Product Sensibility and Taste in the Age of AI
For a long time, the difficulty of building things acted as a filter. Even good ideas often stalled simply because turning them into something real took time and effort.
That filter feels weaker now. With AI, it’s much easier to move from a rough thought to something concrete, to explore variations, and to keep adding capability without encountering much resistance. It’s not that building has become effortless; it’s that it no longer pushes back in quite the same way.
What shows up much earlier, as a result, is the question of what’s actually worth building, and therefore what’s worth spending time and attention on. Because, when execution stops being the main obstacle, you’re forced to confront whether the problem is real, who it’s for, and whether the solution or approach you’re pursuing is something you’re willing to commit to once it exists.
Product sensibility, in this context, then matters more than it used to. Not as a set of tools or frameworks, but as judgment. It's the ability to distinguish between something that’s merely interesting and something that’s necessary, to understand the context a product will live in, and to recognise trade-offs even when the tools don’t force you to make them. It’s that judgment that often separates early excitement from something that actually becomes useful over time.
Alongside that, for me, is taste, which works a little differently. Taste shows up once you’ve started building, in the moment you sense that something is becoming cluttered, that another feature isn’t helping, or that the product is starting to lose coherence. AI makes it very easy to keep adding, which is precisely why taste matters: it’s what allows you to stop, to remove, and to leave certain possibilities unexplored. It’s certainly not something everyone has, it’s not something AI can supply for you, and it’s not even obvious how to cultivate it.
When thinking about product ideas, I’ve found that these quieter decisions tend to matter more. What you choose to take on, and what you’re willing to leave alone, ends up defining what you’re actually committing to.