The graveyard of failed innovation is filled with brilliant ideas that never learned how to speak to the people they were built for.
In the spring of 2013, Google invited the world to see the future.
The future had a camera above the right eye and a price tag of US$1,500. It could take photographs with a blink, display turn-by-turn navigation in your field of vision, and answer questions before you had finished asking them. Technologically, it was a decade ahead of anything a consumer had held in their hands.
By January 2015, Google had quietly discontinued it.
The engineers had solved every problem except the one that mattered. They had never seriously asked what it felt like to be the person standing across from someone wearing Glass. They had never designed for the identity of the wearer — for the social cost of being seen as the kind of person who recorded conversations without warning, who prioritised a screen over a face, who had paid $1,500 to become what the backlash quickly labelled a “Glasshole.”
The technology worked. That was never really the question.
This is not an unusual story. It is the story of most innovation.
The numbers nobody wants to talk about
Harvard Business School estimates that 95% of new products fail. Not 30%. Not 50%. Ninety-five.
CB Insights, analysing the post-mortems of thousands of failed startups, consistently finds the same primary cause of death: “no market need” — cited in 42% of cases. Not running out of money. Not getting outcompeted. Not a technical failure. Simply building something the market did not want, could not use, or did not understand why it needed.
Microsoft acquired Nokia for US$7.2 billion in 2014 and wrote off US$7.6 billion thirteen months later. The engineers were world-class. The hardware was defensible. What was missing was a coherent understanding of why someone in Jakarta or Nairobi or Warsaw would choose this phone, in this ecosystem, in this moment of their life.
The Segway was supposed to replace the automobile. Dean Kamen told investors it would be “bigger than the Internet.” Steve Jobs called it “as big a deal as the PC.” The engineering was genuinely revolutionary — self-balancing, clean, precise. It sold, in its first six years, roughly 30,000 units. A rounding error.
The failure was not mechanical. It was anthropological. Nobody had seriously designed for the experience of the person watching the Segway rider — the pedestrian, the passerby, the colleague — and what they would think, feel, and communicate through body language. Nobody had asked whether the human desire to belong, to appear capable rather than assisted, to navigate public space without announcing one’s affluence on a glorified scooter, might outweigh the functional benefits.
The product worked perfectly. It just didn’t fit inside a human life.
What we misunderstand about empathy
The word has been so thoroughly absorbed into corporate language that it has nearly lost its meaning.
Companies run customer interviews and call it empathy. They administer NPS surveys and call it empathy. They build user personas — “Meet Sarah, 34, a busy marketing manager who loves coffee and struggles with work-life balance” — and hang them on walls as evidence of customer-centricity.
None of this is empathy. At best, it is data collection with a human face.
Radical empathy means reconstructing the world as customers actually experience it — including the parts they cannot articulate, have not yet noticed, or would never admit in a research session.
The distinction matters because it determines whether a product merely sells or actually changes behaviour.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he did not commission market research to determine what computer users wanted. He asked a different question entirely: what is the emotional relationship between a person and their machine, and how does every moment of friction in that relationship make them feel about themselves?
The result was not a faster computer or a cheaper computer. It was a computer that made you feel, from the moment you opened the box, that you were the kind of person who deserved beautiful things. That you were creative. That you were different. The product was a mirror held up to an identity the customer did not yet know they wanted to see.
That is radical empathy. It is not a research methodology. It is a decision about where you stand — inside someone else’s experience, rather than observing it from a comfortable distance.
The experience design fallacy
Most organisations that claim to practise experience design are practising something else.
They are practising interface design. They are practising usability optimisation. They are conducting A/B tests on button colours and measuring conversion lift in fractions of a percentage point. These are legitimate activities. They are not experience design.
Real experience design begins with a more uncomfortable question: what was this person’s life like before our product existed, and what do we honestly believe it will be like after?
Not what features they use or what pain points they report, but how the product fits into the emotional texture of their day — their anxieties, routines, relationships, and sense of self.
Airbnb understood this in 2009, when it was dying.
The founders had a product that made logical sense. You had a spare room. Travellers needed cheap accommodation. The transaction was obvious. And almost nobody was doing it.
Brian Chesky flew to New York and stayed in Airbnb listings himself. What he discovered was not a UX problem. It was a trust problem embedded in something even more fundamental — an aesthetic problem. The listings were photographed on mobile phones in bad light. They looked like crime scenes. No matter how rationally compelling the value proposition, the human brain was receiving a different signal: this place is not safe. This person cannot be trusted. Do not enter.
The solution was not a redesign of the booking flow. It was hiring professional photographers to reshoot listings, for free, at the company’s expense. Within weeks, revenue in New York doubled.
The technology had not changed. The price had not changed. The supply and demand had not changed. What changed was one team’s willingness to enter the emotional reality of the person standing at the threshold of a stranger’s home at 11 pm with a rolling suitcase — and to design for that person’s fear rather than their rational interest.
That is experience design. Everything else is decoration.
Why organisations are structurally incapable of empathy
Executives rarely like where this logic leads.
It is not enough to say that companies fail at empathy because their people are incurious or their culture is arrogant. Some of the most catastrophic empathy failures in business history were committed by organisations filled with genuinely brilliant, caring, well-intentioned people. The problem is not personal. It is architectural.
Proximity collapse
The people who build products become, over time, profoundly unlike the people who use them. A product team in Singapore designing a supply chain application for warehouse workers in Surabaya does not know what it costs, physically and psychologically, to stand for twelve hours on a concrete floor and interact with software written by people who have never done it. The empathy gap is not a failure of imagination. It is a failure of proximity — and proximity is eroded systematically by organisational success. Success increases the distance between builders and users.
Metric blindness
Organisations optimise what they can measure, which means the unmeasurable aspects of human experience are progressively designed out of products. You can measure session length, conversion rate, churn, and NPS. You cannot easily measure whether a product makes someone feel more capable, more respected, or more in control of their life. So the first set of things gets obsessively optimised, and the second set — which often determines whether the product earns genuine loyalty or merely habitual use — gets ignored.
The vocabulary problem
Most product development processes communicate in the language of features, specifications, and metrics. Empathy requires a different vocabulary entirely — one built around narrative, emotion, context, and identity. These are not the words that survive a product review meeting. They get softened into “user stories,” abstracted into personas, and eventually stripped of the human weight that made them meaningful. By the time a genuine customer insight reaches a roadmap decision, it has often been translated so many times that the original emotional truth is unrecognisable.
“Most product teams are solving the problem they understood six months ago, for a customer they met once, in a conference room.”
Good organisations, full of talented people, fail this way with remarkable consistency.
The last competitive moat
There is a particular irony in the current moment.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly compressing the technology gap between organisations. Code that once required years of engineering investment can be replicated in months. Data, once a defensible asset, is increasingly commoditised. Capital is available to anyone with a credible pitch. The traditional sources of competitive advantage — technical superiority, distribution scale, proprietary infrastructure — are eroding faster than any previous technology cycle.
What remains difficult to replicate is a deep understanding of how people actually live.
Not customer data. Not survey responses. Not journey maps. The advantage is not data. It is knowing, almost intuitively, how a product fits into someone’s actual life.
This is what Apple built over decades. It is what drove Grab’s dominance across Southeast Asia — not superior technology, but a granular understanding of what trust, convenience, and dignity mean to a motorbike rider in Ho Chi Minh City or a family in Manila trying to get somewhere safely after dark. It is what separates the companies that build products people defend from the companies that build products people tolerate.
Radical empathy is not a design principle, a research methodology, or a company value to be printed on a wall. It is a discipline — sustained, difficult, structurally resisted, and increasingly rare.
And in a world where every other advantage is being equalised, it may be the only one that compounds.
The question worth sitting with
Before the next product decision. Before the next campaign. Before the next investment in features, distribution, or brand:
When did someone on your team last spend an unstructured hour inside the actual life of the person you are building for — not in a research session, not mediated by a screenshare or a survey, but present in the physical, emotional, social reality of their day?
If the honest answer is months or never, then the product you are building is not a response to a human need. It is a response to your organisation’s internal model of what a human need should look like.
Those two things are not the same. The gap between them is where most innovation goes to die.
The most dangerous product you can build is one that works.
Because it will take years — and hundreds of millions of dollars — to understand why nobody wanted it.
David Kim is a contributing writer and columnist to Nikkei Asia, E27, TechNode, Korea Economic Daily and other leading Asia-focused publications.
This article was originally published in E27.
