Best reads for PMs & Designers
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Sources
Updated 21 Sep
Product and design leaders say the rare skill is deciding what good looks like
Career & Craft
- Product and design leaders say leverage now sits with people who can define what good looks like.
- The same sources name the cost: a generation managing agents may never develop its own judgement.
- The support is learning by doing, taste as many rejections for each acceptance, and immersion while working with agents.
- It spans five kinds of source and is argued from personal practice rather than from any shared event.
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sources
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last 30d
First seen 29 Apr 2026
If you are a PM
- Your acceptance criteria were written for work that was slow to make, not for ten versions of it.
- Someone junior now ships acceptable work without ever making the mistake that teaches the difference.
- Ask who on your team is allowed to say no to output, and whether the reason is written down.
- Critique is where taste gets taught, so cutting it from the week has a cost you pay later.
- Your rejection notes on generated work are the closest thing to a curriculum anyone has.
- Nobody can say how a designer builds an eye without the years of bad drafts behind them.
Who said it
Stack Overflow blogstackoverflow.blog · 17 September 2026
The AI magic wordsRyan sits down with Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO at O'Reilly Media, to talk about the role of books as user interfaces to knowledge, the power of…Lenny Rachitskyyoutube.com · 22 August 2026 · 3 videos
How to Actually Develop TasteTaste isn't something you have. It's reps with feedback, run enough times. Max Schoening (Head of Product at Notion) on why building taste works almost exactly like training a model.
Pushback
1 of 11 disagreeTaste is reps with feedback, and it can be taught.
The counter is that taste is not something a person has but a count of reps with feedback, run enough times, which turns the worry about acquiring it into a question of how many reps a job still contains. The evidence is one product leader's account of his own practice at Notion, not a study of how anyone else got there.
Lenny Rachitskyyoutube.com · 22 August 2026
How to Actually Develop TasteTaste isn't something you have. It's reps with feedback, run enough times. Max Schoening (Head of Product at Notion) on why building taste works almost exactly like training a model.
