Taste Is the New 10x
The bottleneck isn’t execution anymore. It’s judgment.
Everyone is building faster now.
AI tools scaffold apps, draft emails, style dashboards, summarize documents. The floor for execution has been raised across the board. But something else has quietly become the constraint:
Judgment.
Knowing what to build. When to ship it. What to cut. And how to make it feel inevitable.
Great software today isn’t defined by speed. It’s defined by taste—not in the aesthetic sense, but in the ability to focus on what truly matters.
Why velocity isn’t enough
In 2021, shipping fast was the advantage. Now, shipping fast is just the baseline. AI makes it trivial to build the wrong thing beautifully.
Speed without taste is noise at scale.
I’ve seen teams generate 12 dashboards, ship five onboarding flows, and rewrite the homepage headline 30 times with GPT. And still struggle to answer: What’s the actual job to be done? What feels like magic to the user?
That’s not an execution problem. It’s a prioritization problem. A strategic thinking problem. A taste problem.
What taste really means
Taste isn’t about being stylish. It’s about having an internal compass for:
What matters
What’s distracting
What creates delight or trust
What should be invisible
It’s the judgment to kill a feature that took a week to build because it adds friction. Or to obsess over copy on a button because you know it’s the first thing your user sees.
Taste is what tells you: This is the moment the user starts to trust us. Don’t mess it up.
Taste isn’t a vibe. It’s a muscle.
It gets stronger by:
Watching users struggle
Asking better questions
Sitting in customer support
Listening to sales calls
Rewriting the flow four times because it’s still not obvious
One of the best engineers I ever worked with once removed an entire search feature—because in practice, users just needed better defaults. He didn’t write more code. He wrote less. And the product got better.
The rise of the editor-engineer
AI will give you 10 buttons. The engineer with taste removes nine.
Some of the most effective engineers I work with now feel more like editors. They:
Say no more than they say yes
Care how the product feels, not just how it works
Can explain their decisions without jargon
Can see the difference between functional and finished
They don’t just ship features. They shape the product.
Why this matters now
For founders: Your edge isn’t speed. It’s clarity. And more than that—it’s knowing where you're searching for your edge. Every founder I know is in a constant search for leverage. In a world where anything can be built, the real question becomes: what’s worth building?
I spoke with a founder this week who was weighing three different growth hacks. Pricing tweaks, landing page optimizations, a referral idea. My advice? Forget hacks. Ask instead: What’s the single most powerful lever we might be already trying but haven’t nailed yet? Is it homepage conversion? Is it landing and expanding? Sales pitch clarity? Retention for our best-fit users? Then go obsess over that.
Taste is what lets you focus—not spin. It’s how you avoid the noise and keep sharpening the same knife. How you decide what to cut, what to keep, and how to get better at the thing that actually matters.
For investors: Look for taste in how founders describe their roadmap. Do they tell you what they cut? What they left on the table? That’s the signal.
The new 10x isn’t about output. It’s about editorial precision.
Taste is the rarest form of leverage in an infinite-output world.
Stay tuned for Post 3: AI Raised the Bar (Not the Floor).