How to
Cultivate It.

For every reference you save, slow down enough to ask which specific part is doing the work. The whole landing page isn't the reference. The way it handles the third scroll is. The whole onboarding isn't the reference. The single screen where it explains pricing without a salesperson is.

Find the part. Write down what it's doing and why it works. "This works because the load order surfaces the highest-value action first." If you can't write that sentence about a specific part, drop the reference.

Mood boards are scrapbooks of things you find pretty. A reference library is a slowly assembled argument, one observed part at a time. This is the foundation everything else stacks on. A reference you can't argue for is a reference that won't help you when you actually need it.

A hundred real decisions this month, not ten. AI made this kind of practice cheap for the first time in my career. Use it as resistance training, not as a shortcut. Vibe-code a dozen variants of a feature. Throw away eleven. Treat the throwing-away as the workout, not the failure.

The hard part isn't the making. It's the killing. Most of us, me included, on more projects than I'll admit, get attached to the work we just made and find a reason to keep it. This is the moment conviction has to actually fire. Look at the eleven variants. Be honest about which one is genuinely better. Kill the other ten without negotiating with yourself.

The teams that build taste fastest aren't the ones who ship the most. They're the ones who can look at their own work and tell the truth about it.

A feedback meeting produces comments. A decision meeting produces a direction. The difference is a single question at the top: what are we deciding today?

Without it, the crit becomes a place to talk about how things look. Design's version of group therapy, where everyone leaves lighter and nothing actually changes. With it, the crit becomes the place taste gets practiced in public.

There's no other meeting on a design team that does this much work for the team's culture. Try running one crit without the deciding question. Then run the next one with it. You'll feel the difference in the room.

Every design decision is answering a question on behalf of someone. A specific person, in a specific moment, trying to accomplish something specific, and quietly hoping it won't be one more thing that disappoints them.

Name them. Their role. The job they're doing right now. The win they're chasing. The last tool that let them down. If you can't name them by the win they want and the worry they carry, you're making it for yourself, and the work will show it.

"For users" is a dead phrase. "For Maria, who runs operations at a 200-person logistics company, trying to close out the quarter without surprises, hoping this rollout goes smoother than the last one" is a live one. Vague users produce vague work, every time.

AI is impressive at making variants. It's bad at picking which one should ship. Use it to widen your option space, to iterate faster than you used to, to test ideas you'd never have had time to sketch by hand. Don't let it make the call for you. The work at the end of the pipeline is yours. Sit with the variants, choose what's worth keeping.

The team that uses AI to generate ten options for a human to choose between is doing real work. The team that uses AI to generate the right answer is fooling itself, usually beautifully and always confidently.

I've watched myself do it. The model gives you a polished answer, you read it, you nod, you ship it. A week later you can't quite remember why that was the right call. That's the tell. If you can't reconstruct the reasoning, you didn't make the decision.

A principle is a sentence that tells you what to do when two good things fight.

Three things get called principles and only one of them is. Take three sentences a real product team might write down:

1. "We love great design."
2. "We aim to ship products that delight customers and drive measurable business value."
3. "When delight and clarity conflict, we choose clarity."

The first is a value, a feeling about who we are. The second is an intention, a hope about where we're headed. Neither survives a hard meeting. The third is a principle, because it gives you the answer when the meeting actually happens.

"The form is too clean. It's missing the moment of joy users loved in v1." The team reaches for sentence three. Clarity wins, and v2 ships.

Test every one of your principles this way. Pick a tradeoff your team has had to live through. If the principle wouldn't have given you the answer, it isn't done. Rewrite it until it does.

Most company principles are auditioning to be liked. The real ones do work in the room when two good things fight.

Taste spreads through rooms, not through slide decks.

Put your strongest people into rooms they haven't been in before: with executives, with customers, with the people doing the actual work the product is supposed to help. Put the people earlier in their careers into rooms where senior leaders are deciding out loud, with the messy reasoning still intact.

Exposure is the mechanism. It's the slowest kind of learning, and the most durable.

Stop trying to write the playbook. Start picking the room. A culture of taste isn't built in a workshop. It's built by putting people where the decisions actually happen, often enough that the way decisions get made becomes the way they think.