Most new products should not exist

I design physical products for a living, and I believe most of the products launching right now should not exist.

Not because they are ugly. Ugly is survivable, and taste is not the argument. They should not exist because nobody can say who needs them. Ask the team behind almost any launch three questions. Who is the user, by name or by day in their life? What pain does this remove? Why does that pain justify a factory run and use of resources? Watch how many funded, rendered, packaged products cannot get through the first question.

The standard answer to this is a shrug: so what, the market will filter. We will use more marketing. Bad products die, good ones win, and the system self-corrects.

The market does filter; look at when.

By the time the market delivers its verdict, someone has smelted the aluminum. Factories mold parts in the tens of thousands because few factories run a batch of 100. Workers assemble the batteries, print the boxes, the containers cross an ocean, and the warehouse fills up. The filtering takes a year and a half. A price drops, another price drops, items go into a clearance bin, a container moves the other way, and the process ends in a landfill. The market is not a filter. It is a slow, very expensive incinerator that runs on finished goods.

The market is not a filter. It is a slow, very expensive incinerator that runs on finished goods.

Before the verdict arrives, we spend every resource. And this is something that infuriates me and why I like to design with intent. That design flaw in the whole system cannot be fixed at the end. It can only be fixed at the beginning by someone willing to ask the three questions before the money moves.

And the volume is exploding. It used to take a team months to get a product to the point where it could attract money and reach production. AI collapsed that, fast. A plausible product, beautifully rendered, complete with a brand story and packaging, is now a week's work. I use these tools daily, and I am faster with them too, so I am inside this acceleration, not above it. But watch what actually widened: the pipe. The filter at the front, the honest hour where somebody asks who needs this, did not improve at all. More products than ever are reaching production, and the share of them with a real answer to the first question is not going up.

Somebody pays for every failure. The founder pays in money, and that is the smallest part. Everyone pays the rest in material, energy, freight, and landfill for products whose only function was to be filtered out. And that cost appears on nobody's books.

That cost appears on nobody's books.

The fix is unglamorous. It is one honest day before the project starts, spent on three questions, with the willingness to hear no. We have killed projects this way, including one I personally liked, because the research came back and said the user was not there. Stopping felt like losing at first.

There is one more filter, and it is not professional at all. My daughter is going to ask me one day what I did all day for a living. I want the answer to be that I made better products, and not that I made more junk. It sounds soft. It kills more projects than the three questions do because the three questions can be argued with, whereas this one cannot. A product or project either survives that sentence or it does not.

My daughter is going to ask me one day what I did all day for a living. I want the answer to be that I made better products.

Launching is not the achievement. Anyone can launch now; that is exactly the problem. The achievement is being needed, and I want to be able to say I only built things that were.

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Roberto runs REFRAME Design, an industrial design and strategy studio in Zürich, Switzerland. He helps brands like JURA and Wetrok. They also assist start-ups in deciding which products to create before spending any money. Roberto also hosts the podcast Conversations with Roberto.

If your team is generating more directions than it can judge, that is usually a two-hour conversation, not a project. hello@reframe.design