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Book summaries
  • Pages
    • Index
      • Radical product thinking
        • Introduction. A Repeatable Model for Building World-Changing Products
        • Part I. Innovating Smarter Requires a New Mindset
          • Chapter 1. Why we Need Radical Product Thinking
          • icon picker
            Chapter 2. Product diseases
        • Part II. The five elements of radical product thinking
          • Chapter 3. Vision
          • Chapter 4. Strategy
          • Chapter 5. Prioritization
          • Chapter 6. Execution and measurement
          • Chapter 7. Culture
        • Part III. Making our world a little more like the one we want to live in
          • Chapter 8. Digital pollution
          • Chapter 9. Ethics
          • Conclusion
      • Escaping the build trap (WIP)
        • Preface
        • Part I. The build trap
          • 1. The Value Exchange System
          • 2. Constraints on the value exchange system
          • 3. Projects versus products versus services
          • 4. The product-led organisation
          • 5. What we know and what we don't
        • Part II. The role of the product managr
          • Chapter 6. Bad product manager archetypes
          • Chapter 7. A great product manager
          • Chapter 8. The product manager career path
          • Chapter 9. Organising your teams
        • Part III. Strategy
          • Chapter 10. What is strategy?
          • Chapter 11. Strategic gaps
      • Strategize (To do)
      • UX strategy (To do)
      • Product roadmaps relaunched (To do)
Book summaries
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Chapter 2. Product diseases
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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.
These seven diseases are common across industries and sizes of organizations:
Hero Syndrome strikes when we focus on external recognition instead of creating the change that inspires us.
Strategic Swelling means building a wide range of capabilities but lacking the focus to develop any individual capability to a breakthrough level.
Obsessive Sales Disorder means borrowing against the long-term vision to close short-term deals.
Hypermetricemia is focusing excessively on measurable outcomes to determine success, irrespective of whether those are the right things to measure.
Locked-In Syndrome means overly committing to a specific technology or approach because it has been successful in the past.
Pivotitis means changing direction whenever things get tough and leads to exhausted, confused, and demoralized teams.
Narcissus Complex means focusing on your own goals and needs to such an extent that you lose focus on the change you’re trying to bring about.
These diseases can be cured by starting with a clear vision and systematically translating it into your everyday activities.
This list is not exhaustive. You might be experiencing a disease in your organization that’s unique to your industry and getting in the way of creating your impact. Calling a disease by name is the first step toward a cure. Talk to your colleagues or have a group discussion about the diseases you’re seeing in your organization. You can then begin to address each disease’s root cause—either the lack of a clear vision and strategy or a break in the chain when translating the vision into action.
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