'm not drawing up vision versus survival, when my vision is so fuzzy and not in focus, what is in focus is your short-term needs. And that's why you end up making more short-term decisions with a fuzzy vision and mission. Thanks so much. Yeah, we understand the situation.
Yeah, pretty much. And so I think in the book, you mentioned a company you worked for, like Avid, like a broadcasting company in Hollywood. So in that sense, in that first, you mentioned that you were trying to digitalize a flow, so instead of VHS or videotapes, so to digital ones. And so yeah, you mentioned that you were persuading and convincing customers to buy a digital workflow in a videotape. So yeah, we are kind of struggling. We want to preach our mission and vision to
customers, but for customers, they are demanding utility, so short-term utility. I want this highlighter. I want this PDF uploader. So yeah, we tested our landing page. We just showcased our long-term mission, vision, but so customers didn't, yeah, they resonate with us, but so they don't sign up. So yeah, I'm just curious how you overcome that situation. That's a great question. I think that boils down to building a very clear product strategy. I think
the vision gets you so far in terms of clarity. I think the next step is creating clarity by really understanding, by building a clear product strategy. So in the radical product thinking way, a good product strategy requires you to answer four questions, and the mnemonic is radical or RDCL. The R stands for real pain points. So first you have to uncover who are the personas who are going to be using your product, and what is the pain that makes them come to your
product? And then once you've identified that, you can ask the next question, which is the D for design. You can say, okay, for each of those pain points, what's the solution in our product that addresses it for them? Then comes the C for capabilities, which is what's the functionality or what's the underlying infrastructure or the engine that allows us to deliver on the promise of the solution or the promise of the design? And the last is L for logistics, which is where
we think about the business model, pricing, support, training, etc. So now going to this question that you said, that you've shared a vision and the vision resonates, but people are still asking for all these features and pushing for certain features. I think what that points to for me is really building a more detailed RDCL strategy. Sometimes when that happens, maybe it's that we haven't really understood our personas, because there might be personas who
need different things. It might sound like, it happened to me that when I was working in a particular robotics or warehousing company, we were targeting different verticals, different industry verticals. For example, if you're building warehouses for beverages like Pepsi, or if you're building it for let's say frozen foods, the functionality in the end at a high level sounds similar. You're like, well, both companies need packages moving in and out of their warehouse. But when you look at the
details, the actual business drivers, etc. are very different. And so that leads to very different products. And so I think similar thing here, when you look at the pain points and the personas, uncovering really through perhaps user interviews, what is the pain and how are you going to solve it might lead to more definition than the vision, and maybe that's the next step to pursue. I see. At the same time, this is my question, but sometimes people don't know
what they really want. So meaning people sometimes are short-sighted. So let's say, especially in consumer space, application or software space, let's say Airbnb, the early days when they launched and asking money for business, most of the people told them, who want to stay in a stranger's house? Why would I stay at someone's house? But now Airbnb is a really big market, tapping into a really big market. But early days, people don't
know what they really want. So in that sense, how do you balance the innovation or innovative approach to solve the real problem or pain point, I mean, potential pain point to the real existing pain point? Yeah, great question. And this is one of the things that I really work with teams on when I do workshops on the RDCL strategy. The technique here is not to ask users what they want, because they cannot know. We also cannot
ask users, would you use this? Because they won't know the answer to this. It turns out that humans are terrible predictors of their future actions. We also can never be relied on to dictate the right requirements or to say, I want this functionality. So what can we do instead? This is where user research comes into play. We as product people, we have to ask questions in such a way that we are relying on evidence from past behavior. And so we ask
questions about past behavior. We ask questions in completely neutral ways so that I'm not going to bias your answer. So if I ask you, for example, will you stay at this? Let's say I'm building an app that encourages you to go to the gym. And I ask you the question, will you go to the gym if I do this? You know what I'm hoping to hear. And you will most likely tell me, yes, I will go to the gym. The answer of whether you're going to the gym or not, it can't be relied upon for me as a
product manager. And so I have to ask you questions based on what you actually did. Like, did you go to the gym yesterday? Or last week, how many times did you go? That is a better predictor. Then I can ask you other questions like in terms of how you or like which kinds of things, which kinds of nudges you have actually clicked on or like observing what you've done in terms of accepting rewards. There is a set of things that you can do to, first of all, understand what a
user needs and then test out whether they will do something or not. And so you do as much of this user research followed by user testing, and then you put out your solution and launch it. And so it's never based on asking users what they want, but it's rather understanding their workflow or mental models enough that you can then build based on what their intent is and based on like what will fit their user workflow and mental models.
Thank you, yes. By the way, like this whole thing of user research, I have found that it's actually a very rare and hard skill to build. Like I find a lot of user research like asking questions because we want to know what people think, like we want their feedback, but we often ask it in terms of let's get your feedback in terms of what we've built. And so we really have to figure out the distinction between user research, which is purely exploratory research to truly understand workflows, mental
models, and separate that from user testing, which is where we test solutions. I see. That was what we were actually, yeah, working on this season. Yeah. Thank you for the feedback. Thank you, yeah. Thank you for the advice. And also nowadays, you know, like AI is, you know, trendy and Chachibiri is, you know, many people using Chachibiri, Anthropic Cloud and so on. And how do you think AI impact product managers' role
or job or product development? Yeah. Yeah. So interesting as a question too. I think right now we overestimate the impact of AI on product managers. I feel like if you, so for example, you know, one angle that I've seen is product managers using AI to say, you know, what are the metrics I should be measuring for my product, right? And I think that's a very dangerous line to go down because AI can often tell you lots of things
that you could be measuring all based on popular metrics, based on what others are measuring. But the reality is, right, the vision and strategy are really what should be driving what you measure. So if you think about your vision and strategy as hypotheses, what you measure is really derived from those hypotheses. And every metric is basically a way of telling is my strategy working or not? And what should I change within my strategy?
And so when I think about measurement in this way, or, you know, even when I look at the concepts of vision, strategy, et cetera, AI isn't really gonna help you be that vision-driven product manager. You know, at best, you can use AI to write out different marketing messages and see what resonates. Like, I don't really see AI as helping the product management function. In terms of how AI can be used by product managers,
I think on that front, like to be able to include it within their product, this is the other fad, right? Where everyone wants to use AI in their product, and that's the expectation from a lot of investors. Like if you don't have AI in your product, you're kind of left behind. Even that, I feel, you know, there are, it's a long development to have decent enough AI in your product that makes enough of a difference.
And if you are building all of that, you have to have this clarity of what exactly is your vision in terms of the problem that you're setting out to solve by using AI in your product. In terms of a strategy, it should be clear enough that it really is solving for something. And if it's not, it seems a little worthless to try to include it, right? Well, there's one last piece that I will say. Using AI in your product, right?
It's more likely to introduce biases within your product to create unintentional consequences. There are so many instances of this where, you know, there was AI that was giving people really terrible advice on dieting or recipes and things like that, where, you know, you really don't wanna introduce such hallucinations within your product. And so one thing to think about carefully is what is the impact you want your product to have on society?
And if there are biases in AI, which you should assume there are, you know, how will that affect that impact? How will it change the impact you're going to have on society? And would you still be willing to take that risk? And sometimes the answer is no, it's not worth it. And that's something to consider. I think all of this goes to the question of, as a product manager, you know, what's the legacy you want to leave behind
through your product? Like, what's the change you wanna leave in society? And if AI can harm that, don't do it. You know, be very careful with how you introduce AI into your product. Like, AI too has to be very vision-driven in how you include it. I see. And by the way, do you use AI in your workflow? Like working with companies, otherwise? Sorry, I'm just curious how you use AI. Great question, yeah. I don't.
I've tried, actually. I've tried to see if I could use AI for marketing purposes and to, you know, help me craft blog posts or to craft even LinkedIn posts. And I haven't been able to use it effectively in the sense that I hate what AI created. It just sounds like a bunch of, you know, wordy trash that I just end up discarding. And to me, like, that is a big piece of my brand, which is I want to write really thoughtful blogs
or thoughtful LinkedIn posts. And AI doesn't fit into my product strategy or my vision, which is why I don't end up using it. But I wish we could, honestly. I mean, we're trying it out because I wish I could use it. It would make just marketing so much more scalable for me. And it takes me time to write blog posts and LinkedIn posts. So I really wish I could use it. It's just not the right thing for me. Yes, yeah.
Thank you, yes. And so moving to your, you know, like your daily, like information consumption, because, you know, we are building the tool for knowledge management and note-taking and so on. So, like, do you use any, like, journaling app or note-taking app? Because you know a lot of things, right? You have a lot of ideas. You learned a lot from your experience. Do you keep notes somewhere or synthesize ideas somewhere?
Great question. Fascinating. I'll share a little bit about my workflow. So yeah, often I, so when I read news, I will pick out stories that I actually feel are very interesting or that convey a certain point about being vision-driven or lack thereof. And my workflow is that I'll send myself an email with a link to, you know, what I read and why it was interesting. And then the other piece of my workflow is on a regular basis, you know,
I might write in my notebook like a whole passage and I find it kind of meditative to write with a fountain pen and on a notebook where I kind of write up these ideas and describe, you know, concepts to myself. And the last thing is, you know, I also use blog posts or work on blog posts to process some of these ideas and use these stories that I emailed to myself to be able to process kind of what are the main ideas
that I've learned from them and how we can apply these ideas in our work. I see. And I saw a lot of example in your book, you know, you used, you know, Boeing 737 or, you know, many example, right, you used. And do you search for the ideas you send to yourself, you know, then to write it? And I mean, in your writing process, you're writing a book. And how did you, you know, get many ideas or examples and crystallize it into book?
Yeah, great question. So I end up searching, not searching later, but it's more like I continue to create a collection of stories that I then email to myself. And then when I'm writing a book, for example, I do a search of emails from me to me. It's a little less workflow. So in fact, if you have a little bit of workflow, I'm more than open to it. So I search for these emails that I have written from myself to myself.
And then I scour through those to be able to see, you know, what are some interesting stories that illustrate my point? And then I will, I'll use those in whatever I'm writing up. Okay. And, sorry, and for PM, you know, product managers, do you have any tool recommendations for them? Like aspiring product managers, product manager, like let's say, oh, like Notion has this feature so that, you know, Kanban is better for something XYZ
or Google Docs is enough, you know. Do you have some preference or recommendation on tools? Oh, great question. I think, you know, this has been something that's not, that a product manager often doesn't have a choice on. Like you come into a company and it's pretty much whatever the company already has. So it's mostly like, how do you just sort of get on with it? So I think I've developed personal preferences
for what I like or don't like, but even those preferences, they are so completely shaped by, you know, the organization and the complexity of the product in itself. Like when I was running my own startup, we used Pivotal Labs because I think the features and the stories were just easier for us to deal with in that format. And then, you know, later when we, when I was working on Radical Product Thinking, we worked on Trello, but then, you know,
when we were working in the robotics company, we used Jira. So I've used all of these tools. I've used all of these different ones, but, you know, and I can say Jira is my least preferred one in terms of just the complexity of user interface. And it has a ton of features, but I also see that it has. its value, and developers find it useful. So you kind of go along with whatever it is that you end up finding creates the maximum group
value, I guess. Thank you, yes. I have the same opinion on Jira, but yeah, thank you. So I think, yeah, so because our audience are aspiring product managers, or senior product managers, CPO, or sometimes founders, and do you have some advice to those people in terms of career, or their work, and product thinking? Yeah, I think the one thing that I've found in my own experience is that it's really easy to get stuck in a tactical role.
Whether you're a leader or an individual contributor, the pressures of short-term business needs are such that it very often pushes you towards a tactical role, and being more reactive in your role. And so the question is always, how do you take on a more strategic role as a product manager, or as a product leader? And a lot of my work more recently focuses on how do you level up, right? And a lot of that has to do with being able to create
this clarity of vision, being able to help your team understand how to systematically translate the vision into reality. And so along those lines, there is a new course on vision setting that I've co-created with Pendo and Mind the Product. And it's a free radical product thinking course on vision setting. And then there are live online workshops where people can learn to translate that vision into strategy, and priorities, and into execution,
and measurement, and culture. And the live workshops actually give you also personalized feedback, so that as you're working on your specific product, that you know how to do this. So those are the things that I've currently been working on in terms of really helping people level up. But I think the summary of all of it, and what I was trying to say is, I think the challenge, the biggest challenge for leaders
and also individual contributors is don't let yourself just be always sucked into this tactical role. And it's a question of making sure that you can be vision driven. And if you constantly communicate your rationale for how you're thinking, you're able to then spread your influence across the organization more. And you can really level up as a result and get other people to think strategically as well. Wow, that's great advice.
Yeah, thank you so much. And lastly, since Grasp is a platform where people can share what they are reading and learning as a digital legacy, and we want to ask you what kind of legacy impact do you want to leave behind for the future generations? So it's a big question. It is, and I love that question. So to me, what I really wanted to do with radical product thinking was to really allow people to create the change that inspires them.
So if there is any legacy, it isn't about the fame of the book, or it's not about the fame of the methodology, but rather if people can really learn how to create change in a way that inspires them and leave the world a little better than when they found it, that's really what I hope to achieve. And so when I wrote the radical product thinking book, one of the reasons I was so obsessed, and it took me these three years to write the book,
was really because I wanted to focus on how do you create the change that inspires you? And it can be in so many different ways. It's not just being vision-driven at work, but whether it's thinking about the volunteering that you're doing, or political activism, or even parenting, if you think about it as a product, you can apply these same ideas to a vision strategy, priorities, et cetera, even to parenting, right?
And so that's what I really wanted to leave behind, to have people be able to be vision-driven in what they're taking on. It's a beautiful statement, and thank you so much. And yeah, again, thank you so much for taking time and joining today. Thank you, I really enjoyed this conversation, and thank you so much for all the insightful questions that you've asked. Thank you.

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