Source: Yanko Design
The shift reflects a collapse in the traditional product development sequence—designers can no longer rely on "build it and they will come" logic and must validate demand before committing to manufacturing. This mirrors how software teams iterate on feature adoption before scaling, but hardware's capital intensity means the penalty for guessing wrong is exponentially higher, pushing designers toward community validation, pre-orders, and crowdfunding as market research. Industrial design skill alone is no longer sufficient; success now requires go-to-market thinking from the sketch phase onward.