(un)Intelligent Design

When we talk about “designing” products, it’s tempting to imagine ourselves as master planners. Intricate complexity must be carefully crafted by a brilliant mind - it can’t possible arise from chaos and randomness.

But in practice? Product development looks a lot more like natural selection: messy and wasteful, yet brutally efficient. Evolution wins not with plans, but with endless trial and error. Nature didn’t convene a workshop to blueprint the giraffe. It threw out endless mutations and let survival do the editing.

This isn’t just a metaphor. Harvard Business Review says of experimentation that “you need to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince” because you never know which idea will take off. More recently they suggested that generative AI will enable everyone involved in product development to run experiments. Most ideas will fail. But more failures mean faster, stronger adaptation.

The best way to get things right is to get them wrong—a lot. Each new product, feature, or idea is a random mutation. The best thing we can do is put them out in the wild: if they thrive, we build on them. If they don’t, we stamp out that lineage and move on.

So next time you wonder if a half-baked prototype is “ready,” remember: in nature, most species go extinct. The mistake isn't failing. It’s believing you can skip failure altogether.

Evolution doesn’t apologize for waste. Neither should you.

Failures are a key to success

All those bad ideas form the foundation of the few that thrive