Joe: The phrase 'move fast and break things' practically built Silicon Valley. It’s a mantra of progress. Lewis: Oh yeah, it’s the gospel of every startup founder with a hoodie and a dream. Iterate, pivot, disrupt! Joe: But what if that same mindset, when applied to a 70-ton airplane, breaks people? Today, we explore how the relentless push for small, seemingly smart improvements can lead to catastrophic failure. Lewis: Whoa. Okay, that's a heavy start. You've got my attention. This feels like it goes way beyond just software bugs. Joe: It absolutely does. This all comes from a fascinating and, I think, critically important book called Radical Product Thinking by Radhika Dutt. Lewis: And she's not just an academic theorizing from an ivory tower, right? I looked her up. She's an MIT-trained engineer who's been in the trenches, founded companies, and has seen this stuff firsthand across a dozen industries. That gives her perspective some real weight. Joe: Exactly. She’s lived the product life. And she opens her book with a story that is absolutely chilling, one that perfectly illustrates the core problem she’s trying to solve. It's the story of the Boeing 737 MAX. Lewis: A story we all think we know, but I have a feeling we're about to see it from a completely different and much more terrifying angle.

Joe: That's the perfect way to put it. We see it as a story of corporate greed or regulatory failure, and those are parts of it. But Dutt frames it as a failure of product thinking. To understand it, we have to go back to 2010. Boeing's biggest rival, Airbus, announces a new plane, the A320neo. It’s 20% more fuel-efficient, which is a massive deal for airlines. Lewis: Okay, so the competition just dropped a bombshell. Boeing has to respond, and fast. Joe: They have to. And they have a choice. They can design a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane from the ground up. That’s the long, expensive, visionary path. Or, they can take their workhorse, the 737, which was first designed in the 1960s, and iterate on it. Slap on some new, bigger, more efficient engines and call it a day. Lewis: Let me guess. They chose the faster, cheaper option. The iteration. Joe: They chose the iteration. They called it the 737 MAX. But there was a huge problem. The new engines were so big they didn't fit properly under the old 1960s-era wing design. The engineers had to move them forward and higher up. This one change completely altered the plane's aerodynamics. It made the plane's nose pitch up dangerously in certain situations. The plane became, in engineering terms, dynamically unstable. Lewis: Hold on. They made the plane physically unstable and then just… kept going? That sounds completely insane. How is that even legal, let alone a good idea? Joe: Here is where the product thinking gets truly dark. Instead of fixing the fundamental physical problem, which would have meant a costly redesign, they decided to create a software patch. A little piece of code called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. Lewis: A software patch for a hardware flaw on a passenger jet. What could possibly go wrong? Joe: MCAS was designed to automatically push the plane's nose down if it sensed it was pitching up too steeply, counteracting the instability. The crucial, and tragic, part is that they designed it to work off a single sensor, with no redundancy. And they made it so powerful it could override the pilot's commands. Lewis: This is getting worse with every sentence. So if that one little sensor failed… Joe: The software would think the plane was stalling when it wasn't, and it would force the nose down, again and again and again, while the pilots fought desperately to pull it back up. And that is exactly what happened. First on Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018, and then again on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019. Two brand-new planes fell out of the sky. 346 people died. Lewis: That's horrifying. It's not just a business failure; it's a profound ethical collapse. And Dutt argues this all stems from a way of thinking? Joe: Precisely. She calls it being "iteration-led." Boeing's vision statement at the time was full of inspiring words like "connect, protect, explore and inspire the world." But their actions showed their real, unstated vision was to protect their market share and stock price in the short term. They were chasing what the book calls a "local maximum." Lewis: Okay, that's a term we need to unpack. What does 'local maximum' actually mean in this context? Joe: Imagine you're trying to climb the highest mountain in a range, but it's a foggy day. You start climbing, and every step you take is upwards. You keep going up and up until you can't go any higher. You've reached a peak! You think you've succeeded. But when the fog clears, you realize you're just on a small foothill. The real summit, the global maximum, is miles away, and you can't get there from where you are. Lewis: Wow, that’s a perfect analogy. Boeing optimized for the foothill. They made the "best" possible version of their old 737, but in doing so, they completely missed the chance to build a truly great, and safe, new plane. They got stuck. Joe: They got stuck. And the cost was catastrophic. They iterated their way into a disaster because they lost sight of their fundamental vision, which should have been building the safest, most reliable aircraft in the world. They traded a long-term vision for a short-term business goal. Lewis: It makes you wonder how many other companies are doing this. Maybe not with consequences this tragic, but getting stuck on their own little hills, optimizing products into oblivion, adding features nobody wants, all because they're iterating without a map. Joe: That's the core disease the book identifies. And it's everywhere. From bloated software to misguided business strategies. Look at General Electric under Jack Welch. Their vision was to be number one or two in every market. Sounds good, right? Lewis: Yeah, sounds ambitious. Dominant. Joe: But it led them to focus obsessively on quarterly profits. They started using their finance arm, GE Capital, to smooth over weaknesses in their industrial businesses. They ended up buying a subprime mortgage lender right before the 2008 crisis. They chased the local maximum of "consistent profit growth" and it nearly destroyed the company. It's the same pattern. Lewis: Okay, so that's the nightmare scenario of getting it wrong. It's bleak. It makes you wonder if there's a better way. Does the book offer an antidote to this kind of short-sighted thinking?

Joe: It does. And thankfully, it's just as powerful as the problem is frightening. The antidote is the core of the book: Radical Product Thinking. It’s a complete mindset shift. It says you should stop focusing on your product, and start focusing on the change you want to create in the world. Lewis: I like the sound of that, but it also sounds a bit… fluffy. How does that translate into actual decisions? Joe: That’s the "Radical" part. It’s not just a mission statement you hang on the wall. It’s a systematic, repeatable model for engineering change. And Dutt gives a fantastic example of it in action, a story of a company that used this thinking to dethrone an industry giant. Lewis: After the Boeing story, we need a win. Let's hear it. Joe: The story is about Avid Technology in the early 2000s. At the time, the world of broadcast news was completely dominated by Sony. Every news story was filmed on tape, edited on massive, complex Sony machines. It was the undisputed king. Lewis: I remember those big editing bays. They looked like the cockpit of a spaceship. Joe: Exactly. And Avid was a smaller player trying to break in. An iteration-led approach would have been to build a slightly cheaper, slightly faster tape-editing machine. To climb that same foothill Sony was on top of. But the head of Avid's broadcast division, David Schleifer, had a different idea. He had a radical vision. Lewis: The global maximum. Joe: The global maximum. His vision wasn't "a better editing machine." His vision was a "completely digital, tape-free newsroom." A world where a story could be shot on a digital camera, edited on a laptop in the field, and sent directly to air, with no physical tapes involved at all. Lewis: Ah, so the difference is, Boeing was just trying to build a slightly better ladder to get a little higher, while Avid had a blueprint for a rocket ship and was building one module at a time. Joe: That is the perfect way to describe it. They didn't try to build the whole rocket ship at once. That would have been impossible. They executed their vision incrementally. First, they built a system for digital storage. Then a tool for journalists to write scripts. Then a simple video editor. Each piece was a viable product on its own, but they were all designed to connect, like LEGO bricks, to build towards that grand vision of the fully digital newsroom. Lewis: So they were still iterating, but it was iteration with a purpose. Every step was taking them closer to that ultimate goal. Joe: Precisely. And within five years, they had completely taken over. Nearly every major TV news organization in the world was using Avid's suite of products. They didn't just compete with Sony; they made Sony's entire way of working obsolete. That's the power of a vision-driven approach. Lewis: This sounds fantastic, but I have to play devil's advocate. A lot of companies today are obsessed with agile, with two-week sprints, with shipping features constantly. The book's reception is generally very positive, but some readers and critics point out that this 'vision-first' approach can be hard to sell in a culture that wants results this quarter. How does RPT fit into that reality? Joe: That's a fantastic and very real-world question. Dutt addresses this by saying Radical Product Thinking isn't anti-Agile or anti-Lean. It's the necessary foundation for them. Your vision and strategy are the GPS that tells you your destination. Agile and Lean are the car that gets you there efficiently. Without the GPS, you're just driving really fast in circles. She provides a framework to connect the two. Lewis: Okay, so what are the core elements of that framework? If I'm a product manager listening to this, what's the first step to becoming a "Radical Product Thinker"? Joe: The book breaks it down into five logical elements. It starts with Vision – crafting that detailed picture of the world you want to create. Then comes Strategy, which is your high-level plan for making that vision real. She uses a clever acronym, RDCL, for this. Lewis: RDCL? Joe: It stands for Real pain points, Design, Capabilities, and Logistics. It’s a checklist to make sure your strategy is grounded. Then comes Prioritization, which is about balancing your long-term vision against your short-term survival needs. After that is Execution and Measurement, which is where you use your Lean and Agile methods to build and test hypotheses. And finally, and maybe most importantly, is Culture – creating an organization that thinks this way naturally. Lewis: That last one, culture, feels like the hardest part. You can have the best vision in the world, but if your organization's culture is still rewarding the Boeing way of thinking... Joe: You'll fail. Which is why she dedicates so much of the book to it. It’s about creating psychological safety, where people can challenge ideas without fear, and aligning everyone around that shared purpose. It’s about making the vision everyone's job, not just the CEO's.

Lewis: When you lay it all out like that, the contrast is just so stark. Between the Boeing story and the Avid story. It’s two completely different philosophies of creation. Joe: It really is. And what this all boils down to is a fundamental choice every product creator, every leader, every engineer has to make. You can either be a problem-solver or a vision-creator. Iteration solves today's problems, it patches today's leaks. And that's sometimes necessary. Lewis: But it won't stop the ship from sinking in the long run if the hull is fundamentally flawed. Joe: Exactly. A radical vision, as Dutt puts it, is about building the world you want to live in tomorrow. It's the difference between patching a broken system and engineering a new, stronger one from the ground up. Lewis: And that brings in the powerful ethical dimension she talks about near the end of the book. The idea of a 'Hippocratic Oath of Product.' First, do no harm. It’s not just about building cool stuff; it's about taking responsibility for the 'digital pollution' or, in Boeing's case, the very real, physical damage our products can cause when our vision is corrupted. Joe: That might be the most 'radical' idea in the whole book. That our job isn't just to maximize shareholder value or engagement metrics. Our job is to be good ancestors. To build things that make the world healthier, fairer, and safer. Lewis: It's a much higher bar to clear. So, for everyone listening who feels inspired by this but also a little overwhelmed, what's the one thing they can do tomorrow to start? Joe: The one concrete step the book suggests is to simply stop and ask the foundational question: What is the change I want to bring about in the world with this product, this feature, this company? Be specific. Paint a picture of that end state. Start there, before you write a single line of code or design a single screen. Lewis: A powerful question to end on. It shifts the entire focus from 'what are we building' to 'why are we building it.' Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.