Product Taste
topic on 6 shows · 9 statements across 9 episodes
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 
In Depth 
Another Podcast 
Lenny's Podcast 
the Neon Show 
Sourcery
9 statements about Product Taste, every show
Gio: Wasteful ideas and bad taste offset AI's productivity gains
“I think a big, big mistake that people are making is that because of the AI, building things become easier. People are making a lot of bad decisions, bad tastes, wasteful ideas that actually offset the empowerment of AI.”
Evans: Knowing what code should do is harder than writing it
“Writing the code isn't the hard part. Writing the hard part is knowing what the code should be doing. It's seeing the problem and knowing the right way to do it. It's the opinion.”
Mosseri: When building becomes easier, figuring out what to build matters most
“In a world where it's easier to build things, it's more important to make sure that your time is spent figuring out what you should be building in the first place.”
Schoening: Product taste is running a mental simulation of user reactions
“If I had to describe what taste actually means, it's you're able to run. This is such a nerdy way of describing it. You're able to run a virtual machine in your head. Where given an idea, you can predict for a certain in-group whether they're going to like it …”
Taggar: Top 18-to-22-Year-Olds in 5 Years Will Have 'Off the Charts' Taste
“I wonder if, like, the best 18 to twenty-two-year-olds, like, five years from now will just have, like, off the charts taste and everything. Because they'll just be so much more prolific. They should be, right? Like, they should just be launching and touching …”
Ghosh: Product Taste and AI-Centric Design Cannot Be Automated
“The taste of a product, the design aspect of a product, increasingly AI-centric design, where you are building an AI-infused product, how do you land it? These are non-trivial things. Which I don't think can be automated away.”
Butterfield: Product taste provides an advantage because most competitors lack it
“You can create a real advantage for yourself, for your product, for your company by leaning into it because most people don't have good taste and don't invest.”
Rauch: Product taste is a developable skill built through exposure hours
“At Vercel we have one of our sort of internal operating principles as increasing exposure hours. Try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your products. Even to watch how people use other products. And you'll develop that mu…”
Weiss: Product taste is learned by working with experts, not from classes
“It's something I think you learn much better by actually working side by side with folks who have really strong product taste and sensibility. And not by reading a lot, or taking some classes, or I don't know what it might be, because it's something that is in…”