Skip to content
Create a compelling vision of the change you want to bring about.Craft a strategy to give you an actionable plan.Prioritize so that your vision features in your everyday decision making.Measure what matters to know if you’re making progress toward your vision.Embed your purpose in your organizational culture.
Book summaries
- Pages
Share
Explore
Conclusion
Radical product thinkers creating change
As you build vision-driven products to bring about the change you want to see in the world, you can take inspiration from other Radical Product Thinkers around the world.
Finance as a radical product
“It’s not enough for finance to do no harm. Finance must be a force for good” (Ravi Menon, managing director of the Monethary Authority of Singapore).
The idea that profitability and responsibility are mutually exclusive is more prevalent in the financial sector than in most other industries.
To make finance a force for good, Menon envisions that activities in the financial sector must be connected to a human-centered purpose.
“We’re very worried about the fact that [having lots of data] can create an increasingly larger group of people who become uninsurable or their premiums will become extremely high,” Menon explains. “But how do you make the argument that you must use less information in deciding premiums?” The algorithm may be making data-driven decisions, but this may still lead to outcomes that are not good for society by excluding parts of the population.
In 2018, leaders in the financial industry, AI researchers, and MAS leadership cocreated a set of FEAT Principles (fairness, ethics, accountability, and transparency).
In translating this human-centered approach into action, product teams at MAS use the RPT methodology to define a vision that’s centered on users and the change they’re setting out to create for them. In execution and measurement, teams measure the success of their digital products by whether they’re creating the change they intended for their users.
There’s also a conscious effort to embed the values of empathy and being centered on people in the organizational culture. For example, internal guidelines dictate that whenever possible, an MAS officer should not request a data submission from the industry just before leaving for a long weekend as this would likely mean that compliance officers at banks would have to work over the holiday to provide this data.
Menon is very clear that empathy for financial institutions doesn’t mean loosening regulations or their enforcement: “Even if our answer is a ‘No,’ we can make the process of getting to that answer easier for the person on the other end. We can treat them as another human.” To be clear, growth in the financial sector and monetary KPIs are very important for MAS. A declining financial sector would have to focus on survival and make it harder for finance to be a force for good. Going back to the two-by-two of profit versus purpose, MAS is pursuing growth and profits in the financial sector to support a human-centered purpose.
Menon takes a clear stance in favor of stakeholder capitalism and responsible profits over shareholder capitalism, where the sole responsibility of a business is to make profits: “Every business needs to define its larger purpose by how it’s making the world a better place. Building the best product and maximizing shareholder value should still be subordinate to this larger purpose.”
Each of us can build radical products
When we take a vision-driven approach to building products, we think holistically about the impact of our work. For example, if you’re a vision-driven software developer, you don’t find satisfaction just in making your code work but in whether the system works to achieve your shared goal.
Building radical products in our personal lives
In building your product, instead of iterating in the pure pursuit of financial KPIs, you can take the purpose-driven approach of Radical Product Thinking. RPT gives you a methodology to systematically build successful products while avoiding the common product diseases that get in the way by following these five steps:
The RPT approach also helps you embrace the responsibility that comes with building successful products that impact people’s lives. You can bake your human-centered purpose into every step as you build your products. Over the last 50 years, it has been ingrained in us that the role of business (and therefore of products) is the pursuit of profit. We had accepted the idea that we could either build successful products or engage in philanthropy to make the world a better place. This ideology was reflected in how we were building products—we often overrelied on iteration to optimize for financial metrics. But in the process, our products have caught diseases and often inflicted collateral damage to society. We’re seeing that this is no longer sustainable. You can build vision-driven products that do good and do well.
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.