Product Taste

Product Taste and Intuition

Develop a reliable internal compass to recognize and build world-class products.

Help the user with product taste and intuition using insights from 35 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

1. Deconstruct experiences - Guide the user through analyzing specific product details to identify why they evoke certain emotional responses.
2. Calibrate intuition - Help the user document and review their decision rationales against real-world outcomes to refine their judgment.
3. Challenge assumptions - Use first-principles thinking to question standard industry metrics and focus on core user utility.
4. Refine the feel - Assist in articulating the specific polish, speed, and usability elements that contribute to a high-quality product feel.

Core Principles

Learn Through Model Primitives

Howie Liu: "I think to really understand the solution space of what's possible, you have to be in the details. I mean, literally, you can't just look at screenshots or a pre-recorded video of a new product feature. AI is something you have to play with, and ideally you're playing with both the packaged up app or solution that you've built with it, but you're also playing around directly with the underlying primitives who are using the models either via API or via a chat interface."

True intuition is built by playing directly with the underlying technology and APIs rather than observing demos. Understanding the raw boundaries of your ingredients allows you to imagine new possibilities.

Articulate Emotional Responses

Jessica Hische: "Most people are better at understanding the feelings and sensations that typography and logos give us than they give themselves credit for, because what we are as people are endless absorbers of patterns, and information, and all this kind of stuff as we move throughout the world. We don't take time to sit and digest it, but it's still coming in and getting logged, and so even as a non-designer, I think you can look at examples of logos where something's not quite right and be like, 'Something's not right here, I just don't know how to name it.'"

Develop a professional eye by explicitly naming the feelings triggered by specific design elements. Practice identifying broken patterns to understand what makes a visual work.

Design for Human Emotion

Josh Miller: "What we do at The Browser Company is we talk about optimizing feelings. How do we want to make someone feel on the other end of our software? Do we want to make them feel joy? Do we want to make them feel fast?"

Focus development on evoking specific human feelings like joy or speed rather than just moving quantitative metrics. Treat metrics as secondary tools to measure the success of an emotional experience.

Actively Falsify Assumptions

Judd Antin: "One of my big mantras was, "We don't validate, we falsify. We are looking to be wrong." Many PMs, many designers are not in that place. They do not want to be wrong. They're looking to validate, and that's user-centered performance."

Use research to stress-test your internal beliefs and look for ways you might be wrong. Avoid research that merely validates existing decisions without the potential to change them.

Quality as a Growth Strategy

Katie Dill: "I know there's this saying of it's growth versus quality, but quality is growth. And if you think about how you can make your product easier to use and more understandable, that will of course drive people to use it, and use more of it, and have a better experience with it that they'll want to talk about with others."

Superior aesthetics and usability are not just for show; they drive user activation and word-of-mouth. High-quality details make a product feel more approachable and trustworthy.

Iterate via Internal Usage

Karri Saarinen: "We actually believe that when you start building the thing you actually start realizing more how it should work and how it should be better. A lot of times with the teams we tell them, "Just put it there in, I don't know, the first week almost. After you have some designs in place or some design ideas, just put it into the app and ship it to production." It's only visible to us so we internally can test it out."

Ship early to internal teams and co-create with select customers to find real usage patterns. High quality is reached through constant iteration before final polishing.