I agree with every glorious word in Erika Hall’s How the ‘Failure’ Culture of Startups Is Killing Innovation. It’s a brilliant and impassioned defense of making design research part of every product development process:

Somewhere along the way, it got to be uncool to reduce one’s risk of failure.

Part of this may be because the risk of failure is dramatically lower than it used to be. But another reason is that many people don’t actually understand what research is, and have somehow conflated concepts like “rapid prototyping,” “lean startup,” “minimal viable product,” and “[insert] other smart-sounding thing to do” with avoiding research.

It’s really hard to not just go ahead and quote the whole article, because it’s so good. I’ll leave you with just one more bit and an enthusiastic recommendation to read the whole thing:

Maybe knocking out a prototype or building a company is the fastest, cheapest way to learn. But often it’s not. Sure, a prototype can tell us if the user understands the potential solution — but if it’s solving a problem no one has, why bother building it in the first place?

Ok, I lied. One more bit:

It becomes immediately apparent, when we try to understand our fellow humans through research, that we are not rational creatures. But when it comes to making business decisions, research helps address that irrationality and increases our chances to succeed. And make no mistake: in a world where design makes or breaks success, all product design decisions are business decisions. Asking the right questions will lead to useful insights.