INDUSTRIAL DESIGN: nobody wants to hear why their product failed

When products fail, everyone goes looking for the one clean explanation. A bad call. A missed detail. One moment where the program clearly fell apart. But that's almost never how it works.

Products fail two ways. The big thing that was wrong from the start. The price was off, or it solved a problem nobody actually had. Or it died by a thousand cuts. Many small decisions that were each fine on their own but compounded into something that didn't hold together.

The first is brutal but simple. You can point to it and learn from it. The second haunts you, because there's no single moment to fix. You just got a little bit wrong, over and over, and by the time you could feel it the project was cooked.

Good design leadership isn't just preventing one catastrophic mistake. It's building a process where the small ones don't pile up unnoticed.