Radical Product Thinking summary

What makes the Tesla Model 3 revolutionary? 

Well, first and foremost, it’s the vision behind the product. Unlike GM, Tesla didn’t just want to bring an electric vehicle to the market. They wanted to build a car that would accelerate the world’s transition away from fossil fuels. How? By enabling drivers to go electric without compromising performance or breaking the bank. 

Without a vision, your product is like a car without a destination. Sure, you can make it faster by iterating on it – but what’s the point if you’re not sure where you want to go? You might end up speeding down the wrong road. 

Corner-cutting and KPI-fixation are just two of the dead ends you might hit. You could also fall into the trap of aimlessly pivoting from one half-baked idea to another. Or you might let your product get bogged down or blown off course with extraneous add-on features, just to satisfy the whims of individual customers, investors, or board members. 

Once you have a clear and compelling vision, you’ll see your product in a whole new light. It’s no longer just an electric car, a papadam, or whatever the case may be. It’s a mechanism for creating the change you want to see in the world.

The question then becomes, how do you put that mechanism into motion? Well, you need to create a strategy – the next step of the RPT approach to product development. 

So now you have your strategy. This gives you a bird’s-eye, big-picture view of how you’re going to achieve your vision.

But everything seems so simple from high above. Once you get closer to the ground, the world appears a much more complicated place. That’s especially true in the business realm, where you’re faced with all sorts of tough decisions, trade-offs, and pressures on a daily basis. 

With your vision, strategy, and decision-making priorities in place, you’re now ready to get down to business with developing your product. According to conventional wisdom, your next step would be to test your product on the market, see how customers respond to it, and iterate accordingly. 

But the story of an app called Nack illustrates the danger of this approach. The vision behind the app was to allow people to practice the Italian tradition of suspended coffee, where you go to a coffee shop and buy two coffees: one for you and one for a stranger. 

You’ve now seen how to take a vision-driven approach with four of the five steps of the RTP approach to product development. But assuming you’re a leader or employee of a company that engages a number of other people, it’s not enough for you to be vision-driven. Everyone else needs to be vision-driven, too. And that brings us to the final step of the RPT approach: creating a vision-driven company culture. 

“Company culture” has become a bit of a vague buzz phrase lately. To make it more concrete, think of it as the sum total of everyone’s experiences of working at your company. These experiences can fall into four quadrants, based on whether your work is satisfying or urgent.