There’s been a lot of talk about how having great taste is key to building great software.

But taste is subjective. I might consider a particular movie or a restaurant amazing, but you might consider it as terrible.

Despite this subjectivity, there are some common factors that go into honing your taste in pretty much anything.

I believe taste is a product of

• the experiences we’ve had,
• the things we’ve always had or grown to have a keen eye for, and
• our natural ability to discern the components of what went into making those things

When people ask me how to grow their taste when building software, there are two things I tell them about.

Grow your exposure

If all you’ve watched in life are two movies, chances are you’ll think both of them are pretty good.

But if you’ve watched a thousand, you’ll really know to separate the great from the good. And the good from the terrible.

If you want to grow your product taste, you need to expose yourself to a hundred products in your space and adjacent industries to separate the good from the bad and the bad from the terrible.

Specifically, playing around with products from new startups every week makes a big difference.

Because startups don’t have the constraints that legacy products and large teams do, they’re more open to trying out bolder and entirely novel approaches to solve previously known problems.

Early and growth stage startups also tend to build products that are opinionated and differentiated to make an impression with prospective customers among a sea of incumbents.

When you tinker with experiences from products built by such startups, you’ll be able to compare what you’ve seen before with what’s fresh and better.

Something that you might have deemed as a fantastic experience yesterday might turn out to be a little unimpressive when compared against something you see today. But that is the point – this exercise in comparison is the gateway to grow your taste.

Tear apart what goes into world-class

A wine or food connoisseur typically breaks down wine or food into its components – taste, aroma and texture, and has an opinion about how they come together to create a complete experience.

Similarly, to grow your taste in building software, you need to start distilling down and discern the components that have gone into the products you’re exploring.

Breaking down things this way for digital products might not be second nature for some people. So, I suggest slowing down, taking notes or keeping an inspiration log – whatever works for you. Sometimes, asking a friend what they like in a product you both use can help you identify well-made things you have a blindspot for.

Whenever you’re doing these observations, you need to

– take stock of the problems the products have chosen to prioritize vs the problems they’ve chosen to ignore,

– think about the product team’s fresh take on the problem itself vs whatever your understanding of it may have been before,

– look at how the interactions and user flows look like and the ways in which they’ve been simplified,

– think about the architectural and technology choices the builders might have made to ship the solution you’re seeing,

– identify clues that help you get a sense of their product vision

By doing this for years, you can build a repertoire of patterns and building blocks that go behind creating something world-class.

Discerning these components comes to great help when you’re building something on your own later.

Your mind remembers the things you’ve seen and gathered. You start comparing what you’re trying to build with everything you’ve previously seen, driving yourself to do better than the experiences you’ve observed and discerned.