There’s a line doing the rounds this summer that when anyone can build, taste is what’s left. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I’ve started to find it a slightly lazy word. Nobody can quite say what it is or how you would know whether someone has it, so it ends up as a convenient way to justify a decision without really backing it, and I’ve definitely been guilty of it myself.
I don’t have a much better answer, though I do think there’s something real there. My best attempt is that it’s judgement trained by reps, specifically reps where you got to see what happened next and then take the next shot. Some are with users, seeing whether they engage or use things in ways you never imagined. Some are commercial, watching whether the business plays out the way you thought it would. Some come from marketing, seeing which messages actually resonate and how people relate to the product. Some are organisational, learning what gets enough backing to land. Then there’s the soft part in your head, weighting all of those differently depending on the product, the phase and the moment.
Because those reps are tied to the people and the market you earned them in, taste also travels less well than we like to think, and someone with great taste in one world can be confidently wrong in another. It’s never going to be 100% right however good you are, and the uncomfortable part is that you can’t write it down and hand it to the next person. The only way to get more of it is more reps.
Which is where AI gets interesting. Building is now so cheap that you can take far more shots in a year, but a shot only becomes a rep if you close the loop, and when everyone is hungry to ship, that’s the step that gets skipped. So if taste can’t be handed over, the thing worth building is the conditions for it: short loops, outcomes people actually get to see, and room to take the next shot. That feels like where the real leverage is right now, more than in any single tool.