Ethical Product Innovation With Radhika Dutt

In this episode, we explore the world of ethical product innovation with Radhika Dutt, author and expert in radical product thinking. Radhika shares her journey from startup founder to product leader, revealing valuable insights on building successful and ethically-sound products. She discusses common pitfalls in product development, such as "hero syndrome" and "obsessive sales disorder," and introduces her framework for creating impactful, vision-driven products. Listeners will gain a fresh perspective on balancing short-term survival with long-term vision, communicating effectively in corporate environments, and the importance of ethical decision-making in product development.

---

Listen to the podcast here

Ethical Product Innovation With Radhika Dutt

Introduction To Radhika Dutt

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Radhika Dutt. She is the author of Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter, which has been translated into multiple languages, including Chinese and Japanese. She's an entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in five acquisitions, two of which were companies that she founded. She's an advisor to the Product Thinking Monetary Authority of Singapore. She does consulting and training for organizations ranging from high-tech startups to multinationals on building radical products that create fundamental change.

She has built products in a wide range of industries, including broadcast media and entertainment, telecom, advertising, technology, government, consumer apps, robotics, and wine. She graduated from MIT with an SB and a Masters in Electrical Engineering. She speaks nine languages. She has lived and worked on four continents and now calls Boston home. It is truly an honor to welcome you to the show. We're thrilled to have you, Radhika.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here and to chat with you.

We're going to have a great conversation. You have such a fascinating background. I can't wait to hear all the things that have brought you to do what you do in the world. Your work is fascinating because there are many aspects of it that we need now to move us forward into the next decade. I'm looking forward to understanding the journey that got you here, where you're headed, the work that you're doing, and how you're doing it. We're going to do that through what's called flashpoints. These flashpoints are points in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. Along the way, we will pause and see what themes are showing up. Are you ready?

It sounds good.

Let's take it away. I'll turn it over to you. You can start wherever you'd like to start.

I'll start with some background and share what journey brought me here. I've lived in many countries. I was born in India and lived in South Africa during momentous times from ‘91 until ’95, which was after Perth Aid was abolished and when the first democratic elections happened. I came here to the US for undergrad.

My first startup was born while we were still living in the dorm rooms at MIT. It was called Lobby 7. We had this grand vision of revolutionizing wireless. I look back and ask myself, “What did revolutionizing wireless mean exactly?” We knew we wanted to be, but we had no idea what problem we were setting out to solve. In terms of flashpoints, that was the first product disease we encountered. The product disease, I now call hero syndrome. We knew we wanted to be heroes. We wanted to be big, but we had no idea what we were doing and what problem we were solving.

That was our first startup, and we sold it. A company called ScanSoft bought it. It's Nuance that bought Lobby 7. It wasn't life-changing for us as an acquisition because we were early to market. We built the early version of Siri back in 2000, way before anyone needed anything like it. That's because of hero syndrome. We were solving problems that nobody needed solutions for at the time.

That was the first experience of product diseases that I mentioned. As I founded other startups, I came across or experienced other product diseases, ones that I would call Pivotitis, where you keep pivoting from one shiny object to the next. There was obsessive sales disorder, where you're chasing every little bit of revenue going all over the place in terms of a vision. I learned how to avoid these product diseases and build successful products. It took time and a lot of trial and error.

In 2017, I was working for a robotics company, and I was finally looking around, going, “I'm tired of always. Now that I've learned how to avoid product diseases, I’m watching other people make those same mistakes that I had made and learned from trial and error again.” The burning question for me at the time was, “Are we all doomed to learn from trial and error in all these hard lessons in terms of how to build successful products? Is there a framework and a step-by-step process that we could hand people and say, ‘This is what you can follow if you want to build successful products?”

That was the burning question that came up in 2017 when I was tired of seeing everyone make those same mistakes. I was talking to a couple of ex-colleagues of mine. They agreed they had seen the same product diseases. We said, “Let's work on a framework to create the step-by-step process and allow people to build successful products.”

Creating The Radical Product Thinking Framework

We created this and put it out as a free toolkit. That free toolkit still exists on RadicalProduct.com. People can download and use it. What happened was people adopted it and found it organically. At the first conference I spoke at, where we talked about radical product thinking, someone came to me at the end saying, “You guys created Radical Product Thinking. I had no idea. We found it on Google and started using it. I told other people about this toolkit.

That's how the need for the book came up. People started saying, “We see the toolkit. Can you give us a voiceover in terms of how we know if we're doing this right and filling out this using this framework?” That's how the Radical Product Thinking book was born. It was published in 2021 by Barrett Koehler. It's become a worldwide movement of people being vision-driven and taking a systematic approach to creating change as opposed to saying, “Let's try things and iterate. Let's try things in the market to see what works.” As opposed to that, it's a more vision-driven approach that enables us to build successful products systematically.

You're sharing many insights. One of the things that comes to mind about what you shared is this idea that sometimes you get into this process of like, “We're giving away too much by putting this out in the the world.” In reality, you can share this platform and framework, and it allows you to be seen. It allows this framework to start a movement that becomes something bigger than what could be possible.

I also think that you shared your early days. There's something about moving so fast that it almost becomes hard for you to see the landscape and what's possible because you do fall under those traps and diseases of product development. You start to stumble. Because you were moving fast, you realized, “Slow down. Let's see what's going on here.” That's what led you to those insights. I'd love to get your thoughts about this. How can we avoid these mistakes? How can we help others avoid them? I love the whole journey that you walked through. It seems like that's the insight that you found. Would you agree?

Speed Vs. Velocity In Product Development

You said about speed, searching for the speed, and wanting the sense of moving fast. This is the foundation of startup thinking. We need to move fast. I remember many times I've heard founders and people in business say, “We need to move faster. We don't have time for strategy.” What happens in that setting is people are moving fast. They're all being agile, but you are moving fast in different directions. When you're moving fast in different directions, what you have is speed, but you don't have velocity. You need direction to your speed so that you are all aligned and moving in the same direction. That's how you have velocity.

Speed without direction leads to chaos. True velocity in product development comes from aligning your team with a clear vision and strategy.

The perception of speed that you often have manifests in chaos and product diseases. What you want is to add some direction. We're all aligned. Radical Product Thinking is a methodology. You can add that direction to your speed. You can still use agile and lean methodology. You can use all of those things, but add some direction to it. Your iterations and approach to doing small feedback-driven iterations are driven by this clarity of vision and strategy. That's how you can move all together faster.

It's about finding that leverage point. Getting people in the right direction is about leveraging and harnessing the power of everyone in the same mission, not an artificial sense of direction or a sense of like everyone's on board. Let's go. The reality is you may think that they are. You have to make sure that everyone is aligned on the path forward and where we're truly moving towards. That takes some slowing down, and seeing this is what this means. This is how we're going to move forward. I love the way you described that. Velocity is the key word that I love because it has a lot of strength in being able to move people forward.

What happens is when people hear they have to slow down, that in itself raises fear. It’s like, “You're telling me to slow down.” I want to reframe it. It's not necessarily slowing down. It's a question of how do you create this alignment. If I talk about Radical Product Thinking way, there are five. The first element is vision, strategy, prioritization, execution, and measurement. The last one is culture. I don't advocate for slowing down. I advocate for being systematic about it.

Let's look at this first element of vision. The way we think about vision is we have to have this broad, aspirational vision, something that is unchanging. I want to challenge all of those elements. It's called Radical Product Thinking because it is radical. We have to question conventional wisdom. Instead of this broad fluffy vision of being the leader in aerospace, I'm paraphrasing, but that's what Boeing's vision is like. It’s being the leader in aerospace.

The problem with such vision statements is what it means to be a leader. Is it about market share? Is it about revenues? You can define being a leader in all sorts of ways. It doesn't necessarily make you the leader. It doesn't align your whole team on what it is. Instead, a radical vision statement helps you outline the details. It helps you say, “Whose problem am I setting out to solve? What exactly is their problem? Why does it need to be solved?” Maybe it doesn't even need to be solved. The status quo is fine the way it is. You can answer, “When will you know that you've arrived? When can you say mission accomplished? How will you bring this about?” This is finally the point where you can talk about your product and how your product is going to bring about this world.

A radical vision statement, to answer this, who, what, why, when, and how is this fill-in-the-blank statement where you don't focus on wordsmithing and sounding inspiring. It's not creating a vision like revolutionizing wireless, which was the mistake we made. It's answering the question in detail about the who, what, why, when, and how. Envisioning the solution well enough. When you do this in a team, you are not slowing down. If anything, you are airing out the misalignment, and you have better clarity on what you're going to solve for, why it needs solving, and how you're going to do that together. You have velocity. It's not slowing down. It's being more intentional and systematic about it.

A radical vision statement isn't about wordsmithing or sounding inspiring. It's about answering who, what, why, when, and how to solve a problem and create change.

Clarity makes a big difference. One thing that I started to think about was the Boeing example. I would see that as, like, are you going to be the leader focused on quality? Is it a focus on the leader in the minds of the passengers? Is it a leader in fund travel? There could be something about the way that they envision that actual piece coming together, but for who? Is it going to be winning awards because their airplanes are designed to go the fastest or because they happen to be built with quality? There's a lot of things about that that can be different. It is an aligning factor because when people know what that means, they can do that and work towards that.

I want to take you back into your own journey because I want to understand. You went fast to get into the concepts of what you've done here. I want to hear about some of the other flashpoints along the journey. Share some of the things that have evolved along the path. You have done a lot. Tell me some of the other challenges that you faced in your journey that you want to share.

In the first startup that I had, Lobby 7, the biggest challenge was realizing that you need to have the confidence to question the path that everyone else is taking. In the startup, I was one of five co-founders. I was the only woman. The others were all male co-founders. They all seem to know what to do. They all have this view that the way you build a startup is all about going big. We spent a lot on marketing and getting the fanciest offices, whereas that wasn't the path that I would've wanted.

When I was looking at office space, I was trying to find a modest setting where we wouldn't spend too much on office space and instead be more careful with the cash that we had and use that more towards being able to give us some time to figure out what it is that we were doing. When everyone else seems to know what to do and what's the right way, you end up questioning yourself. You wonder, “Maybe they're the ones who are right.” This was the first learning. It requires confidence to question what everyone else believes is the truth. That was a foundational lesson for me. It's made me not be afraid of challenging held beliefs.

That was the first one. Let's look at other challenges along the way. The other challenge was going from a startup to a much larger company. In a startup, when you're one of the founders, you decide, “This is the path. This is what we need to do.” It's like having a small boat. You hold onto the wheel and steer it however you want. If you're sailing, you are holding the lines, and you do whatever you think is the right thing to do. When you're in a much larger company, you have to bring everyone with you on this journey.

One of the first things I had to learn in working in a larger organization was how to do that. How do you communicate your vision and strategy? How do you get other people to follow you? One of the most amazing lessons and people I worked for was the person who headed up the broadcast division when I worked at Avid. Avid was a company that was a leader in the post-production world. Every movie ever made that had won an Oscar had been made using Avid.

This was back in 2003. There's the glamor of working in such a company where there are all these movie posters. You even saw famous directors or editors walking through the offices every once in a while. There was all this glamor. Avid was this leader in post-production, but they were getting into the broadcast world. At the time, Sony dominated broadcast. We didn't stand a chance in broadcast, but David, who was the head of broadcast, had a vision for the division. He felt that if we could figure out how to crack the end-to-end workflow for broadcast and understand how newsrooms operate and give them this end-to-end workflow, we could oust Sony.

My role was to was to figure out what it is our broadcast customers needed and be able to build that out. We didn't have money. That was one of our challenges. Our broadcast division wasn't bringing in much money. It was only an investment for the company. We had to scrounge with little investment. The way we approached it was that we would talk to companies like CBS or NBC. We would say, “We can build all this functionality for you, but it would be custom engineering.” We would get them to pay us to build out functionality little by little.

We weren't building things that were custom. We told them, “If we build everything custom for you, this product is going to die in the mine. You'll be stuck with something that's all custom. You'll never be able to get serviced on.” They invested in building it out with us. Over time, a whole bunch of different broadcasters. We were able to grow this whole broadcast product. It became an end-to-end solution. Broadcast became the major revenue contributor to Avid. Within several years, we had completely conquered the broadcast market. Every major broadcaster around the world was using Avid.

How do we do that? What was fascinating was David had this clarity of vision. I was only 25 to 28 at the time. Early in my career, I got this role model showing me that when you know what that end state is and the vision is to get there, you can even teach a 28-year-old or a 25-year-old to negotiate with heads of broadcast divisions to negotiate for exactly what you want to build in the product and avoid what you don't want to build.

That takes communicating vision and what we want to build out. You give them autonomy to make it happen. That was such a brilliant lesson that I felt like I learned. It was in contrast to my whole startup experience, where you feel like you are telling people what to do. In this case, you communicate a vision and strategy, and you give people autonomy.

There are two Cs that come up to me for both of those parts of the story, one of which is that you talked about confidence. There's also another part of this, which is being a contrarian. You have to go against the grain and be able to speak up and say, “Everyone is going left. It's time for us to go right.” It's hard, but I think that's where the experience starts to bear out. We need to do things differently if we want different results. If everyone in the room has one view, we need someone who's a contrarian and going to be able to say, “Is that the right path? Maybe it's another path.”

Seeing that there's that confidence that builds leads to another C, which is communication, is at the forefront of all this. If you can't communicate a good vision and idea, you're not going to be able to break through and do something bold and radical. That's what you ended up being able to do through having a good mentor and someone who helped you to see that, but having you do that through this process of seeing something bigger than what was already in existence. Would you agree?

That's so true.

I don't know why all the best words start with C. It was such an amazing demonstration of what you shared and seeing that sometimes, the organizations that are in power are only there because people accept the status quo and they don't see anything new. Something new comes in because people are able to challenge the status quo.

That's such an important point, even when you look at how people rise in corporate leadership. People who rise in corporate leadership are the ones who agree with their bosses. Therefore, they rise through the ranks. That's not always the equivalent of good leadership. Sometimes, you have to be able to question the direction. Good leadership requires questioning the status quo as opposed to going with the flow.

It also has a sense of doing it diplomatically, which means having good communication skills and not being like, “You're wrong. You're an idiot.” It's more about like, “Here's another way to look at it. Here's another thing we could try.” Those things are what a good person who comes up in the ranks can be able to do. It is to say, “I see and understand you, but I also have another thought. This is going to be something we could try.”

That's such an important point because it's not about being contrarian and opposing what someone said but being able to communicate your rationale. That was one of the biggest things I learned over the course of my career. One challenge that I found, and there are many research studies that illustrate this, is that women are often judged more harshly for being assertive and challenging the status quo.

You'll read research studies that show that a woman often gets feedback saying, “You're not building consensus. You're being disagreeable.” We heard that Hillary Clinton was not likable. The point is that a man saying the same thing and being assertive is seen as good leadership. As a woman, I've had to learn how to challenge authority without sounding like I'm being the contrarian and opposing and being this obstacle.

The Vision Vs. Survival Framework

One of the ways that I've found myself doing this diplomatically is I go to the whiteboard and drop an X and Y axis where the Y axis is if it is a good vision fit or not. I use this when I want to challenge whether we should be doing this or not. Everyone else thinks that we shouldn't do this. I'm advocating for why we should or the opposite. The Y axis that I draw is, is this good for the vision or not? The X-axis that I draw is, is this helpful for survival or not? What I'm drawing up is the yin and yang of long-term versus short-term. The X axis is short-term, and the Y axis is long-term, which is vision fit.

Communicate rationale, not just opposition. Use frameworks like the vision vs. survival matrix to have productive discussions about product decisions.

Things that are good for both vision and survival are easy decisions. We'll hardly ever argue about those things. Let's do it. There are things that are good for the vision, but they're not good for the short term. Maybe they don't bring in revenue in the short term. This example of investing in broadcast was an example of investing in the vision. It's good for the vision, but it wasn't bringing revenue in the short term.

The opposite of that is taking on vision debt. It's good for the short term, where maybe it's bringing in revenues, but it's bad for the long-term vision. An example of this is if I'm taking on custom features where the salesperson tells me, “Let's do this feature for this customer. It'll win up this mega deal.” If you take on a lot of such custom features, this is how you catch obsessive sales disorder. That's a lot of vision debt.

When I'm at the whiteboard, and I drop this X and Y axis, I'm conveying rationale, saying, “Here's why we need to invest in the vision and why I think this functionality falls in investing in the vision.” It’s the opposite. I'm arguing for Y. This is vision debt. It leads to a more productive discussion because I'm not opposing you.

It's not personal. We're both talking about whether this is good for the company's vision or not. Is this good for the short term or long term? Our disagreement is not subjective. It's a lot more objective. We can talk about it if we disagree with the vision. Are we disagreeing on the short-term survival of the company? Is this helping revenues or not?

It becomes a lot more about this vision versus survival and more productive discussions. I'm not asserting my will. I'm conveying my rationale. We can have a productive conversation and an outcome. When we left this meeting, I conveyed and helped spread my influence and thinking. When you are off making other decisions, you are thinking, “Is this good for vision?” You'll think like me. These are the kinds of tricks that I've had to develop. Radical Product Thinking is filled with several years of this, where it's about helping scale your influence and how you convey rationale and communicate in this strategic manner.

This is brilliant the way you described this because it drives home the point of sense that we need to be able to create pathways for people to be able to justify their thinking in a way that allows them to make a case and not feel like they're coming in and saying, “I'm going to throw a wrench in the plan.” No, you're coming in with a sound argument based on thoughts around ways of looking at things and a good framework.

That makes people think it's not someone wanting to be different for the sake of being different. It's coming in with a sound argument for being able to say, “This is why we should think differently about this situation. I'm not trying to go against you because I don't like you or the way that you've decided to look at things. It's being more rational.” I want to get back into the thinking because what you shared is wonderful. I want to think about how you make the decision to finally go off on your own. This is now your thought leader doing your own thing. Eventually, you left the comfort of being inside an organization. What was that like for you?

It is like taking a jump into the deep waters. It's been incredibly rewarding and scary at the same time. It's learning what you like and don't like. It’s learning more about yourself. I'll give you one example of something that I've learned. It takes a lot of effort to write a LinkedIn post or a blog post. It takes me ages to write one. Why? I feel like if it's been said already, I don't bother saying it again. Every post has to be some brand-new idea that has not been said before. It takes time to write anything.

I find it to be incredibly rewarding to write blog posts and LinkedIn posts. I invite people to check that out. It has been a challenge. It does tend to burn me out. If I focus on too much marketing or writing too much content, I have to find what is the right balance between working on consulting versus doing workshops versus creating thoughtful content that inspires me. If it doesn't inspire me, I'm not putting it out. It's been interesting and incredibly rewarding.

Writing The Radical Product Thinking Book

One of the best parts about doing what I'm doing is the fact that many people have reached out over time to say that it's made a difference to them. They've been applying this not only at work but also in their personal lives or wherever they volunteer. It's changed their mindset. That has made me happy. The counterpart to that right is when I set out to write this book. It became an obsession. You can always hear the passion in my voice. Anything that I get passionate about turns quickly from passion to an obsession. This book was no exception.

Finding a publisher to write the book and to create this book that feels like a window into my soul took a long time. There are lots of rejections. There were many times that I kept wondering. I’m like, “Why am I doing this? Should I be doing this?” What kept me going was applying the whole Radical Product Thinking approach to the book itself and thinking about my book as a mechanism for change.

My vision was to help people who want to build better products and create change in the world through products. I wanted to equip them with systematic know-how. My idea was that even if five people read the book, I wanted those five people to come out knowing how to do it. If I can create that impact, it is fine. That was the vision behind it.

I wasn't measuring success purely by numbers. In the end, it spent time on Amazon's bestseller list. I'm happy about that, but that was not how I was measuring success. That was the measure of what made me happy about the book. It was true that to the vision. A lot of people have written to me unsolicited that this made such a difference. That was what was important.

Something came to mind as you described it. This is a sense of you wanting people to make better products so we can make a better world. That's the goal. It's a movement. Through this book that you've put out there, which is a very personal thing, that's one of the challenges of going into this world. When you start working for yourself, it's personal.

There are a lot of things that go along with that, which can be challenging. Writing posts and doing things like that can have you all wound up, like, “Is this the right message? Is this going to connect with people? Is it going to do all this? Where should I spend my time to maximize?” It all gets wound up in the personal part of who you are. It's hard because of that. It's almost like you want to be able to say, “Outsource all this stuff. Someone else takes responsibility because you don't want to have that emotional attachment to it.” You can't. You have to be in it because otherwise, people won't see your voice.

There's also a part of this, which is to be of service to people, knowing that if you don't do these things, how will they get the gift of this movement and the things that you're sharing? That's the gift back to you, which is I get to bring a movement out into the world that helps other people do what I want them to do. It’s to make better products.

What you said is true. Even when you think about this vision versus survival, you can apply that to your own work, like when you start working for yourself. You think about your vision. That's the part where you said you want to be of service and feel like you're making a difference. This X axis is like, is it sustainable for you? You can define sustainability in different ways. It could be financial sustainability, mental well-being, or sustainability on different counts.

When you're doing things sometimes that are good for the vision but it's not sustainable for you, what you're taking on is you're taking on body debt. The opposite of that is maybe it's sustainable for you, but if it's not good for the vision, I call that soul debt. Both body debt and soul debt can burn you out. You have to figure out how do you balance those. You need to do things that are more in the ideal quadrant, which is good for vision and sustainability. Sometimes, you have a little bit of body debt and soul debt, but you have to find the right balance for yourself.

I can see a book coming out on that or a blog post because we need to share that. There are many people who feel that viscerally, and it's such a beautiful concept to bring to life.

I have a different book planned as the second book.

We have many things to cover. I want to give you space. Where to next for you? What are some things that are on the horizon? You got some cool things cooking up. Share about that.

I'll share what I've worked on. I've introduced Radical Product Thinking Certifications. People can get a certification in the Radical Product Thinking methodology and be able to apply that. The way you can get that certification is to first take the free visioning course. You can try it out and see how much you like it and start to see the power of Radical Product Thinking. You can take two live workshops that help you work through the radical product thinking strategy and how you prioritize. Those will be hands-on exercises with live feedback, where you can truly refine your vision strategy prioritization.

Another set of workshops will help you figure out how to translate your strategy and prioritization into how you measure success and how you apply the Radical Product Thinking methodology to create a better culture in your organization that's helping you innovate smarter. You can look up the RadicalProduct.com website. That's where you'll find all of these certifications where you can get this certification. You can also get the Radical Product Thinking book.

Introducing Radical Product Ethics

I'll tell you about the next book I'm working on, which is near and dear to my heart. If people are interested in the next book, please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn and share your thoughts. The next book's title is Radical Product Ethics. It's about how we can build more ethical products. There's so much talk finally about ethics, but I feel like a lot of that talk is focused on ethics in terms of AI. I find that thinking at a more shallow level. The problem of ethics is much more deep-rooted. I'll give you a quick sneak preview of that.

The Cumulative Impact Of Small Decisions

The reason I say it's shallow thinking is we often think about ethics almost like we're ethical heroes in waiting, where I'm one day going to be asked to cross this line in the sand and heroically say, “No, I'm not going to do that.” That's how we think ethics manifests itself in building products. In reality, you are never asked to cross a line in the sand. Nobody is going to ask you to do something atrocious. The way unethical products come about is because of lots of small decisions. It’s lots of small decisions that add up over time. You only realize what you've done by looking in the rearview mirror.

An example of that is WhatsApp. If you look at WhatsApp, it's an example of an unethical product in my mind. Why? WhatsApp saves metadata about who you are talking to, who you're messaging with, how often, and how long. If you look at how WhatsApp saves data, they take your entire contact list and upload it to their servers. This way, they know who's in your actual social network, who you call, and who you're friends with.

All of this data is what Facebook wanted, which is why they bought WhatsApp. If you look at how these decisions came about, the founders of WhatsApp knew that this was sensitive data. They said, “We would never sell WhatsApp because this is sensitive data. Who knows what an acquiring company would do with it.” It begs the question. If you knew this was bad to do, why did you do it?

It felt inconsequential at the time because we could save this metadata, but we're not going to sell it to anyone. It was a small decision that was inconsequential at the time. This is what happens. We make those small decisions. It's after WhatsApp was sold to Facebook that the founders quit Facebook after they had vested and said, “This was bad what we did.” They donated money to Signal, which is instead an app that doesn't store all this metadata.

My point is the way we build ethical products is not by being this hero who makes the right decision once. It requires constant persistence and climbing over obstacles all the time to do the right thing. What drives us to do that is knowing that you are voting for the world that you want to create with your labor. Unless you internalize that belief, it's hard to find that internal drive to do the right thing, and you constantly persist through these obstacles in trying to do the right thing.

Your work is a vote for the world you want to create. Internalize this belief to find the drive to make ethical product decisions consistently.

You blew my mind with this idea. You shared this briefly with me before. Now that you put this out into the world, it's amazing that it is happening. This is the book that we need as soon as possible. No pressure. This is something that a lot of us are concerned about. We need to start thinking about how we integrate the playbooks of entrepreneurs. How are we ensuring that we're thinking a few steps ahead, not thinking at the moment?

What I want to offer people is a framework for how you incorporate ethics into how you build products. What you said is the most important part of it.

I could talk about this for hours. I want to leave it at that because I want to leave some room for you to be able to share this during your next book and bring it to life. Speaking of books, I have a last question I have to ask, which I love asking and finding out more about. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you?

I'll mention two that I've found to be thought-provoking. One is a book called Permanent Record by Edward Snowden. It makes you realize that a lot of stuff that you thought was science fiction in terms of surveillance and what is important for democracy in terms of free speech like a lot of that is real in terms of how one could store data or save data when you build products and why it's dangerous. It gives you perspective in terms of what it means to build ethical products that do not erode privacy.

The second book that I want to mention is a book called The Tyranny of Merit. It's by Michael Sandel. That book is about this realization that we think the world is a meritocracy. A meritocratic world is a good society. You realize that rethinking some of those concepts means that you need equality for meritocracy to work. When you have more equality, the concept of merit works. Without that, we're creating an increasingly unequal world. It's two thought-provoking books that challenge ideas that I feel should be mandatory reading.

You make me think. You have such a brilliant perspective on things. You always bring new ideas into my world. I'm thrilled about that. I can't thank you enough for coming to the show. This was amazing. There are lots of great stories and insights. I can't wait to take your course. No pressure, but this new book, you have to get it out in the world. I'm going to buy the first copy. I'll be ready for that. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure chatting with you, Tony.

Before I let you go, you mentioned your website earlier, but what's the best place for people to reach out if they want to learn more about you?

RadicalProduct.com is the website. You can get the free toolkit there. You can also learn about the Radical Product Thinking certifications there. You can get the book Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. It's on Amazon and other bookstores. People are always welcome to connect with me or reach out on LinkedIn. I always love hearing their stories.

Thanks to the readers for coming on the journey. I know you're completely blown away by all the great insights. Please do reach out. Buy the book. It is brilliant. Take this course. This is going to be amazing. Thank you again.

Important Links

• Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter
• RadicalProduct.com
• LinkedIn – Radhika Dutt
• Permanent Record
• The Tyranny of Merit

 Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://www.ipurposepartners.com/podcast