What is taste?
In the technology industry, taste is a frequently invoked yet poorly defined concept. It raises a fundamental question: is taste a distinct, enduring attribute, or is it merely a proxy for high-level technical and execution skill?
Defining the boundary between taste and temporal skill requires looking at how value is created across other disciplines. Exceptional writing provides a clear parallel.
A great writer knows their audience deeply. Because they understand who they are talking to, they speak directly to that audience’s needs and sensibilities. For a less formal audience, the writer might use more slang, keep things casual, and get straight to the point. On the flip side, a strong technical document or a legal memo will be written completely differently. Most great content is built deliberately for a specific audience.
Software is actually much closer to writing than it is to other traditional branches of engineering.
Software as Art, Not Just Engineering
While there are incredibly complicated elements around scale, and a constant need for thoughtfulness regarding how software gets created, building software is not like building a bridge.
When you build a bridge, it is pure engineering. When you create software, you are creating something for an end consumer who is going to use it to get value, but also to feel something as part of that experience.
This is exactly where taste comes in, and it is why taste leans so heavily into the product side of the house.
The Rebundling of Product, Engineering, and Design
The industry is currently seeing a massive rebundling of the product, engineering, and design roles into a single, cohesive execution. Every person on a team might have different relative strengths within those three buckets, but you absolutely need all three working together to create an amazing product.
Right now, product skills are becoming significantly more valuable to actual value creation. Because pure coding skills are becoming less valuable as automation and tools make development easier, the bottleneck has shifted.
The catch is that the definition of product is expanding. Many things that used to be pure engineering are now being bucketed under product, including:
Latency: How fast the application responds to a user’s intent.
The “Feel”: The fluid transitions and responsiveness of the interface.
System Architecture: Managing backend complexity so the user never senses it.
Managing these components requires deep technical knowledge. You cannot design a great experience if you do not understand how the underlying machinery works.
The Anatomy of an Agentic Interface
Take an agentic interface like ChatGPT as an example.
There is how it looks, which is one element. There is where the buttons are placed, which is another element closer to traditional product design. But then there are the deeper product decisions that require technical intuition:
What kind of workspace state management solution do you use on the backend?
How do you scale the data layer in a way that directly benefits the end user?
As coding itself becomes a lot easier, writing the lines of code is no longer the primary challenge. What becomes a lot harder is creating a truly great product.
The True Definition of Taste
That brings us back to taste. Taste is not just aesthetic preference.
Taste is the ultimate extension of knowing your audience. It is the ability to look at a complex system and constantly make the right trade-offs between speed, quality, UX, UI, and engineering constraints.
When you have taste, you balance all of those competing pieces perfectly so that the end user gets the absolute best possible experience for them.