Grand pianos are remarkable objects. In the hands of the right pianist, it can bring an audience to tears. We cart pianos around to funerals, graduations, and weddings. Seemingly every important occasion would welcome a piano with open arms. An alien observing earth might call them "meaning machines" if they didn't know better. Yet, wearing the hat of a product designer, it's hard to imagine a product that could bomb a blind user testing session harder.

Picture this scene: an eight year old walks up to the piano, presses some keys. After a few desperate attempts to make something listenable happen, they give up and go to the other room to watch youtube. Dismayed, this child's parents hire a professional to teach their child.

The bar I hold myself to as a product designer is something like "the product explains itself, each step towards mastery inherently motivating the next, creating an exhilaratingly meaningful experience that leads the person using it to desperately get their friends involved". The piano, by this metric, fails to clear that critical first stage.

But wouldn't it be preposterous to suggest wiping the earth of all pianos? (Picture Spiderverse 203949 where instead of fighting crime, spiderman fights poor product design). Even though pianos fail to clear my bar for "good design", I still want them around. So how do I make sense of that? Is my metric for good design improperly formed?

I hate articles which try to neatly answer a complicated question with a confident and pithy aphorism. Instead I'll answer this question with more questions. Equal parts truthful and annoying (that's a good slogan for life).

What is the purpose of a product? Purpose as in Aristotle's telos. For example the telos of a trumpet is to play beautiful music. The telos of a childhood is to fall in love with life and play. The telos of a piece of charcoal is to make a drawing which describes life in a way that only charcoal can. So then what is the telos of a product? Is it to elegantly solve a problem? Is it to help someone make sense of the world around them? Is it to increase someone's agency within the world?

Okay, let's acknowledge the elephant in the room - Capital C Capitalism. That must be where my standard for good design is coming from right? My ease-of-use and growth-friendly metric is describing a product that thrives in a market. In markets (The U.S., where I live, is so capitalist that we can substitute the word "markets" for "society" if you like), there is no time to learn how to use a product from a mentor. Only the most invasive (picture bamboo) products can survive the volatility of the shifting land.

Let's contrast this with the kind of ecosystem a grand piano thrives in. We can reverse engineer it. What do funerals, graduations, and weddings all have in common? Let's make our job easier and consider some other situations where a piano really shines: finally mastering a movement that has vexed you for weeks, playing a song that you wrote for your dad for his birthday, playing a single solemn chord on a rainy day and letting it slowly peter off - you finally realize you haven't taken a deep breath all day and finally draw one in.

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It's a patient spaciousness. A quiet contemplation. A place for maybes and ifs.

The market is no place for patience and contemplation. By the time you finish patiently contemplating, you've already been trampled over by a dozen optimizators or competitrons. The spacious quiet, was long ago gobbled up by exploitosaurs.

I'd really love to now boldly declare - optimizators, competitrons, and exploitosaurs be damned! The telos of a product is beauty, joy, and meaning! But that's simply not where I live. I would be in denial to make such a claim.

So what is a dreamer-designer to do? Should I learn to love and accept that I live in Capitalistan? There are so many exquisite and magical things that you can only find here. Or should I fight for patient spaciousness and quiet contemplation? Every empire that came before has fallen, so why would Capitalistan be different? Maybe I should find a harmonious middle ground where I celebrate and cultivate the beauty and joy that somehow still survives despite the optimizators and their ilk.

I think that's why the grand piano is so remarkable, that it has survived the stampede of the competitrons and exploitosaurs. We have every reason to give up on pianos and just play Guitar Hero or something. But for some reason we still crave mastering hard things. Even unreasonably hard things.

So is it a good product? Maybe it's a not a good product, but it's something else - an artifact that stands for humanity's spirit. Or maybe that's why it's a good product, because it has transcended the basic requirements of a product and achieved something of a higher order. Or maybe the question is stupid. You might as well ask "Is a dog a good product" or "Does sex have good UX". Or maybe the question is profound and it points to an even bigger truth - what gives things their meaning: how they fit in to their category or how they defy it?