Cultivating Good Taste in Product Development
Taste in product development is described as the ability to produce high-quality work by exposing oneself to good things.
Two Teams, Same Deadline
Picture two product teams, each building a form-based workflow for the same kind of user. Both are competent. Both ship on time. Yet when you use the two products, one feels considered and the other feels like every other tool you have already seen. The gap is easy to notice and hard to explain.
Most people's first explanation is talent or 'design sense,' a quality that seems to live inside individuals and cannot be taught. The passage this article is built on offers a different explanation, one that a team can act on. It treats taste as the ability to produce high-quality work by exposing oneself to good things. The explanation is about inputs a team controls, not about innate gifts.
What do you think happens?
Two teams are equally competent and ship on time. One team deliberately reads outside research, studies interface patterns used elsewhere, and looks at strong craft in adjacent fields. The other does not. Which team should you expect to stand apart in the quality of its output?
Reveal answer
The team that seeks outside exposure. The passage identifies exposure to external good work as the input that separates work that stands apart from work that does not, and it says a team that omits this exposure should not expect its output to stand out.
The question is about the causal direction the passage describes. Exposure is the link a team controls, and omitting it has a predictable result: output that does not stand apart from the median.
The Causal Chain Behind Taste
The passage anchors the idea in a line that Abridge lists among its stated company values: 'you have to taste good things to have good taste.' Read that line slowly. It is not telling you to cultivate a refined eye in the abstract. It describes a cause and an effect: the quality of what you can produce depends on what you have been exposed to.
The passage presents taste as the second feature of Rao's frame. The chain runs from inputs, through a team's thinking, to the output it ships. Each link can be examined on its own, and the diagram below shows the direction of the relationship. The diagram is a simplification. The passage does not describe the internal mechanism in detail; it states the direction of the relationship and the consequence of breaking it.
Notice the direction of the arrows. Exposure sits upstream of decisions and output. The passage names the exposure link as the one a team controls. Everything downstream depends on whether the team has deliberately put good outside work into its thinking.
Three Kinds of Exposure
The passage names three kinds of exposure that a team has to deliberately seek out: the latest research papers, the latest interface patterns, and the strongest examples of craft in adjacent fields. These are not the same as the work the team is already doing. They are external inputs that sit outside the team's current project.
- Research: the latest research papers, read as inputs to the team's thinking
- Interface patterns: the latest interface patterns, which the team sees in work outside its own product
- Adjacent craft: the strongest examples of craft in fields next to the team's own
Taste as Operational, Not Aesthetic
The word taste often suggests a personal preference: a feeling that one thing looks nicer than another. The passage makes clear that its point is operational rather than aesthetic. Taste is defined by what the team does with its inputs and what its output can do, namely produce work that can stand apart from the median.
The passage closes with a practical instruction: when you assess a team's work, ask what it has been exposed to, not only how talented its people are. That question is operational. It points at inputs you can inspect, rather than a quality you can only feel.
Technical Curiosity as the Operating Posture
The passage connects taste to a second term. Technical curiosity is what the source names as the differentiator, and it describes that curiosity as the operational name for the same posture that taste requires. The source's own wording for the underlying posture is being open to new ideas and experiences.
| Term | What it describes | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|
| Taste | The link between exposure and output quality | In the work a team ships and whether it stands apart |
| Technical curiosity | The disposition to actually seek exposure out | In the day-to-day habit of looking at new ideas and strong examples |
The two terms are not competing explanations. One names the link and the other names the disposition that keeps the link active.
The passage also mentions a founder-mode FDE that is on the same circuit. The text does not elaborate on that role beyond stating that the posture is shared, so this article does not expand on it. What matters for the reader is the shared posture itself: a practitioner who keeps seeking new ideas and strong examples is doing the same thing that the taste line describes.
Mistakes in Reading Taste
Common mistake Treating taste as innate talent that cannot be taught
What it looks likeConcluding that one team's interface is better because its designers simply have better design sense
Why it failsThe passage frames taste as a product of exposure, which is an input a team can act on
Do this insteadAsk what the team has been exposed to to explain the difference
Common mistake Assuming reading research alone creates good products
What it looks likeA team reads the latest papers but never looks at interface patterns or adjacent craft
Why it failsThe passage names three kinds of exposure, not one
Do this insteadSeek all three kinds: research, interface patterns, and strong craft in adjacent fields
Common mistake Concluding that internal work is worthless
What it looks likeDismissing a team's own project work because outside examples look better
Why it failsThe passage says it does not claim internal work is worthless; it identifies external good work as the input that differs
Do this insteadKeep internal work and add deliberate exposure to outside good work
Common mistake Equating taste with personal aesthetic preference
What it looks likeJudging a design only by whether one person likes its look
Why it failsThe source's point is operational: taste is about inputs and whether output stands apart from the median
Do this insteadCheck what the team was exposed to and whether the output can stand apart
Common mistake Confusing technical curiosity with a hobby, rather than the posture that keeps exposure happening
Assessing a Team's Work
Applying the exposure question to two workflows
Two teams have each built a form-based workflow for the same kind of user. Both are competent and both shipped on time. Team A's interface feels considered; Team B's feels like every other tool. Using the source's framing, how would you assess the gap?
- 1Set aside the talent explanation
The first instinct is to attribute the gap to design sense. The passage offers an explanation that a team can act on, so start there instead.
- 2Ask what each team was exposed to
Check whether each team sought outside research, interface patterns used elsewhere, and strong craft in adjacent fields. These are the inputs the passage names.
- 3Check whether exposure was deliberate
The passage says these inputs must be deliberately sought, sitting outside the team's current project. A team that did not look outward has not been exposed to them.
- 4Judge the output against the median
Ask whether Team A's output stands apart from the median and whether that matches the exposure each team had.
The gap is best explained by the exposure each team sought, not by an assumed fixed quality of its people. The assessment points at inputs the team can change.
Practice: Diagnosing Exposure
A product team has excellent internal work and a strong research practice, but it has not looked at interface patterns or craft in adjacent fields in over a year. Its latest release feels like the rest of the market. Using the causal chain from this article, explain what the passage would predict about the release, and name one concrete exposure step the team could take. Do not conclude that the internal work is worthless.
Hints
- Identify which of the three kinds of exposure the team is missing
- Trace the chain from exposure to decisions to shipped work
- Remember the passage says omitting exposure predicts output that does not stand apart from the median
Key Takeaways
- Taste, in the source's sense, is the ability to produce high-quality work by exposing oneself to good things, and it is an operational matter rather than an aesthetic one.
- The causal chain runs from deliberate exposure to research, interface patterns, and adjacent craft, through team decisions, to output that can stand apart from the median.
- Technical curiosity is the operational name for the open posture that keeps a team seeking that exposure, and the source names it as the differentiator.
- When assessing a team's work, ask what it has been exposed to, not only how talented its people are.