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From airplanes to apps: how iteration drives innovation and success

Discover how testing, iteration, and continuous improvement can transform your product development process, reduce risks, and lead to long-term success.

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The first airplane built in 1903 by the Wright Brothers flew only 260 meters (852 ft) before it got damaged during landing. Today, the airplanes we fly can safely take us across continents and land with incredibly high precision in both location and time.

What’s more, they aren’t just empty machines moving people from point A to B — today’s airplanes are equipped with numerous forms of entertainment that transform any long-haul flights into much more enjoyable experiences. They increasingly often provide internet connection, entertainment systems filled with the latest movie premieres that you haven’t seen in theaters yet, or even cross-passenger communication systems allowing passengers to exchange messages and play games with a friend sitting in a different part of the plane.

The Importance of Iteration in Air Travel

You may be wondering how you got to this article, or if you’ve followed me for a while, why I’m suddenly writing about airplanes. Here’s the idea: the airplanes we know today emerged through countless iterations and lessons from failure. In fact, from the moment the first airplane was built, it‘s taken over 120 years to get to the point when there are 100k planes taking off every single day. Yes, a hundred thousand PER DAY! And what’s truly remarkable is how safe and reliable air travel has become over time. Statistically speaking, a plane crash is 220,000% less likely than a car crash, making air travel the safest means of transportation.

Cross-Cultural Design Plays a Crucial Part in Every Airplane

Our long-term experience over the years has also shaped the way every airplane’s interior is designed and labeled with universal signs, ensuring that it’s universally understood and functional. Whether you’re flying for the first time or the hundredth, everything inside the plane — from buttons to emergency exits — is labeled with universal signs, which helps passengers and cabin crew recognize them right away regardless of airplane model, country of departure, or destination.

Photos taken by Michalina Bidzinska

Think about different areas, buttons, or handles that you’ve seen inside airplanes. Everything is always labeled with universal signs, colors, illustrations, all accompanied by guidelines translated into multiple languages. This ensures that passengers, no matter their language proficiency, cultural background, age, or physical abilities, can easily understand the key information. The goal is simple: make the essential information onboard understandable for EVERYONE — a brilliant example of designing with accessibility and inclusivity in mind.

Photos taken by Michalina Bidzinska

This inclusive approach to interior labeling becomes even more vital in case of emergencies when seconds count and there’s no room for misunderstandings.

The Importance of Iteration in Product Design and Development

Whether you’re responsible for creating physical products, software, or websites, your launch date doesn’t mark a definite end in the product development cycle. Instead, every feature you release should be given the opportunity to evolve through post-launch analysis, reflection, and optimization.

In my design career, I’ve noticed that many product launch delays are caused by a myriad of team disagreements with surprisingly minor nuances, such as the colors and sizes of buttons, the arrangement of different UI elements, or the amount of white space on the screen. (Oh, you wouldn’t believe how often the latter is a sticking point!) This focus on minutiae often leaves design teams stuck in an extended review phase as they try to balance everyone’s demands — even when pleasing everyone is virtually impossible. The result? All processes get delayed, and the launch date gets pushed back. If you’ve faced this, it’s time to ask yourself and your team:

Is chasing an unknown and undefined perfection more effective than releasing the most lovable and acceptable version, and quickly learning from it after launch?

Designs can — and should be — given space for improvement. Designers should be given the opportunity to review what works and what doesn’t based on the actual user or customer satisfaction, and real-world interactions with the end solution.

If you work closely with stakeholders and often feel pressured to satisfy their needs, remember that your stakeholders aren’t the end users. What’s more, they have the right to be wrong in making assumptions about their target user group. That’s why it’s important to be as transparent and open to making changes as possible, while also keeping your end users’ best interests at heart.

A/B Testing

In my article Why A/B Testing Pays Off, I described what A/B testing is and how it can offer a game-changing advantage for businesses, far beyond releasing a radically changed product without proper preparation. In my other article — Why some great products failed to survive on the market — I’ve also explored real-world examples of products that failed to conquer or stay in the market because businesses couldn’t learn from their mistakes both quickly and effectively enough.

Why You Shouldn’t Skip Testing

A massive challenge in the product development cycle is providing no room for testing solutions ahead of launch. I’ve seen companies and leaders avoid the word “testing” like the plague because they wrongly believe it wastes time and resources, especially when they’re overconfident about their change requests. But testing has the opposite effect — it reassures us about which features can be even more profitable than expected and which ones could backfire. As a result, companies that skip testing deliberately choose to put their products at significantly higher risk of failure than those which test.

The Impact of No Testing on Individuals and Teams

  • Delayed deadlines. The absence of a “test & learn” approach greatly impacts the design and development teams, as stakeholders insist on chasing perfection that’s extremely difficult to find.
  • Working with assumptions = guesswork. The truth is, until you launch your product or feature, you won’t know the final outcome. All too often, product development is based on the internal team’s assumptions and opinions about what the end user needs. We all can be completely wrong about this. I’ve learned this firsthand when I supported optimization teams in formulating different hypotheses for tests we were sure would win. And guess what? The results turned out to be the opposite. However, the beauty of the “test and learn” approach is that you’re allowed to be wrong, and you’re given the chance to correct it before it’s too late. In product launches, the room for error is smaller, and the costs of failure are much higher.
  • Increased pressure on team performance. Skipping testing created a tense atmosphere, where the pressure to deliver a flawless solution becomes overwhelming. When unexpected issues arise post-launch, you’re left scrambling to figure out: WHY? And sometimes, you’ll need months and years to figure out that WHY.

What If My Company Doesn’t Want to Test?

If your company isn’t willing to test anything, consider these two approaches:

Approach 1: Raise the Awareness

Focus on educating your team about the high stakes of skipping testing and guide them toward adopting a “test and learn” mindset. Influencing and leading change doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but it’s a skill you can and should develop. Simply dropping the word “testing” into conversations isn’t enough. You need to create a strategic, compelling case for why a “test and learn” approach will drive more benefits and fewer risks. Use examples from other companies’ failures, quantify the missed opportunities at your own organization, and illustrate how testing could have avoided those pitfalls.

Approach 2: Change Your Mindset

I understand that not everyone has the power to change the entire organization’s mindset — at least not yet. Sometimes it takes more time to build trust. In this case, try to focus on your own mindset and think of the next product launch as a test for a future release.

While avoiding testing entirely is risky (since all changes affect all users at once rather than a selected pool of people), it’s still significantly easier to convince your stakeholders to analyze the results post-launch and optimize the product later if something doesn’t bring the desirable outcome. This way, stakeholders are more likely to say “yes” to your designs, and your wider team will be better prepared for a thoughtful, data-driven post-launch analysis and adjustments.

However, to adopt this approach, you must assess all your new features ahead of launch and identify which ones pose the greatest risk to your product and which are worth breaking down into smaller parts because of their complexity. I always recommend starting small — or at least smaller —especially when you don’t know what to expect. Then, after launch, shift your focus to post-launch analysis and further iterations to inch closer to your larger goals.

Are Deadlines More Important Than Learning and Iteration?

The lesson I’ve learned as a strategist and UX manager is that delivering the final designs doesn’t mark the end of the product development cycle. Any potential blockers should be resolved as early as possible, even if it means settling for a temporary solution. Trying and reviewing the results of your short-term solution allows you to see if you’re heading in the right direction and what should be improved in future iterations. Aim to launch the most lovable version instead of endlessly delaying projects in search of a “perfect” solution.

Don’t Delay. Launch the Most Lovable Version You Can Produce.

Team alignment is crucial, but it shouldn’t keep you stuck in endless revisions, waiting for an ideal solution to magically appear, or until every team member agrees to a small change. In fact, it’s even likely that the perfect solution might not even exist. That’s why it’s more practical to strive for the best acceptable and lovable version, and aim at perfecting it once you’ve gathered real data and insights from your first iteration. Armed with your insights, you’ll be in a far better position to improve your solution — rather than relying on stakeholder assumptions and gut feelings while skipping testing. Remember, you’re ultimately making assumptions about human behavior, and it’s an aspect that’s very unpredictable by nature. I also wrote about this in my article: Everybody Lies: your users too.

Key Takeaways

Everything can be optimized. If something doesn’t bring the desired results now, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved in the future, or that it should be entirely scrapped and forgotten. Think of the example of airplanes I’ve described at the beginning of this article— we’ve spent over 120 years to make them safer, more reliable, and entertaining for passengers, and we still haven’t finished — we still push for more innovations, new features, new experiences, and enhanced safety.

Continuous Improvement is the Key to Success

Whether you’re a founder, a design team manager, or a stakeholder, consider shifting your mindset from “It has to be perfect when we launch” to “Let’s make it as perfect as possible today and refine it later.” This continuous improvement mindset, paired with a test-and-learn approach, is a winning combination that helps many global leaders like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple stay ahead of the competition and achieve long-term success.

At the same time, design teams should be given space to collaborate with data analysts, assess the effectiveness of their designs, and uncover any pain points users experience. Why? Because no one else in the business will notice that, for example, 50% of users couldn’t register on your mobile app because the account registration button was too small to click on, causing frustration and prompting potential customers to delete your app.

Give Your Designers More Space to Uncover Issues

One of the most critical yet often overlooked mistakes that many non-designer managers make is overloading designers with “typical design work” and pushing them from one project to the next without giving them time for their analysis and reflection. Sometimes, a tiny design tweak can make or break a product, and your designers are the specialists who can uncover those hidden opportunities.

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