Product Agility

Radhika Dutt: From Goals to Puzzles: A Different Way to Lead Product Teams - Productized 2025 TalkInTen

• Ben Maynard, Barbara Fazeka, Radhika Dutt

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Productized in Lisbon is exceptional: thoughtful programming, a warm international community, and practical ideas you can use Monday morning. We’re honoured to partner with Productized for the third year running and proud to bring you this special Talk-in-Ten series thanks to Bobcats Coding.

In this short, sharp episode recorded on the balcony at Productized, we dig into a mindset shift with Radhika Dutt champions: stop obsessing about rigid goals and start framing work as puzzles—curious, solvable, and energising.

Key topics discussed

  • Why reframing goals as puzzles increases curiosity and engagement
  • The mismatch between traditional OKRs and complex product work
  • How puzzle-setting supports transparency and real learning
  • Practical three-question approach: How well did it work? What did we learn? What will we try next?
  • Radha’s upcoming book, the OHLS toolkit and how to contribute


[00:00:00] - Live from Productized: Quick intro and why Lisbon matters: A snapshot of the conference vibe and our gratitude to partners.

[00:01:10] - Why puzzles, not goals: Radha explains how puzzles invite curiosity and reduce the perverse incentives of rigid targets.

[00:05:30] - The limits of measurable goals: When measurement creates illusionary progress and hides the real problem.

[00:11:00] - Puzzle-setting in practice: Three guiding questions to diagnose and iterate product work.

[00:15:20] - Book, toolkit & next steps: Radha on her forthcoming book, the OHLS toolkit and how listeners can contribute.

Guest bio:

Radhika Dutt is a seasoned product thinker who challenges conventions in product strategy and org design. She helps teams move from mechanical goal-chasing to curiosity-led problem solving. Radha is authoring a new book on puzzle-setting and maintains practical toolkits at radicalproduct.com.


Thank you to our Sponsor: Bobcats Coding — Budapest-based digital product studio specialising in AI engineering and end-to-end product development. Download their free AI economics guidebook at bobcatscoding.com. We’re honoured to partner with Productized and grateful to Bobcats for making this Lisbon se

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast where we explore the ever changing world of product leadership and org design, helping you navigate complexity and build better outcomes for your people and your customers. This week we're coming to you live from Lisbon for the third year in a row at the Productize conference where I'm grabbing 10 minute conversations with product thinkers, leaders and innovators from around the world. These quick fire chats are all about what's shaping our industry right now, from AI and product strategy to the human side of building great products. Now a huge thank you goes out to Bobcatz Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest and Lisbon based digital product studio specializing in AI engineering and end to end digital product development. They're also on a mission to educate the market, exploring a new topic every six months and this fall is no exception. Their latest AI economics guidebook is out now and you can download it for free@bobcatscoding.com now here's your talking 10. So this is the last conversation that I'll be having at productise 25, because after this I'm not talking to anybody. I'm just gonna give up having conversations with people. No, because tomorrow I'm gonna guess you're. Saving the best for last. Absolutely. No, we have a really strong finish to this. I think it's solid. No, we have. We've had Justin speaking of Rich Mironov and now we've got Yu Radhikatha. It's phenomenal. I'm excited to be ending in this way. I'm not around. Tomorrow, Saloni, my dear friend, my twin, will be standing in for me, co hosting with the wonderful Bobcat's people, the co founders and CEOs etc. So, yes, this is my last conversation. I'm going to end on a high and it's been such a long day, I can't think of a better way to end it. So, Radha Kadat, thank you so much for coming back onto the podcast for the third time. Fourth time. Yeah, something like that. And I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having me as the last guest on this one. Yeah, it's going to be fantastic. And then, Barbara, you're co hosting and you're also co founder and you're also CEO of podcast coding, isn't that correct? Absolutely correct. And as you said it like for the 10th time today, I have to tell you, this was the best version so far. Well, thank you. Well, you are the sponsors, so I need to make sure that I get It. I've been told to get it into every episode, so I think I've ticked the box. They say, baba, you're feeling ready for this, aren't you? Okay, so let's not waste any more time of me blabbering shit. Radhika, you are doing a talk, creating change together. That hardly describes it. So would you like to have a go at describing it in a different way? Creating change together? Yes. It's more like shaking things up like a rattle. It's about a fundamental mindset shift of, you know, instead of thinking about goals and being so goal driven, thinking about puzzles. So why puzzles? Because it's not something that we use very often as terminology in the corporate world. You know, in the corporate world, it's all about goals. Rah, rah, have you hit those targets? So why puzzles? And the best way to just describe this is to experience it. So I'm going to ask you two questions and just tell me how you feel at the end of each question. Right. So the first question is, what goals do you want to achieve this year for your company? Just think about how you feel. What goals do you want to achieve for your company? And the second question is, what puzzles would you like to solve for your company this year? Okay, first one, frustrated. Second one, like, curious. Isn't that interesting? I find something very similar, but Ben, go on. Oh, no, my second. My opinion doesn't count actually in this one. No. You're the CEO of a company. It's different. But I agree with you. Like, goals makes me feel nervous. It makes me think of something which I can't quite figure out how to articulate and it feels like I'm forced to decide upon something. So it makes me feel nervous. But puzzles creates an element of the potential for joy in solving it, which I find encouraging. And this is what I find in a lot of people. Like, I was running a workshop today on exactly this topic. And when I ask people to speak up and share their experience, a lot of people, when they talk about puzzles, they talked about it as this is what I want to do. It comes from both curiosity and an internal drive. Oh, I want to solve this problem for the company as opposed to goals. Feel like you're making me do this. So it was fascinating to me that a lot of people say exactly the same thing. Goals. This feeling of burden, frustration, this nervousness versus puzzles. Curiosity, excitement, the internal drive. And so isn't it crazy that I asked you these two questions? Everyone I've talked to so far has the same reactions and yet what is entrenched in our corporate world is this mindset of goal setting as opposed to thinking about puzzles. And so my talk is about how to move from this mindset of goals to solving puzzles for the company and how to drive much better business results by making that shift. Bob, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, giving your position and experience, because I'm genuinely interested in what you think on this topic. All right. I just mentioned you in the break that we are experimenting with a method within a company that we are doing the Shape up planning method, but that was basically designed for product processes, but we are using that for the agency. And we had an interesting conversations about interaction in this data driven world. Do we dare to set goals that are not exactly measurable? And we had an interesting chat about that and how to apply this puzzle logic on that. And where I'm not stuck, but what I'm curious about is that do I dare to put something on my Shape up plan board that's not measurable? Do I dare to say that my goal is a little bit vague or a little bit like unshaped? Because that's the intuition and everybody gets that. So, yeah, that's where I'm standing. I guess it depends what you like. Are you measuring for certainty, which is impossible and expensive? Yeah. So one thing that I find is, you know, what is it that we want to measure for? Right. So very often goals that we want to set, we might be introducing a product and we say something like, we want to see user engagement or user engagement increase of X percentage. So is it worth continuing to optimize that metric or do you launch it and then you discover actually it's a different metric altogether, that is more important. So when you set a goal and the team then discovers, oh, what is more important is not that user engagement number, it's actually what is really killing us right now is the number of calls that are going to support. And maybe that is what we need to work on. So when the team discovers that, then you need the flexibility to not just keep working on the goal that had already been set, but rather to be able to figure out, well, this is the puzzle that we really need to figure out. What is going on? Why are people suddenly called customer support? And that's where all of our resources are going. The puzzle setting and puzzle solving approach gives you the flexibility so that you can actually react as a business to what is important. When you set a goal or a target, it is very rare that people will come back to you and say, you know what? We aren't hitting that goal. But that's not what's important. It's this other thing that's important instead. Because rather than tell you that if I want to look like a high performer to the CEO, I will just achieve that number that you have set. It's as a CEO, you're less likely to see transparency where people are telling you exactly how it is, as opposed to just showing you the numbers that you want to see to please you. There's something in my head, it's kind of a half thought. But when we talk about goals, it's something hard and definite and something we're scared to put out there. Almost something we don't want to change or. Because is there something around the word goal that hides the inherent complexity of understand of our ability to do it? When we call it a puzzle, we are acknowledging that there is something to solve that we don't quite understand. And it's okay not to understand it when we use that terminology. It's not okay not to understand a goal has to be definite with a puzzle, it's okay not to understand it because it's a puzzle. It is such an important point. It goes back to the origin of how do we come up with goal setting. Like, why is goal setting so entrenched in the business world? So I started doing some research on this because when you look at okrs, for example, it sounds like a very new idea. You know, it wasn't until 2018 that Google was saying, oh, this is our secret to success, etc. Right? And by the way, the anonymous Googlers say that OKRs are how we kill our competition, that we evangelize OKRs so that we can kill our competition. So let's talk about the origin of goal setting. What happened with goal setting was okrs are not a new idea. They came from Andy Grove at Intel, which was in the late 1970s. And if you then look at where did Andy Grove get this idea of OKRs? It goes all the way back to the 1940s from Peter Drucker. And you know what problem Peter Drucker was solving? He was working with General Motors at the time where there was no automation for the workforce. They were working on repetitive tasks. And in that case, you can tell Andy's a better performer than Bob because he installed four. 45 tires. Bob did 40. There's one way to install tires. And now you look at the complex problems we are solving, right, that are more akin to puzzles. And this is why even if you apply goal setting in a production environment like at Boeing, you see the kind of quality shit of, you know, panels flying off of planes that we run into today. What came to my mind while you were talking about this is that I lately saw Chris Walsh masterclass about. It was about negotiation tactics. And he said that all deadlines and goal settings are to reduce our stress about progress. So what we want to see is not being ready by the deadline or reaching the okr. But we want progress, and if we can track it any other way, then that's fine. Just leaders want to see the progress. And this puzzle logic is a great idea for that. And I love this point, right? Because what goals create is often the illusion of progress. Because people will show you the good numbers because they want to show you progress. And what's happening subconsciously, even is I want to sweep away the bad numbers rather than what you really need me to do, which is to look at those bad numbers, play detective, and say, what's happening here? Why is this happening? You know, what am I learning from this? Is this an opportunity? Is it a problem? Right? You need people to play detective, whereas people will just want to show you the good numbers to please you. And so it's the illusion of progress. Frustratingly, we are overtime. Well, they say overtime. It's like someone's going to come and beat us for going over. But we have exceeded our time box. But we didn't even get to what is the solution? Well, that's why I think we can extend this one a little bit. A little bit, yes. Is that okay of you, Barbara? So you've got. You're getting our stress. Barbara's coming back. You sure? Yes, yes. Okay, go. Okay, so the solution is puzzle setting. And puzzle solving. Puzzle setting is. Let's look at the example of sales. You would set the puzzle by saying, we need to hit X million by the end of the year. But I see a problem, which is maybe sales. Sales grew in the last three years and they've stalled in the last year. And we ask a few guiding questions, like, is it because the market has shifted fundamentally? I don't know. Is it because maybe we knew how to sell to the early adopter but not to the mass market? Is it that the product meets the needs of the early adopter, but not the mass market? Right. And I summarize this puzzle and say, well, how do I solve this puzzle so that we can get back to that growth trajectory? So that's the puzzle. And to solve this puzzle, you ask three questions. The first question is, how well did it work? And this is where you try your first attempt at the puzzle and you say, let's look at the good and the bad. What worked, what didn't? So how well did it work? It's not a binary question of did you or didn't you hit your target? How well did it work? Then the second question is, what did you learn from this? And this is where you say, don't just spit out lots of numbers. What did you really figure out from all of those numbers? What's the story? And then finally the third question, which is based on how well it worked and what you learned, what will you try next? So if you had a magic wand, what would you try? Love it. Now you're writing a book on this. Your first book for me was just. It was defining moment for me going through it because I'd had so much hassle in my life going through various kind of vision, setting and the rest of it and it was all fucking nonsense. And I found your book and it changed my opinion on things and gave me something I could anchor into, like emotionally and cognitively. So I loved it. And it felt quite radical, to coin the phrase for me, this whole puzzle setting idea. Like I think it's worthy of that radical moniker because I think you've done another fantastic job. Any idea when the book is going to come out? Well, first of all, thanks so much. That means so much to me that it feels radical because to me, some of these ideas, you know, they're radical if they sound obvious in retrospect. In retrospect, to me, puzzles sounds obvious, but it wasn't to me when I started out. When will the book come out? Hopefully by the end of next year, early the year after. So end of 2026 or early 2027. At some point, publishing just takes a very long time and so I'm in the writing phase. So in fact, here's an action, a call to action for our listeners. If you use the OHLS template or this puzzle solving template, you can find it on radicalproduct.com just go to Toolkits and look up the OHLS toolkit. If you use it, reach out to me, tell me about your experience and your story might just make it into the book. Amazing. What an opportunity. Well, everyone do take Radica up on that opportunity. We'll make sure there's link in the show notes. I can hear some other applause and stuff. Other things are either heard Radica speak or something's finishing. So we'll call it a day there. Radhika, thank you so much for coming on and being so gracious and so, yeah, giving us something new and challenging to think of. Barbara, thank you so much to be an awesome co host. I've loved spending this time with you and we'll call it a day there. This is me signing off from productised 25, handing over the baton to Saloni and my wonderful co host from Bobcatz. I hope everyone's enjoyed these little run of episodes and you'll hear from me again soon.

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