A design company with no shipped product just sold for $6.5 billion.
That’s the number that stopped me this week. OpenAI paid it for Jony Ive’s company, io, not for a product roadmap, but for the years Ive spent in a room with Steve Jobs deciding what deserved to get built.
Suddenly everyone in tech is talking about taste. Paul Graham thinks it’s about to matter more than it ever has.
A former ByteDance engineer went as far as calling it “the moat.” I think they’re onto something real, and it has nothing to do with aesthetics.
Taste is judgment. It’s knowing what’s worth doing, when to stop, and why one choice beats another given the constraints in front of you.
That kind of judgment only comes from years of getting things wrong and being forced to choose well anyway.
Apple is the cautionary tale here. After Ive left in 2019, the design studio that once made Apple the most respected product organization in the world lost nearly every designer from his era.
Incoming CEO John Ternus is now spending some of his first months trying to rebuild what walked out the door. You can keep the engineers and the AI tools and still not have enough.
Here’s where this gets practical:
- Start by mapping your judgment calls, the decisions in your organization where taste, not just technical optimization, actually determines the outcome.
- Get explicit about who owns that judgment and how well you’re tapping into their experience.
- Then hire for lived experience. When execution gets cheap, the premium shifts toward people whose judgment has been sharpened by years of friction and failure.
And deliver tasteful experiences. Whatever you call it, design, UX, or just experience, find the people in your organization with real taste and put their judgment to work creating something that makes people feel something.
This Week
Ask yourself where in your organization the quality of sound judgment is determining the best outcomes. Then identify one area where you’ve been treating taste as optional, possibly sub-optimally deferring it to data or AI, and determine how to move it into the human domain –assigning it to someone with good taste.
Where has your organization been outsourcing judgment it should be protecting?
I publish Leapfrogging the Headlines to help leaders cut through the noise, gain clarity on what’s happening, and make smarter decisions. Subscribe below to get each issue delivered free.
Join 30,000+ other leaders