We are living in the most accessible time in history to build software. A flood of AI tools has made it faster and cheaper than ever to create, market and sell new products — just executing quickly is not a differentiator anymore. You’re probably not the “first of” anything; or even if you are, a competitor is likely not far behind, nipping at your heels.
But for plenty of founders and builders, this feels like a fork in the road. Choose your route: craft versus speed. Should you race to ship an MVP, or take time to polish every pixel?
In our view, this is a false binary. Taste and craft are not about endless design reviews. Taste is finely-tuned intuition for what differentiates good from great — and perhaps more importantly, the ability to explain why.
Taste may look effortless, but underneath the hood, there many finely-tuned gears cranking in unison. And for the companies doing it right, you don’t have to sacrifice speed and horsepower to get there.
But don’t just take our word for it. We've gathered insights from some of tech's sharpest builders on how they operationalize taste at scale. Drawing from the Review archives and In Depth podcast, we unpack concrete systems — from Stripe's rigorous brand reviews to Linear's work trials approach to hiring tastemakers — that turn taste from an abstract ideal into repeatable processes.
Our expert roster includes:
- Krithika Muthukumar, Stripe’s first marketing hire and former VP of Marketing at OpenAI
- Karri Saarinen, founder & CEO of Linear
- Alyssa Henry, former CEO of Square
- Milin Desai, CEO of Sentry
- Julie Supan, YouTube’s first Head of Marketing
- Anthony Casalena, founder & CEO of Squarespace
- Jiaona “JZ” Zhang, CPO of Linktree
- Noah Desai Weiss, former CPO of Slack
In this guide, we distill their advice into the four tenets of taste, offering a roadmap to elevate your product, brand and team. Let’s dive in.
Tenet 1: Reframe the ROI of taste
Centralize your mission
Words like “taste” and “craft” may bring to mind artistic flourish. But it’s much more than just pixels, says Krithika Muthukumar (who was hired as Stripe’s very first marketer, tasked with taking up the pen from co-founders Patrick and John Collison). A thoughtful display of craft still needs to ladder up to the company’s broader mission, otherwise, it’s likely to fall flat.
Take Stripe Press (an editorial operation that publishes books on technological, economic and scientific advancement). Starting a small publishing house might not be an obvious choice for a payments company. But it was a calculated investment in Stripe’s mission to “increase the GDP of the internet.” “We invested in sharing knowledge and ideas for progress with the world,” says Muthukumar.
If you make brand bets that are too orthogonal to your mission, people can very easily sniff that out. It has to connect back.
-Krithika Muthukumar, Stripe’s first marketing hire and former VP of Marketing at OpenAI
Yes, the design of Stripe Press has the company’s signature sleek look and feel, but Stripe didn’t get into the books business just to design eye-catching covers. As founder Patrick Collison explained, publishing books like “Poor Charlie’s Almanac” and Claire Hughes Johnson’s “Scaling People” is to help more startups succeed — who can, eventually, become Stripe customers.
Ditch the dashboard
There aren’t many designers-turned-founders out there — and that’s, in part, what makes Karri Saarinen stand out from the pack. Before co-founding Linear (an issue tracking tool beloved by product teams at Vercel, Runway and Ramp), he was the founding designer of Coinbase and the principal designer at Airbnb.
So when starting Linear, the founders began with a simple ethos: Craft is the new growth hack.
“Most of our customers today came to us because they heard about us through one of our users. They found us because someone was talking about the quality experience we’re providing, not because of our outbound sales,” says Saarinen.
But maintaining this quality-first approach isn't easy when facing market pressures. “Sometimes companies incentivize other things, like speed of execution or how much the metrics are going up. If you incentivize those two things, quality is no longer one of the requirements anymore,” he says. “Instead, it’s, ‘We just want you to complete this task. We don't actually care how you do it, we just want you to finish it now.’”
Lots of companies give up on quality because it’s not easily measurable — there’s no dashboard where quality goes up or down.
-Karri Saarinen, founder and CEO of Linear
Linear takes it one step further — as Saarinen explained to Lenny Rachitsky, they don’t use OKRs, instead centralizing around strategic goals like “Be the default tool for startups.” With that wide berth, quality and taste have room to flourish — and Linear is better positioned to win, says Saarinen.
“In this market, we’re not going to win any other way than being the best product out there. With these kinds of company-wide work tools, there’s often inertia to change, so the quality of the product has to be much better for them to switch,” he told Rachitsky.
Differentiate with delight, not sprinting
“Brand is the business value of delight,” says Krithika Muthukumar. “When you spend that extra time on craft, you increase the chances of reaching audiences beyond your core ICP.”
At Stripe, that meant sweating the details, even if that extra effort padded project timelines. “We wanted to launch a page that showcased our open-source contributions. But we delayed the launch of that page by almost a month and a half because our design team wanted to implement the Game of Life in the header background of that page. And that sounds crazy.”
But the team’s obsessive commitment to craft paid off. “It went viral, which speaks to the craftsmanship that we place on our product,” she says.
She shares another example of how the marketing team at Retool (where she was the Head of Marketing) spent extra time on whimsical details. “We put out these beautiful explainers about the history of Visual Basic and Yahoo! Pipes, which are the spiritual predecessors to Retool. We spent a lot of time coding in some Easter eggs and design elements that caught the attention of the people reading the page.”
Just don’t expect immediate returns for an investment in craft in the short term — you’re playing the long game here.
If you're always looking for short-term payback from brand, you're not going to get there. But in the long term, it amortizes across all of your programs. It makes them all more effective and pays off in dividends.
-Krithika Muthukumar, Stripe’s first marketing hire and former VP of Marketing at OpenAI
Stripe isn’t alone in its willingness to ditch a deadline for the sake of craft. Squarespace is equally game, according to its founder and CEO, Anthony Casalena.
“We tend to see a lot of deadlines as arbitrary and meaningless. At their worst, they compromise design quality and burn people out so much that they stop having good, creative ideas,” he says.
If we don’t think we can deliver something phenomenal by a certain date, we’ll just change the deadline. Sprinting is not our core differentiator.
-Anthony Casalena, founder and CEO of Squarespace
Tenet 2: Implement these taste checkpoints
Create predictable, systematized reviews
How did Stripe’s leadership scale taste throughout the org? Put simply, they didn’t, says Krithika Muthukumar. “Instead, we invested in processes and systems to ensure that everything that went out the door had taste.”
Rather than hope for a mind-meld from the founders down to each IC hire, Muthukumar created taste checks and balances. “What I’ve seen often happen at scaling startups is that everything is in the heads of the founders or the early marketers. Instead, we built processes so that a marketer in their very first month at Stripe would know exactly the steps to take something from idea to execution.”
Below, she details three of the most impactful workflows at Stripe:
1) 20% and 80% review meetings
You don’t check your GPS for the first time when you’re just a few miles out from your destination. So don’t wait until a project is nearly out the door to review it. “At Stripe, we would do a 20% strategy review to make sure that we were aligned on the goals and intent of any big project,” says Muthukumar. “Then we would do an 80% review for the execution and check in on how things were going, like what the collateral looked like.”
The altitude of these check-ins would change depending on the project, sometimes a quick “LGTM” thumbs up, or a more involved discussion about the audience or positioning. But maintaining those checkpoints is vitall.
It’s important that you review at the 80% mark, not the 99% mark, because you still want the ability to make changes based on what comes up in the review.
-Krithika Muthukumar, Stripe’s first marketing hire and former VP of Marketing at OpenAI
2) Marketing review forums
As an org grows, look for opportunities to scale invaluable access to founders in a more attainable way, says Muthukumar.
“We would hold these marketing review forums where a team would present their work to John Collison and our marketing leadership for review. And then we would have a shadow Zoom room (like a marketing fishbowl) where the rest of the marketing org could listen to the discussion,” she says. “That transparency went a long way to help others see how the founder’s feedback applies to their own work.”
3) Designated red pen holders
Just like you wouldn’t expect everyone in the org to have an expertly-honed hiring bar, don’t expect that everyone will have the same level of taste. Instead, Stripe tapped specific folks to hold the red pen. “As reviewers, they were putting on the hat of the user and asking, ‘Hey, if I'm seeing this piece of collateral for the first time, am I confused? What questions do I have? Is it in line with the Stripe brand in terms of consistency?’” says Muthukumar.
And to be clear, “red pen holder” was not a loose title — it was an explicit designation. Early on at Stripe, there were five domain area experts who would review every single piece of content that touched an audience size of 100+ users (if you fell under that mark, you would pull in a peer reviewer).
Putting every new hire through an onboarding week will not enable them to suddenly pick up the same taste as the rest of the organization.
-Krithika Muthukumar, Stripe’s first marketing hire and former VP of Marketing at OpenAI
For more from Muthukumar on her experiences as Stripe's and OpenAI's first marketing hire, check out her advice here.
Don’t shy away from (a bit of) micromanagement
You might hear “red pen” and immediately think micromanagement. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, says Muthukumar.
“I don’t think you can build a good brand without micromanagement. It gets a bad rap for depriving people of independence or autonomy — but it’s about making the user experience the best it can be. It takes a bit of funnel tightening to a certain set of people for you to maintain that bar and consistency,” she says. “Every touch point, email, event, blog post and landing page is a representation of our brand.”
She challenges marketing execs and founders to reframe micromanagement: “Micromanagement is not about depriving people of their independence or autonomy. It is about putting your user first.”
How do you mix in just the right dash of micro to your management? “It can still be a very kind environment, which is how I would paint Stripe,” says Muthukumar. Here’s how they approached it:
“For example, we made sure that by the time reviewers picked up that red pen, it was about objectivity versus subjectivity. Is this objectively meeting our guidelines? Is it objectively confusing or not confusing? It’s about consistency and putting ourselves in our users’ shoes — especially users seeing the messaging for the first time,” she says.
Milin Desai, CEO of Sentry, echoes that leaders at the top of the org chart need to embrace some degree of micromanagement. “As we add more people, sometimes they don’t have all the context. So execs must have the presence to say, ‘We don’t do things this way, this is how we do it,’” he says.
When you’re a founder or CEO and you’re participating at a very detailed level, it can come across as micromanagement. Like, “Why the hell do you care?” But the articulation of that detail is what makes Sentry, Sentry.
-Milin Desai, CEO of Sentry
Tenet 3: Add some magic to your MVP
Craft minimum remarkable products
The lean startup movement popularized the idea of building minimum viable products (MVPs) as the quickest path forward. But years ago on the Review, Jiaona “JZ” Zhang (now the Chief Product Officer at Linktree) made a strong case for an alternative approach — and her take is more relevant than ever.
If companies want to stay competitive, she argued, product folks need to be more attuned to a fledgling product’s lovability, not just viability. “The minimum viable product was appealing because it was cheap, and you could get it to market faster. But stiffer competition means that MVPs aren’t going to cut it anymore. If startups truly want to stand out, they need to strive toward creating a minimum lovable product instead,” says Zhang.
This sentiment is echoed by Alyssa Henry (who took over the helm as CEO of Square from Jack Dorsey). “Part of Square’s operating principles is that if we’re launching something new, we want it to be a minimum remarkable product, not just a viable product,” says Henry.
Crucially, remarkable does not have to mean complicated. “Remarkable has a number of characteristics to it, but one of them is elegance. You can have two simple chairs, but one is crudely made and one is elegantly made,” says Henry. When you make something simple, the craftsmanship and elegance (or lack thereof) is more evident.
Henry shares a specific Square example: “The card reader or the payment terminal was not something brand new or pioneering — it was a card reader with a receipt printer on it. But the differentiating value was the elegance and care and thought,” she says.
Find more timeless lessons for startups from Henry’s time in the executive suites at Square, Amazon and Microsoft.
Build for the high-expectation customer
Julie Supan is one of tech’s most sought-after brand strategists who cut her teeth as a marketing exec at YouTube, Airbnb, Dropbox, Thumbtack and Discord. All vastly different products, with dramatically different audiences. But when it comes to crafting a brand with taste and craft, Supan always starts from the same building block: Identifying the high-expectation customer.
“The high-expectation customer, or HXC, is the most discerning person within your target demographic. It’s someone who will acknowledge—and enjoy—your product or service for its greatest benefit,” says Supan.
If your product exceeds the choosiest customer’s expectations, it can meet everyone else’s.
-Julie Supan, YouTube’s first Head of Marketing
Consider the HXC in these two examples:
- Airbnb: This HXC is invested in being a good global citizen, and doesn’t want to simply visit new places but to belong. “It’s the guest who wants to ‘live like a local’ and experience Paris as if they are living there,” says Supan. “They’re energized by the idea of staying in unique spaces and feeling welcomed, but are cost-conscious, too.”
- Dropbox: “This one may come as a surprise, because people used to think of them as just a file-sharing and syncing technology company. But the Dropbox high-expectation customer is actually a person who wants to simplify his or her life,” says Supan. “They're trusting, organized, tech-savvy, and looking for ways to get some time back in their day. They want to know they're covered, that someone has their back when it comes to their life's work, which is primarily in their computers—family photos, videos, work files, school docs.”
That’s not every Dropbox user; plenty of people just use their free account to share a file here and there. But that’s the idea: your HXC should not be an all-encompassing persona. “The high-expectation customer will benefit from the product's greatest attributes and spread the word. Then others will say, ‘If it works for my tech-savvy friend Lisa or if it works for Tishman Construction (which built the World Trade Center and was an early power user of Dropbox), then it will probably work for me,’" says Supan.
Supan expands on the HXC in this Review article with her biggest lessons from developing branding for Airbnb, Dropbox and Thumbtack.
Be opinionated, not endlessly flexible
From the beginning, Linear took a stance against unlimited flexibility in their product design.
"I don't believe that you can build the optimal tool if it's very flexible and endlessly customizable. So from the beginning, we wanted to provide certain standards for how people should operate in Linear," Karri Saarinen told us.
This philosophy stems from Saarinen's fundamental beliefs about effective product design.
My design philosophy has always been that you should design something for someone. It’s incredibly hard to design something really good that’s also for everyone. You have to be opinionated.
-Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear
This approach has proven particularly valuable as Linear works with growing organizations. As companies evolve from startup to scale up, the more structure and standardization they need — even if they don't always want it, says Saarinen. "What we heard from customers was that other tools became very chaotic when one team uses it this way, and then other teams use it very differently. There's no standard."
Saarinen draws parallels to another tech giant known for its opinionated design. "I think of product more in the Apple way. On your Mac and on your iPhone, you can change some things, but you cannot change all of the things that they do. If you want to customize everything, don't use Apple products," he says.
Codify your product principles
Delegating taste entirely to the founder is quite simply impossible — while they may have eyes on the very biggest projects, their pen will not be ever-present. Expecting the founder to be the sole arbiter of taste is like assuming the head chef will cook every dish at a busy restaurant.
Noah Desai Weiss has a unique POV on disseminating a founder’s singular taste as the company scales — formerly Slack’s Chief Product Officer, he worked closely to bring founder Stewart Butterfield’s vision to life. “We had to figure out how to scale Stewart’s product sense and intuition when he couldn’t be in the room with most of the teams most of the time,” he says.
So in addition to the usual company vision and mission, Slack instituted a set of product principles. “They are all a bit simple and almost glib when you hear them, but when you unpack it, there’s a whole set of stories and examples around them,” says Desai Weiss. “These principles created a shared language within the product org for not just our values, but how we apply those values in instances where it’s more subjective and about taste.”
Here are three of Slack’s product principles, along with Desai Weiss’s explanation for each:
- Don’t make me think: “How can we make Slack feel effortless and intuitive?”
- Be a great host: “We view Slack as this digital environment that’s the closest thing to your physical office, but in the software space. How can we be caring and considerate of the people who are spending their days here?”
- Prototype the path: “How can we avoid getting stuck in long product debates or endless design reviews — instead, figuring out the fastest path for users to be able to touch the software with their own hands?”
Splinter out your sub-brands, but centralize your trade-offs
Scaling taste across an entire product suite (like Square’s massive fleet) is enormously challenging, Alyssa Henry admits. She unpacks an experiment they tried at Square that didn’t ultimately pan out: “At one point, we had hired someone to centralize design, and they just got overwhelmed. It’s not feasible to do design review for that many products.”
Despite being under the same brand umbrella, each sub-brand needed its own unique flair. “Take Square versus Cash, for example — different customer set, and different tastes. The Square aesthetic is very Apple-esque: Sleek and modern, and we want to evoke trust. You’re running your business on it, so we want it to fit into a lot of different environments,” explains Henry. “With Cash App, on the other hand, the demographic that we're going after is young folks, many of them under-banked, and our aesthetic is hip and edgy. So, how do you marry hip and edgy with elegant, tasteful and trustworthy? Those are very different things.”
So rather than try to squeeze each brand into a one-size-fits-all aesthetic, instead, Square organized the entire org around trade-offs — in this case, functionality should win out over elegance.
“For example, we had lots of internal debates around our next-generation card reader. We had a camp that believed we shouldn’t include the ability to swipe a card and instead just use tap-to-pay, because we should be paring the card reader down to its simplest version. But others were in the camp that the U.S. isn’t an AMV tap market. So, without including swipe, our customers are then going to need two different card readers. And yes, it looks beautiful, but now you’ve got to have two,” says Henry. Thus, swipe capabilities stayed on the reader, even if it made the product slightly less elegant.
Tenet 4: Train your tastemakers
Get in the ring
Noah Desai Weiss doesn’t abide by the mentality that a knack for taste is a “you either have it or you don’t” phenomenon. “My honest feeling is that almost everything can be taught,” he says.
How does one go about training this particular muscle? You’ve got to put in your reps. “Work with lots of different types of people, teams and problem spaces to build that intuition yourself. That’s what feeds that creative spark,” says Desai Weiss.
Product design and product intuition is about seeing what great looks like and being a part of the process of creating something great over and over again.
-Noah Desai Weiss, former CPO of Slack
You’ll find that even the most remarkable sparks of taste and craft probably came from a very messy process, he says. “The book, “Creative Selection,” by one of the early Apple engineers, takes you behind the scenes of what the creative process looked like at the company. It’s not some magical moment where someone walks in on Monday morning with an idea, they sketch it on the whiteboard and — aha! — there’s the iPhone, fully baked. It’s an incredibly iterative, painful, messy process.”
His advice to folks (particularly PMs) who are looking to get better at craftsmanship: Find your taste coaches. “Get your hands dirty and work side-by-side with other people who can push you. Find a team with folks who are really good at prototyping. Work on different problem spaces that force you to step back and bring a set of fresh eyes. You can start to learn from the people around you, bit by bit.”
Read on for Desai Weiss’s three-step framework for taking bigger, bolder product bets.
Test drive taste with a work trial
Taste gets exponentially harder to scale as a company grows — that’s why the folks at Linear have intentionally kept the team small. “When I started to think about building the team, from the very beginning we’ve wanted to hire fewer people and then trust them to do the work, rather than hiring a lot of people and hiring a lot of managers to manage those people,” says Karri Saarinen.
I find companies think about resourcing as the number of people, not necessarily the output of those people.
-Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear
But probing for something as nuanced as taste can be exceptionally difficult in an interview. Sure, you can look at candidate-submitted work samples, but it’s tricky to disentangle which work came from the candidate’s own metaphorical pen versus from the team around them.
Linear’s hiring managers don’t just guess here — they leverage paid work trials for every single potential hire.
As explained in this blog post, the final step of the interview process at Linear is a paid 2-5 day period where the candidate works with the team on a real project. The candidate carries out the project (like building a new product feature), shares status updates and presents the final deliverable to the team. From there, the project team submits feedback and debriefs to make a final hiring decision. The Linear folks have generously shared their work trial template here.
And remember, as AI democratizes the basic building blocks of software, the true differentiator isn't shipping fast — it's shipping with conviction. But taste isn't some mystical force that exists only in the minds of visionary founders. The companies that endure have figured out how to transform this intangible quality into concrete systems — a foundation for sustained excellence that goes far beyond aesthetics.