Taste Is Not What You Think It Is
A lot of people believe taste is simply about holding good opinions. Liking the correct music, wearing the proper clothes, and using the trendiest apps. However, that is not taste. That is just preference. Real taste is something far more difficult and much rarer.
Taste is the ability to know why something is good. It is not just about feeling it, but being able to observe it so clearly that you can almost articulate it, even if you struggle to find the exact words. It is the instinct that makes a seasoned designer glance at a rounded corner and instantly recognize it is 2 pixels off. It is the exact drive that compelled Dieter Rams to scrap a radio design simply because a single dial felt wrong in the hand. That level of obsessive clarity is not a mere personality quirk. It is a highly trained skill.
And here is the uncomfortable truth: the vast majority of us have not trained it.
Why The Tech Industry Got This Wrong for So Long
For a very long time, tech companies treated taste as an optional extra. The primary goal was to ship features, fix bugs, and grow the user base. That was the entire playbook. If the product functioned, it was deemed good enough.
Then, a significant shift happened. Building software became relatively cheap. "Good enough" became the standard everywhere. Suddenly, when almost every app could perform roughly the same functions, the ones that felt right began to win. They did not win because they had an endless list of features, but because using them gave the impression that the product actually cared about the user's experience.
Take Linear as an example. It is a project management tool. There are literally hundreds of project management tools out there. But Linear is fast, clean, and precise in a way that feels incredibly physical. The people who use it talk about it the same way they might praise a high-quality pen. Notion achieved something similar by building a tool that felt like it respected how your brain actually operates. These companies did not conquer their markets on functionality alone. They won on sensibility.
The reality is that you cannot easily clone sensibility. You can replicate a feature in a week. But copying the ten thousand minor decisions that make Linear feel the way it does would take years, and even then, you still might miss the mark. Taste compounds over time. Every good decision makes the subsequent one easier, and the entire process solidifies into a form of institutional knowledge that breathes life into the product itself.
Taste Is Not a Gift. It Is Reps.
Here is the part that nobody really wants to hear. You do not just possess taste or lack it from birth. You construct it, very slowly, through a massive amount of observation, creation, and brutal honesty with yourself about what is subpar.
Emil Kowalski puts it perfectly: you develop taste by consuming a lot, making a lot, and reflecting deeply on both. That middle step, the making, is where the majority of people give up. It is very easy to look at phenomenal work and feel inspired. It is significantly harder to try and create something good yourself and then figure out why it consistently falls short.
Paul Graham emphasizes the same point. You learn to recognize high quality by attempting to create it and failing. When you try to write a clean and sharp sentence and it continuously comes out muddy, you begin to grasp what "clean and sharp" actually entails. When you try to design a minimalistic interface and it keeps feeling cluttered, you start to notice the intricate decisions that make true simplicity possible.
The chasm between what you can recognize as great and what you can personally make is very real. Every individual with exceptional taste started right there at that gap. The only way to bridge it is to ship things and then be ruthlessly honest about what did not work.
Strong Opinions About Small Things
One clear indicator that you are developing taste is when you start caring about details that seem far too small to matter. The subtle weight of a button tap. The specific phrasing of an error message. The exact amount of white space placed between two elements on a screen.
This is not being overly fussy. This is simply taste doing its job. When something feels even slightly off, that feeling of discomfort is valuable information. It signifies that your eye has advanced further than your hand. You can sense the problem before you can completely explain it.
Spotify understands this concept well. Their Discover Weekly feature works in part because it respects your attention. It does not bombard you with endless choices. It makes a single, confident bet each week and trusts you to follow along. That confidence and that restraint is a deliberate taste decision. Someone at Spotify had to stand up, say no to more, and say yes to less. That requires courage, especially since users frequently demand more features. Taste means committing fully to a vision, even when the path of least resistance is to just give people whatever they ask for.
Caring deeply about small details is not perfectionism for the sake of it. It stems from the belief that these small details are, in reality, what the entire experience is made of.
"The design is not just what it looks like and feels like. The design is how it works"
Steve Jobs