When Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 batteries started catching fire, the company faced a question every product manager eventually confronts: what kind of defect are we actually dealing with? This episode maps the foundational architecture of products liability law through the three ways a product can go wrong: manufacturing defects (unit-specific production errors), design defects (flaws built into an entire product line, illustrated through the Ford Pinto), and failures to warn (inadequate disclosure of known risks). Using the FAIR Framework’s Flexibility lens, the episode shows why each defect type demands a different managerial response; misdiagnosing the problem wastes resources and multiplies liability exposure. It closes by previewing a question that runs through the whole semester: how this decades-old taxonomy holds up against software, algorithms, and AI systems that resist tidy classification. When Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 batteries started catching fire, the company faced a question every product manager eventually confronts: what kind of defect are we actually dealing with? This episode maps the foundational architecture of products liability law through the three ways a product can go wrong: manufacturing defects (unit-specific production errors), design defects (flaws built into an entire product line, illustrated through the Ford Pinto), and failures to warn (inadequate disclosure of known risks). Using the FAIR Framework’s Flexibility lens, the episode shows why each defect type demands a different managerial response; misdiagnosing the problem wastes resources and multiplies liability exposure. It closes by previewing a question that runs through the whole semester: how this decades-old taxonomy holds up against software, algorithms, and AI systems that resist tidy classification.