product design
the important questions to build a product

When I started my enterprise career in 2013 the market looked like the golden age for product design. The companies where pivoting around products re-structuring teams around ideas, breaking hierarchies and building sub companies to be ready to treat as external entities.

For VCs investing in startups the most important moment is the company exit more than the relevance of the business or the durability of the company. The exit value is based on company evaluation which in many cases around 2020s wasn’t really tight to revenue figures.

Among all the strange evaluations we saw big investments in products who didn’t have enough market or enough maturity to disrupt. We paid with increased service costs some of these investments that didn’t bring the expected return. The question is whether the buyer or the seller had a bad understanding of the profitability of the products. To name a few:

virtual reality

hard to think you can spend hours a day with an visor on your head

5G

hard to quantify the improvement. The moment I switched it off from my self phone my battery lasted 3 times longer

web3

a lot more computation needed and unclear advantages

blockchain

I don’t see any more companies offering this service

autonomous drive

in 2015 everybody said in 3y we will stop buying private cars

SaaS

in 2026 it’s hard to see how can they be profitable

LLMs

we’ll see. It’s hard to think that a subscription model could bring long term revenues

The easiest argument for selling to a client is cost saving.

Logistic is a field where the optimization potential is huge but the resistance against changes is even larger.

Delivery sounds like a well established market where everything is highly optimized. I rarely order something online but when I needed some hardware components my experience was in 2025:

China

the provider didn’t have debit card nor IBAN options to pay

US

the price wasn’t considering custom fees which wasn’t clear at the time of the order

EU

the product wasn’t in stock and the price was much higher due to hypothetical custom fees

account

I had to open two different accounts for the two different regions for the same company. Each region has separated customer service, terms and conditions

delivery

I find in my mailbox a note that the courier didn’t find me when I actually was at home

tracking

I opened the different emails to find out who was the carrier but the link for the tracking ID was broken

customer service

I contacted the Indian contact center multiple times, people where kind but couldn’t help, nobody could tell me where my parcel I paid for was delivered

parcel

I went all over the shops in the neighborhood where usually parcels get delivered and finally found the product I paid for

laptop

when my company sent me the laptop they delivered it to a neighbor breaking the confidential terms of my contracts. The delivery service sent me a note instead naming a shop close by who didn’t actually received my laptop

It is pretty clear that the optimization potential is huge and the industry is not mature enough. The idea itself that running vans across the city for door-to-door activity consuming boxes and trash is not competitive against a well organized mini hub logistics is not comparable. The labor, even with automation, for door-to-door is not convenient.