Field Note · July 21, 2026
A field note on product taste
Taste is not a mystical gift. It is an accumulated set of comparisons, and it can be trained on purpose.
People talk about taste as though it were inherited. In practice, the people with the best judgement are simply the people who have looked at the most examples, closely, and formed opinions they were willing to be wrong about in public.
A practical routine: pick one object a week, a landing page, a package, a checkout flow, a menu, and write two hundred words on what decision each detail encodes. Not whether you like it. What it costs, what it protects, what it assumes about the person using it.
After a year you will have fifty documented comparisons, which is fifty more than most teams have. That is the entire trick. Taste is a research habit that eventually looks like intuition.