Every few months a new product lands that nobody asked for and everyone suddenly needs. I’ve been trying to understand why that keeps happening…
People still talk about product design like it’s a sequence in a detective story: find the need, build the solution, ship the fix. For a long time that made sense (looking at you JTBD). The world was full of unmet problems waiting to be solved. But a big shift happened in 2025. The most interesting tools didn’t respond to pain; they created appetite. NotebookLM turned scattered notes into a podcast and, within days, people were treating it like an obvious idea. Perplexity learned to remember key details in previous conversations. Arc built a memory of your entire browsing life. Gemini started working inside docs, anticipating context before you even asked. Each arrived uninvited and immediately felt inevitable.
Desire seems to have new wiring. The most useful tools don’t just fit into our wants — they’re shaping them. The moment something lands in our world, we behave as if we’d always wanted it. A retroactive craving kicks in. We rewrite the past to include the thing that only just appeared.
When I think about it, “user research” feels a lot like paleontology — dusting off the artifacts of yesterday’s instincts. Needs are fossils. They tell you what mattered to people once. Invention is adjacent to unstable art: it gives form to feelings that haven’t fully evolved. Builders used to study behavior. Lately the most original ones stage little psychological experiments that reveal new ways to want things.
Still, the industry clings to validation. Surveys, interviews, prototypes — rituals to prove their idea is safe. But safety is irrelevant when vocabulary hasn’t caught up. Nobody could have articulated the desire to cheat their way through an interview before Cluely built it. Nobody imagined needing a carbon copy of their own voice, narrating their inner thoughts in any app until ElevenLabs made it possible.
The year’s biggest question wasn’t what do people want? It was what can they recognize once they see it?
In this market, discovery is happening through exposure. The first encounter creates the feeling of absence. Builders provoke recognition more than they predict demand.
I stumbled into that newfound truth on an ordinary cold call.
I was pitching my company’s product, Factify — a newish tool that protects research firms from having their reports stripped and rephrased by AI. The prospect, an insights analyst at a mid-sized market research firm, sounded like he was over it before I could get halfway through my pitch. He said all the things people say when they want to end a conversation politely: sophisticated clients, sufficient disclaimers, minimal risk, yada yada yada. I came very close to thanking him for his time and disconnecting the call.
But then I remembered the Deloitte story that had broken that morning. They’d submitted a $440k government report full of fabricated citations and invented quotes — the byproduct of an ever-hallucinating, overeager AI assistant. I asked if he’d seen the headline.
He hadn’t.
What I told him stopped him in his tracks. The scandal wasn’t hypothetical to him— this was his world, one degree away. Suddenly, my cold call had turned into an explanation for a thing that had already happened.
He asked me how we actually prevent that kind of leak.
It was like we were having a completely different conversation. In that moment, I became a consultant. Logic hadn’t moved him, fear hadn’t either. What did was recognition — the sense that the future had already reached his doorstep. And that future was terrifying for him. His need hadn’t existed an hour earlier. The context I shared made it real.
That’s what invention does: it constructs the scene in which realization becomes possible.
Builders who understand this don’t chase consensus. They cultivate temporal empathy, the ability to sense which future will feel familiar when it arrives. The best new tools this year — NotebookLM, Perplexity, Arc — did just that. They met us halfway between memory and anticipation, as if these were ideas we’d forgotten to imagine.
Innovation, seen this way, is a way of giving curiosity a body. The moment someone experiences it, they feel the contour of a gap they hadn’t even thought of before. We’re illuminating future possibilities.
When I started in tech sales over a decade ago, I assumed my job was all about persuading strangers — explaining value, building logic, overcoming objections. Lately it feels closer to provocation: holding up a mirror that lets someone see a piece of themselves that had been invisible for so long. The mirror changes shape with every new tech release, but the reflection always lands the same way — with that quiet, startled thought: I didn’t know I wanted this until right now.
You’ve made it to the edge of this thought experiment. Hungry for more? My Medium is open 24/7 for the insatiably curious—drop in here.
Or, if you’d rather let the strangeness come to you, subscribing to Vice Versa is just a click away. Keep questioning.