Product taste

Product taste seems to be all the rage these days. As software becomes easier to build, differentiation is shifting from technology to softer aspects of product development, like taste. But what does great product taste even entail?

Some take the simplistic view that product taste is just equal to design. But as modernist architect and designer Louis Sullivan famously said, "form follows function", design should be downstream of functionality. In my view, taste encompasses design, it's its superset. Others compare it with being opinionated, but that feels more like a necessary rather than a sufficient condition. You can be highly opinionated and at the same time fail to resonate with a wider audience. In that sense, taste is something more inter-subjective than subjective. It is like a clustering region of many individuals in some sort of high-dimensional space. For food, it's how the chemicals on your tongue create subjective experience. For cognitive work, it's how the user experience relates to your pre-conceived mental models of the world.

Words similar to "taste" have already been floating around in the product community, like product intuition or product sense. All these words hint at the idea that taste is something that cannot be taught - it has to be developed through experiences. Just as the way to develop taste in music is to listen to a lot of music. To develop a product taste, you need to try out a lot of products. But experiences alone won't endow you with taste, there also has to be a sensitivity attuned to those experiences. In fact, some thinkers argue, the way to think about knowledge as:

knowledge = experience x sensitivity

Sensitivity is about not taking things for granted. It's easy to not learn anything from a masterpiece of any kind - just don't ask "why?". By asking "why?" you try to peel off the surface layers to understand its essence. Many times, the essence of something is its core purpose or message. And without an essence, meaning becomes fuzzy, unclear and ambiguous.

Building products with taste

Needless to say, building a great product always starts with answering "who is the user?". One thing is certain, products that start to blur on target users are surely lost. The user always lives in some context: problems to be solved (or Jobs-to-Be-Done), current workflows and habits, incentive structures, etc. Understanding and having deep empathy for the user is a necessary precondition to developing taste for a specific product category.

With the target user is pinned down (the who), one should answer the what, how and where:

• What: What is the core functionality and focus of your product? What are the boundaries? What is in- and out-of-scope? This is about deliberately and narrowly channeling user attention, having the judgment to make trade-offs, and providing clarity of purpose.
• How: How do you make the user feel when using the product? Are there patterns and mental models that your user will recognise? This is about the design and cohesion of your product and the emotion and delight it brings to the user.
• Where: Where are you taking the user with your product? A great product is more than just its inputs and outputs. It's about having a great vision and raison d'être. It's how you empower the users to become a better version of themselves. Using the best products feels like being on a journey.

In other words, first step is about usefulness, the second about emotion and the third about meaningfulness. Does the hierarchy above feel familiar? You're right, it mirrors Mr. Maslow's hierarchy of needs and forms a "hierarchy of taste" that should be infused at every level of your product.

Experimenting with taste

Taste can sound like something binary, either you have it or you don't. But no one knows everything, and thus no one has the ultimate taste. Taste always lives on a spectrum. The more confidence you have in your product taste, the more you will build your product based on conviction. With less confidence in taste, you need to resort more to exploration. But even in exploration, there is some sort of taste (or intuition) that can be built up. For example, what are the signals to look for in a user interview? How do you turn telemetry metrics data into a product narrative?

Building culture with taste

Product taste doesn’t lie in a single decision or plan. It emerges from the accumulation of small choices that, over time, compound into a coherent whole. It is expressed through the culture and craft of a team, which has to be fostered and nurtured. Taste is very seldom the default; the default is meeting that next deadline or taking that sales meeting. That is why taste has to be fought for with intention, even when there are other more important things to do.

Conclusion

In a world where building software is becoming cheaper and faster, taste may be one of the few enduring differentiators left. Not because it guarantees correctness, but because it keeps you oriented. It helps you recognize what matters, what doesn’t, and why. And perhaps the real aim of product taste is not to make products perfect, but to make them more meaningful.