2 out of 5

I am not the audience for these types of books. I always… want to be, as I suspect I’d be a better [business] person if I was, but I’ve yet to read one that really motivates me beyond its thesis and opening chapter. Cynically, this makes sense: I’ll normally come across the thesis in a podcast or an article, and appreciate the gist, and want to know more… only to discover that there’s not much more to it. There are no secrets, just how far you want to extrapolate some framework, and how much guidance you need in that extrapolation. There’s some cynicism there – maybe skepticism in the “no secrets” bit, but cynicism in thinking there’s ultimately not much more to it – but I realize I double down on it by subconsciously (and then consciously…) questioning motivations behind expanding to a book, knowing it’s good self promotion to put this stuff out, and you go and get some pull quotes from others in the industry, and then more people check out your Linked In, and then your qualifications as a “leader” are even furthered, and you go into the cycle of developing a new thesis that can turn into a new book…

See? Cynical. But stepping back to my comment about frameworks, you can perhaps extrapolate from that how my brain organizes things, or perhaps you can’t, and that’s a key differentiator between whether or not books like this work for you. No shade – I could likely do with more consistent frameworks, but for better or worse, I tire of mini-tomes like this because they read like filler.

I do appreciate Dutt’s pitch, which is why I got the book: stop iterating for short term wins and narrow OKRs; use a vision to guide your priorities. …Er, well, rewind again, because that kind of woo woo is why I don’t like the book, because that definition is flexible as fuck, such that even in chapter 1 I was kinda like – can’t you use this to pretty much justify any product approach, just based on how you define vision? Pretty much confirming that, Dutt positively cites some companies I’d consider evil as doing product “right,” and cherry picks ones as doing it “wrong,” and I didn’t bury the lede there at all, but yeah, you could swap them out depending on your own proclivities. Anyhow, what we rewind to is Dutt trying to prevent toxicity in the workplace, at micro and macro levels, and kind of trying to put the entire workspace into a four-quadrant bad/good/better/best matrix that’s guided by trying to Be Better, and that that could lead to not only better product, but a better society…

What I’d hoped was that the book would give some thoughts on how to practically effect that. It doesn’t not do that, but it’s as impractical as any product book in the sense that you need to get buy in from a company to make this happen. So it sounds good, but ultimately, you may only be able to enact this change within your specific product discipline, and even that will be troublesome if you can’t convince stakeholders why immediate profit doesn’t trump something that profits a little less but makes the team happier. That’s… a usual product problem, of course, which is why I was hoping Radical Product Thinking (RPT) was a little more A to Z about how to shift perceptions towards this goal. When you read the chapter names, it seems like that’s there – we define RPT, why it’s needed, and then, in chapter 2, break down how to apply it – but we lapse quickly into the problem I stated above: this feels very generic, early on, and not as radical as proposed. Dutt is good at doing learning-by-repetition, giving real world examples, explaining how they apply, then summarizing key takeaways for each and every chapter; however, when the examples are these kind of zoomed out issues at Tesla, “solved” by Musk, this is just another version of sales – it’s not really practical; you’re just being wowed by the “OMG Elon Musk uses RPT” of it all, setting aside that that reference has aged pretty poorly (except for those of us who always hated Musk – so I was probably triggered by this book early on, sorry).

Ideally, I should rate this as though I was the audience for it, and I swear I’m trying to. Dutt has a good writing voice, and the structure of the book looks sound. I think if you’re the type to copy and paste a framework, this will give you some talking points (and those four quadrants) for justifying some product choices. So I’d probably bump this up to a three out of five as another product book on your shelf from that perspective; something you reference when you need a new strategy to wow your boss. But… you can hear my cynicism again. Like a lot of those books, it ultimately reads more like something that energizes a CEO for a week versus a practical tool. That’s not to say I feel Dutt’s intentions are dishonest – I believed in their message, which is why I picked up the book – but in trying to bloat these messages out to all-encompassing guides, they lose their potency. The real “radical” product thinking approach would be to write this more narrowly: start with underlining that most product approaches are toxic, and then give us the reasons for change. How to effect that change – even though I asked for a step by step – could actually be only that single chapter, if the lead-in chapters were more direct and persuasive.