Ideas don’t fail. Ownership does.

Stefan Zweegers

Setting the scene

We met on a quiet Thursday morning at the Van Piere bookstore, right in the center of Eindhoven. The city was still warming up. Shops had just opened and the rush had not started yet. People wandered between shelves, flipping through books, looking for something to take home for the Christmas break.

Van Piere is one of those places where different speeds coexist. A bookstore, but also a café. Knowledge stacked floor to ceiling, with a bar in the middle where you can order a coffee or a drink and keep reading. Public, but calm. Busy, yet slow.

We sat there while the day slowly came online. Conversations around us stayed quiet. People had coffee while reading a few pages. It felt like a good place to talk about learning, making, and the strange reality of how things actually get built.

What he does

Stefan does not fit neatly into a job title. He has worked for years as a product business analyst, something close to what many would call a product owner, across both hardware and software. But those labels do not really capture what he does or how he operates.

What defines him more is his relationship with learning. When faced with something unfamiliar, he does not wait for an expert to arrive. He digs in. Reads. Experiments. Takes a course if needed. And if the situation calls for it, he simply does the work himself.

This shows up everywhere. In his professional life, but also outside of it. He rebuilt large parts of his own house. Learned Japanese for fun. Builds side projects that have nothing to do with his official role.

He is not trying to become the best specialist in one narrow domain. He is optimized for navigating uncertainty, for figuring things out when there is no clear manual yet.

What we talked about

Learning just enough to judge quality

We talked about his experience rebuilding his house. Initially, he hired contractors, many of them presenting themselves as experts. Over time, he realized that expertise as a label does not guarantee quality. His response was not frustration, but curiosity.

Instead of outsourcing blindly, he started learning the basics himself. Not to become a full-time builder, but to understand the work well enough to judge it. In some cases, that led to a simple conclusion: doing it himself was the better option.

You do not need to master everything. But without understanding at least part of the craft, it is impossible to know who or what to trust.

A strangely primitive building industry

That conversation expanded into a broader reflection on construction as a system. From a designer’s perspective, it is a surprisingly uncoordinated process.

Walls get built without considering window sizes. Windows end up all different. Electricity comes later, requiring holes to be cut into freshly finished walls. Another person fills them. Another paints over them. Each step solves a local problem, without regard for the whole.

It feels less like engineering and more like sculpting with clay. Layers added, removed, patched, and corrected on the spot. Not because people do not care, but because the way we build houses has been like this forever.

When simple ideas collide with reality

Stefan shared a project involving glow-in-the-dark road markings. On paper, the idea is almost obvious: paint the road lines with glow-in-the-dark pigment and let car headlights charge it as they pass.

In practice, it unravels quickly. The light spectrum of typical headlight bulbs does not sufficiently excite the material. The headlights themselves overpower the glow, so the human eye barely registers it. Trucks apply sideways loads on curves, causing the strips to drift. Roads crack and elements break and need partial replacement, not full replacement.

The concept had already been sold and started. His task was not to ideate, but to realize it and make it survive contact with reality.

Zero-to-one needs caretakers, not silos

We both recognized this pattern from zero-to-one work. In the earliest phase, ideas do not fail because of bad intentions. They fail because no one truly owns them.

Both Elon Musk and Steve Jobs have talked about avoiding silo mentality, particularly in tech organizations. Divisions lead to an us versus them mindset, which impedes communication and slows growth. Left unchecked, engineers overbuild, product over-scopes, marketing over-promises, and sales over-commits. Siloing does not create excellence. It creates friction.

What is needed instead is alignment around a shared goal. When everything is still unstable, you cannot afford strict role boundaries. Someone has to care about the whole. To babysit the idea. To learn whatever is necessary in that moment to keep it alive.

Making outside the job

Towards the end, we talked about what we do outside our formal roles. Stefan is building an art piece with an e-ink display. His idea is to turn something that looks like traditional Japanese black-and-white art into a subtly animated piece.

There is no outcome pressure. No pitch. Just an honest pull toward making. In a world that rewards explanation and talking, this kind of building is often what actually moves things forward. Stop talking, try to build it, fail, learn from it, and try again.

Reflections

Titles lag reality

Some roles are easy to name because the system has seen them a thousand times. Others are harder, not because they are vague, but because they cut across boundaries.

What I saw in Stefan, and recognized in myself, is a type of value that does not compress well into a vacancy. Someone who can enter an unclear situation, learn fast, and keep the whole thing moving. Not as a specialist flex, but as a form of practical care.

Simple is usually just unexamined

The glow-in-the-dark road story is a reminder that the first version of an idea is often just a story we tell ourselves. Reality is where the idea gets rewritten.

That does not make concepts useless. It simply means the real work starts when you move from nice on paper to something that works at night, in rain, under trucks, on curves, and during repairs.

Coherence is a design choice

The construction examples made me think about a simple rule: local optimization produces global mess.

When everyone solves only the problem in front of them, the system becomes expensive, slow, and fragile, even when everyone is competent. Coherence does not happen by default. Someone has to design for it.

Keep a thread of making alive

The e-ink art project was a reminder that making does not need a justification to be valuable.

Sometimes the point is simply to stay connected to the act of building. That is where curiosity stays honest. And it is a good reason to keep putting work into the public domain, one small artifact at a time.