The discourse around ✨ taste ✨ is bugging me.

It’s the thing everyone says you need to have in order to succeed since AI caused software delivery to be cheap. As if this is something you can just build as a skill or take an online course for.

No. Just… no! That’s not a thing!

Taste is not something you can just learn because that’s what everyone says you need for a job. You build taste over an entire lifetime of immersing yourself in a domain you’re fascinated by – art, music, software, fashion, many more, and often not one of those exclusively.

It’s also not something you’re just born with – you build it over time (decades, really) based on your life experiences. You can’t just build taste in a quarter. You also definitely cannot ask your AI product of choice to summarize what makes these 20 products great and expect to build your own taste from that.

It’s also not something you can be objectively good or bad at. I don’t know that I personally have great taste in software products. I do have a particular set of preferences and I can speak to why I have them, and I guess that’s taste - but I’m also not going to assume I can translate that into “the next great billion-dollar product.” That’s just what I like.

Steve Jobs happened to have a good handle on what he thought might be appealing to the masses in terms of what a touch-screen smart phone should look like. He (and his team, mind you) nailed the best execution of a vision that happened to be right and with the right timing.

Sometimes taste is also, simply, awareness. Knowing what is anachronistic or silly and leaning into it for the fun of it can actually be a great indicator of taste. My colleague @Sofia did a whole talk on the subject of taste during our last @Buffer retreat, and you know what resonated the most during her presentation? Her use of WordArt (yeah, the classic 90s MS Office stuff), because she knew it was the opposite of current design vogue. But it was funny, and it landed.

By extension, a very small percentage of product managers who “survive” (ha) AI will not have great taste. That’s just going to be the case. More likely you’ll survive because you know how to make your execs happy or generate revenue – bonus points if you know how to be silly or elegant while doing it.

Don’t chase taste. Or if you do, do it by getting off LinkedIn and immersing yourself in something you really care about for a long time and form some deeply-held convictions about that thing, and then maybe it’ll translate to your work.