makes me think of “product sense” a term that gets thrown around often these days. there’s always an effort to rationalize and formalize emerging insights, but these ephemeral qualities are more nuanced and don’t fit deterministic methods, I think we should leave it at “taste” which captures the artistic and cultural expressions that traditional business language can’t fully convey, reflecting the deep-rooted and intuitive aspects essential for product dev
Really thought provoking read! Made me think about how this translates in industries like healthcare where the user experience tends to be pretty horrible across the board. Will taste eat software when software is still trying to eat the world in healthcare? Will taste be a huge differentiator that will drive adoption even in the face of legacy tools that have major distribution advantage?
Great questions, i’d suggest it looks like a cycle in each industry, where legacy players with large moats don’t have to adapt as fast to the current point in the cycle but any new players do. Each industry has its own unique dynamics that would make this cycle progress at a different rate.
Great piece. In the end, it's all a user experience. Whether it's crafting a dish, decorating a room, or designing software.. they all involve emotional experiences.
I agree with you, especially for new startups. Last week, I asked a Principal from a VC about this topic, and he told me that he balances taste with whether the startup is solving a pain for users that no one else is addressing. If that is true, they still overlook the taste.
Taste is a lot about judgment first—the underlying awareness of what taste means. Linear's success and their experience shows their impeccable judgment which gradually develops into the taste. This is why product judgment is so important—something Paul Adams wrote in the Intercom blog few years ago.
This was merely a general reference to product judgment that we know—I guess there is a deep interdependence in this judgment and the product taste that you mentioned.
This trend is clearly happening with more in-house teams moving into tech companies.
Brand design is about turning a utility into an experience. Rosetta Stone is a utility; Duolingo is an experience. Most companies now want the latter because it's opinionated, it's delightful, it has a point of view, and most of all it's fun to use. Overall, it'll be good for business, too.
This is a huge challenge as many brand agencies don't understand product, many product teams don't understand — or genuinely dislike — brand designers. The strongest companies like a Linear have both.
I always said: product is merit; brand is distribution. But a slight remix here might be: Product is merit. Brand is taste. Taste is distribution.
The concept is best understood by the creative folks.
It is not about the utility of a song but how it makes you feel or how humming a certain tune changes your mood.
Same with apparel designers who need to decide when to hold back. Just because they can add as much fabric and embellishments as they like does not mean they should. Grace and elegance is about taste.
Same with fiction writers who transport you to their world with their writing and more importantly editing skills.
I believe the future belongs to people operating at the intersection of behavioural psychology and design. Business world looks down upon the touchy feely but designing for emotions is the future.
> A fifth of all open product manager job listings are based in the Bay Area. The share has increased 25% over the past two years (from 15% to over 20%) and is still growing.
Writing code has always been relatively cheap. Maintaining and scaling a system through growth (if you're lucky enough to get it) is the hard part.
I'm a big fan of product thinking/taste and I think you're right that there's a shift. But also VCs have seen enough startups fail after a round or two to prevent this being a paradigm shift.
I'm building a Taste Factory. "Everyone creator should have a Rick Rubin: a school for finding your ideal Feedback Partner" (something like that).
Great article - I wonder if every technical industry follows this pattern as it matures.
The breakthrough starts as technical, strictly useful, practical tools. And then, when that becomes commonplace, we move up the ladder on the Creativity Spectrum towards more abstract, impractical, appeal-to-emotion's creativity (otherwise known as Art?).
I think of creativity as a spectrum. On one end is appeal-to-logic based creativity (math, science and tech) and the other is appeal-to-emotion based creativity (art, music, poetry). The best products are creative breakthroughs on both ends of the spectrum (Tesla, iPhone, Dyson Vacuum, etc).
Now, the question I have: does you ideal feedback partner, your Rick Rubin, change based on what end of the spectrum you are seeking to create?
We know from Rick Rubin da God that you your ideal feedback partner helps you follow your "taste" or felt-sense when creating "art" (appeal-to-emotion based creativity). This is because art is a partial articulation of the unknown. It's at the very edge of our understanding, outside the bounds of logic or reason, so reason and logic won't do. Felt-sense or taste, and not logic and reason, can be your only guide in this realm, a process we know works but don't understand why. Maybe humans just have a magic pitchfork (taste) within them, that if followed authentically, partially articulated the world through their art if they're paying attention to the subtleties of Life.
But as you slip down the creative spectrum towards solving technical, practical problems in say science and technology, does your ideal feedback partner change? Should you now seek someone with specific knowledge in Reason (not felt-sense or taste) in order to work out the kinks in your critical thinking as you try to create a tech-breakthrough? Like I'm thinking, Rick Rubin probably wouldn't make a great feedback partner for a physicist or biochemist, would he?
The larger point is, no creator should create in isolation. So then, who is the ideal feedback partner, who is the Rick Rubin that each individual creator so desperately needs? And does it change based on the creators intent to create something technical or beautiful? Or perhaps based on the part of the project they are creating? (the technical part or the beautiful part).
I don’t know if I’d use the term “Taste”, I might say user experience. It’s certainly not enough anymore to solve important customer problem and be first to market. Poor taste, ugly, hard to use products can be unseated by good taste ones, look at the focus-destroyer named Slack, or the commoditization of Gen-AI.
Great Post - In my opinion, Silicon Valley is beyond redemption in many ways. Today we published what might be our most important piece yet, which analyzes the legal framework that has allowed this to happen.
makes me think of “product sense” a term that gets thrown around often these days. there’s always an effort to rationalize and formalize emerging insights, but these ephemeral qualities are more nuanced and don’t fit deterministic methods, I think we should leave it at “taste” which captures the artistic and cultural expressions that traditional business language can’t fully convey, reflecting the deep-rooted and intuitive aspects essential for product dev
Narayan, whether it be taste or sense, your point about the more ephemeral, non-deterministic qualities being discussed here really resonates.
For product sense specifically, I think its actually quite useful to perceive it similar in spirit to our other (real) senses: https://waqaswrites.substack.com/p/the-sense-behind-product-sense?r=jhccc
This was a great read and extremely relevant for the times.
Taste is something that almost all knowledge workers will have to develop and curation will also become a super power.
Really thought provoking read! Made me think about how this translates in industries like healthcare where the user experience tends to be pretty horrible across the board. Will taste eat software when software is still trying to eat the world in healthcare? Will taste be a huge differentiator that will drive adoption even in the face of legacy tools that have major distribution advantage?
Great questions, i’d suggest it looks like a cycle in each industry, where legacy players with large moats don’t have to adapt as fast to the current point in the cycle but any new players do. Each industry has its own unique dynamics that would make this cycle progress at a different rate.
Great piece. In the end, it's all a user experience. Whether it's crafting a dish, decorating a room, or designing software.. they all involve emotional experiences.
agreed
I agree with you, especially for new startups. Last week, I asked a Principal from a VC about this topic, and he told me that he balances taste with whether the startup is solving a pain for users that no one else is addressing. If that is true, they still overlook the taste.
A beautiful post.
Taste is a lot about judgment first—the underlying awareness of what taste means. Linear's success and their experience shows their impeccable judgment which gradually develops into the taste. This is why product judgment is so important—something Paul Adams wrote in the Intercom blog few years ago.
Will look that up!
Here is Paul's post: https://www.intercom.com/blog/product-judgment/
This was merely a general reference to product judgment that we know—I guess there is a deep interdependence in this judgment and the product taste that you mentioned.
This was great!!
🫶
Really interesting point but brings up questions regarding your definition of "taste".
when we can’t explain it with math it feels hard to define!
No October essays?
many drafts, out 🔜
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Really great post.
This trend is clearly happening with more in-house teams moving into tech companies.
Brand design is about turning a utility into an experience. Rosetta Stone is a utility; Duolingo is an experience. Most companies now want the latter because it's opinionated, it's delightful, it has a point of view, and most of all it's fun to use. Overall, it'll be good for business, too.
This is a huge challenge as many brand agencies don't understand product, many product teams don't understand — or genuinely dislike — brand designers. The strongest companies like a Linear have both.
I always said: product is merit; brand is distribution. But a slight remix here might be: Product is merit. Brand is taste. Taste is distribution.
The concept is best understood by the creative folks.
It is not about the utility of a song but how it makes you feel or how humming a certain tune changes your mood.
Same with apparel designers who need to decide when to hold back. Just because they can add as much fabric and embellishments as they like does not mean they should. Grace and elegance is about taste.
Same with fiction writers who transport you to their world with their writing and more importantly editing skills.
I believe the future belongs to people operating at the intersection of behavioural psychology and design. Business world looks down upon the touchy feely but designing for emotions is the future.
> A fifth of all open product manager job listings are based in the Bay Area. The share has increased 25% over the past two years (from 15% to over 20%) and is still growing.
https://x.com/lennysan/status/1839721913041752368?s=46&t=MxjKGZ0xcO_edQX0W4Soig
Writing code has always been relatively cheap. Maintaining and scaling a system through growth (if you're lucky enough to get it) is the hard part.
I'm a big fan of product thinking/taste and I think you're right that there's a shift. But also VCs have seen enough startups fail after a round or two to prevent this being a paradigm shift.
I'm building a Taste Factory. "Everyone creator should have a Rick Rubin: a school for finding your ideal Feedback Partner" (something like that).
Great article - I wonder if every technical industry follows this pattern as it matures.
The breakthrough starts as technical, strictly useful, practical tools. And then, when that becomes commonplace, we move up the ladder on the Creativity Spectrum towards more abstract, impractical, appeal-to-emotion's creativity (otherwise known as Art?).
I think of creativity as a spectrum. On one end is appeal-to-logic based creativity (math, science and tech) and the other is appeal-to-emotion based creativity (art, music, poetry). The best products are creative breakthroughs on both ends of the spectrum (Tesla, iPhone, Dyson Vacuum, etc).
Now, the question I have: does you ideal feedback partner, your Rick Rubin, change based on what end of the spectrum you are seeking to create?
We know from Rick Rubin da God that you your ideal feedback partner helps you follow your "taste" or felt-sense when creating "art" (appeal-to-emotion based creativity). This is because art is a partial articulation of the unknown. It's at the very edge of our understanding, outside the bounds of logic or reason, so reason and logic won't do. Felt-sense or taste, and not logic and reason, can be your only guide in this realm, a process we know works but don't understand why. Maybe humans just have a magic pitchfork (taste) within them, that if followed authentically, partially articulated the world through their art if they're paying attention to the subtleties of Life.
But as you slip down the creative spectrum towards solving technical, practical problems in say science and technology, does your ideal feedback partner change? Should you now seek someone with specific knowledge in Reason (not felt-sense or taste) in order to work out the kinks in your critical thinking as you try to create a tech-breakthrough? Like I'm thinking, Rick Rubin probably wouldn't make a great feedback partner for a physicist or biochemist, would he?
The larger point is, no creator should create in isolation. So then, who is the ideal feedback partner, who is the Rick Rubin that each individual creator so desperately needs? And does it change based on the creators intent to create something technical or beautiful? Or perhaps based on the part of the project they are creating? (the technical part or the beautiful part).
These are the questions that plague me.
Damn! That felt really good for about 3 seconds until I realized this is an impostor account
I don’t know if I’d use the term “Taste”, I might say user experience. It’s certainly not enough anymore to solve important customer problem and be first to market. Poor taste, ugly, hard to use products can be unseated by good taste ones, look at the focus-destroyer named Slack, or the commoditization of Gen-AI.
Great Post - In my opinion, Silicon Valley is beyond redemption in many ways. Today we published what might be our most important piece yet, which analyzes the legal framework that has allowed this to happen.