AI is a better loser than you
AI thought this would be a good book cover for me….I hired a human graphic designer instead
Fail Like an AI: A Better Way to Build Products
In the last few weeks, I've been running a beta email campaign for a new product idea. And wow, it's harder than I remembered. Putting something new out into the world, something you've made, and asking people what they think? It's vulnerable. You're exposing a half formed idea to the risk of being misunderstood, criticised, or worse - ignored. Please validate me!
It got me thinking about the emotional trauma that comes with product innovation. You need feedback to learn, but asking for it is an embarrassment. What if it's not ready? What if no one replies? What if it just... flops?
And then, because of course I rode shotgun with a LLM throughout the whole awkward process, I thought about AI.
We've all seen those weird, glitchy outputs from AI - extra fingers, surreal guesses, confidently wrong summaries. At times it's absurd. At times it's hilarious. But AI doesn't care. It just keeps trucking.
There's no embarrassment.
Would you let these synthetic team mates help your organisation?
No fear of failure.
DALLE sees me retiring in this house, with Esher’s impossible stairs.
No shame.
Wow, is that some kind of superpower?
AI learns by failing fast, failing publicly, and using that failure to refine. It doesn't wait for perfect. I found myself thinking AI’s ego is bulletproof, but it’s better than that, it’s egoless.
It ships something, sees what happens, apologises for disappointing you and adjusts. That's a feedback loop most of us know we should follow in product work, but emotionally it can be really tough to adopt.
Unlike AI, WE get embarrassed. WE take feedback personally. WE fear rejection. So we polish, we overwork, we delay. And sometimes we lose the momentum that comes with showing our work early.
What if we took a leaf out of AI's emotionless playbook?
There's something powerful about embracing a more detached, learning-focused approach to feedback. Ship earlier. Invite critique. Expect mistakes. And treat every misstep as data.
If AI can show us bizarre spaghetti-fingered hands without a shred of self-consciousness, surely we can handle a little awkward silence or a few rough edges in our early-stage product feedback?
Iterating ideas and improving them starts with exposure. And evolution cannot happen in a vacuum.
AI is a better loser than you are, but you can become better at losing. Better at picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and getting back out there to fail again, but better this time. What could you unlock in progress if you weren’t afraid of failing?