I used to think I didn't have taste in my own product. I run product for a marketplace connecting sex workers and clients. I don't buy what my users buy or sell. For a long time I treated that as a gap I had to work around with research, interviews, data, because I couldn't just build for myself and trust it. Then I actually sat down and tried to prove that judgment and taste were two different things. They're not. They're the same mechanism, pointed at different targets. Taste bets on yourself as the user. You compress everything you've seen and read and felt into instinct, and you hope enough people are like you that it works. Judgment bets on someone else, because you can't consult yourself, so you build that person from evidence instead. What I didn't expect to find is that before any of that judgment work starts, someone has to decide which users matter. Which segment. Which problem is worth solving this quarter. That decision isn't research. It's conviction, made before a single interview happens. That's taste. It never left. It just moved up a level, into the one call you can't outsource: who's worth building for in the first place. Link to the piece below.