Taste is the bone-deep feeling that you’ve made something good. It is a sense, inexplicable and ephemeral. But it’s also a tangible skill that’s increasingly essential. Taste is how a business differentiates itself when attention is scarce and choice is abundant. Knowing what to make is just as important as the ability to make it.

Taste is inescapable; it involves “the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing, or decoration,” the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote in his 1984 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. These choices can be symbolic of a range of things beyond just our aesthetic preferences, such as economic

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