Track delight debt alongside technical debt. Monitor the small things you're not doing—the loading animation, the empty state, the error message personality.

Dogfood religiously. Use your product the way customers will. Feel the sharp edges. Most teams test features; taste-driven teams test feelings. When something hurts, fix it. When something delights, double down.

Polish beats features. The product that looks finished gets tagged as "enterprise-ready"—even when it's not.

This clarity cascades through everything. When software feels intentional, users assume the infrastructure, security, and roadmap are too. Your product gets judged in seconds, your website in one. That first impression becomes a permission structure for everything else.

The effects multiply. Linear's waitlist converted massively because every pixel ... See more

Most companies confuse taste with aesthetics. They hire a design agency, pick a nice font, and call it done. But real taste runs deeper—it's in the error messages, the loading states, the features you killed because they were merely good, not essential.