There's a quality that separates good work from great work, and it's hard to name precisely. It's not intelligence — plenty of smart people build mediocre things. It's not effort — hard work is necessary but not sufficient. It's something closer to taste: the ability to sense what's right, what's unnecessary, what's missing, and what deserves attention that nobody explicitly asked for.
Taste is an unfashionable word in business and technology. It sounds subjective, elitist, unmeasurable. We prefer words like "data-driven" and "user-centered" and "evidence-based." And these concepts matter. But they don't capture the thing that makes the difference between a product that works and a product that feels right.
The Invisible Details
The best products are full of details that most users never consciously notice. The animation that's 200 milliseconds instead of 400. The error message that tells you what to do, not just what went wrong. The empty state that welcomes you instead of showing a blank screen. The email notification that arrives at 9am instead of 3am.
None of these details, individually, make or break a product. But collectively, they're the difference between a product people tolerate and a product people love. And the decision to care about these details — to invest time in things that won't show up in a KPI dashboard — is a decision that requires taste.
Steve Jobs talked about this as painting the back of the fence. Nobody sees the back of the fence. Nobody will know if you don't paint it. But you know. And the decision to paint it anyway — to care about quality in places where nobody's checking — is what separates craft from mere production.
Taste Is Learned, Not Innate
One of the harmful myths about taste is that it's innate — you either have it or you don't. This is false. Taste is developed through exposure, attention, and practice. You develop taste in design by looking at a lot of design, both good and bad, and thinking carefully about why the good stuff works. You develop taste in writing by reading widely and paying attention to what makes a sentence clear or a paragraph compelling. You develop taste in technology by using a lot of products and noticing the details that distinguish the excellent from the adequate.
The key is active observation. Most people use products passively. They click buttons, read text, and move on. People with taste use products attentively. They notice the spacing. They wonder about the word choices. They observe what happens at the edges — when something goes wrong, when the data is empty, when the network is slow. This attention is a skill that improves with practice.
Craft as Competitive Advantage
In a world where AI can generate code, design, and content at scale, craft becomes more valuable, not less. When the cost of production drops to near zero, the differentiator shifts from "can you build it?" to "can you build it well?" Everyone will be able to ship a product. Not everyone will ship a product worth using.
This is counterintuitive. You'd think that AI-powered abundance would make quality less important. But abundance creates noise, and craft cuts through noise. When there are a thousand AI-generated blog posts on a topic, the one that was carefully edited by someone who cares about clarity stands out. When there are fifty apps that do the same thing, the one with thoughtful interaction design wins.
Craft is slow. It's expensive relative to the alternative of shipping something that merely functions. But it compounds. A product built with craft earns trust, which earns word-of-mouth, which earns an audience that isn't rented from an advertising platform. This is an increasingly rare advantage.
Building Things That Last
The technology industry has a bias toward the new. New frameworks, new platforms, new paradigms. Last year's approach is obsolete. The cutting edge moves daily. This creates a culture of disposability — build fast, ship fast, and if it breaks, build again.
There's a place for speed and iteration. But there's also a place for building things that last. Software that's still useful a decade after it was written. Documentation that's still clear years later. Systems that handle growth without needing to be rewritten. These things require an orientation toward durability that's at odds with the move-fast culture, but that creates more value in the long run.
Building things that last requires asking different questions. Not "what's the fastest way to ship this?" but "what will this look like in three years?" Not "does this work?" but "will this still be understandable to someone who didn't build it?" Not "can we add this feature?" but "should we?"
Taste, craft, and durability are connected. They all stem from the same impulse: to care about the quality of what you build, even when — especially when — nobody is asking you to. The world has enough things that merely function. The opportunity is in building things that are genuinely good.