Founders need taste and structure

Over years of building and advising, I've noticed founders tend to come in two flavors, and both are incomplete on their own. One kind has taste — a sharp instinct for what feels right, what's elegant, what a good experience should be. The other kind has structure — they think in systems, roles, flows, and edge cases. The best products need both, and the founder's real job is often to supply whichever one their team is missing.

Taste is knowing what "right" feels like

Taste is the ability to look at two options and know which one is better before you can fully explain why. It's what keeps a product from feeling generic, bloated, or soulless. You can't fully outsource it and you can't quite teach it — it's built from paying close attention to a lot of good and bad work over time. Founders with taste protect the product's soul. Without them, products drift toward whatever the loudest stakeholder wanted this week.

But taste alone produces beautiful things that don't hold together. A gorgeous flow that ignores the admin role, the error states, the edge cases, the second user type — that's taste without structure. It demos wonderfully and collapses in production.

Structure is making the instinct buildable

Structure is the other half: turning "this should feel effortless" into concrete decisions about roles, permissions, states, data, and flows. It's the part that asks the unglamorous questions — what happens when this is empty, when two people do this at once, when the input is wrong, when the account is brand new versus three years old. Structure is what lets a good instinct survive contact with real users and actually scale.

But structure alone produces the opposite failure: products that are technically complete, logically sound, and completely lifeless. Every state handled, every role defined, and no reason anyone would want to use it. That's structure without taste — correct and forgettable.

The founder's job is to hold both in tension

What I actually do, for my own products and the founders I work with, is keep these two forces in conversation. Taste proposes; structure tests. Structure organizes; taste refines. When a system diagram starts to feel cold, taste asks what the human moment is. When a beautiful concept starts to wobble, structure asks what happens at the edges. Neither wins outright — the product lives in the tension between them.

The reason I can be useful to a founder is usually that I supply the missing half. A structured, systems-minded founder often needs a push on taste and experience; a design-driven founder often needs help turning instinct into something buildable and scalable. Naming which half is thin is half the work.

So if a product feels off, it's worth asking which of the two is missing. A soulless product usually needs taste. A beautiful mess usually needs structure. And a founder who can tell which — and go get it — tends to build things that both feel right and hold up.

If you're not sure which half your product is short on, that's exactly the kind of thing I help founders see.