Radical Product Thinking

CHAPTER 2

PRODUCT DISEASES

When Good Products Go Bad

Without a clear vision and strategy behind iterations, products become bloated, fragmented, directionless, and driven by irrelevant metrics. They catch what I now call product diseases.

Most of us learn to build products through trial and error and develop an intuition for building products. Using intuition to keep your vision connected to your strategy, priorities, and tactical activities is like doing algebra in your head. It works well for easy problems, but for more complex problems you can easily make a mistake. Products become diseased when the vision becomes disconnected from the execution. This happens often, which is why product diseases are ubiquitous across industries and sizes ...