So here’s where I part ways with the whole lovely quality conversation, Neeman’s piece included, and I want to be careful, because I’m not saying any of them are wrong. They’re arming for a fight I’m not losing sleep over.
Standards make sure the thing gets made well. Taste makes sure it’s good. Both matter more than they did a year ago, because AI just made building infinite. Jakob Nielsen puts it well: generative tools make ideation basically free, which means the scarce, valuable skill is no longer producing options, it’s the discernment to pick the good one out of the flood.
Standards and taste are both, at heart, ways of choosing well.
But…you can have impeccable standards and exquisite taste and still build, beautifully and to spec, a product not one human being on earth wants. Marty Cagan, who has spent a career on this, draws the line between teams that ship features and teams that solve problems, and his whole argument rests on one uncomfortable idea: shipping efficiently means nothing if you’re shipping the wrong thing.
Cagan’s been making that case for years. AI just made it easy to be wrong faster. The feasibility risk he wrote about, can we even build it, has mostly collapsed. The value question, should this exist at all, is exactly where it always was.
Gale Robins framed the same split cleanly in a recent piece: there’s a short game, the activities and outputs of figuring out what to build, and a long game, getting better at the judgment of what’s worth building at all.
AI made the short game fast and left the long game exactly as hard as it ever was. That long game is old, older than any of our tools.
Clayton Christensen spent a career on this and boiled it to a sentence: people don’t buy products, they hire them to do a job. The classic example is his team’s study for McDonald’s, who wanted to sell more milkshakes and couldn’t figure out how. Turned out a huge share of them sold before eight in the morning, to commuters hiring a milkshake to get through a long, boring drive and stay full till lunch.
The real competition wasn’t other milkshakes, it was bagels and boredom. Figure out the job and the product almost designs itself. Miss it and you can build the most beautiful milkshake in the world and watch it sit there. AI has no idea what job anybody is hiring your product to do. It’ll just keep making milkshakes.
I watched a version of this play out with someone who knew exactly what he was doing. When Rafat Ali launched Skift, he built it on a four-legged stool of content: aggregation, curation, syndication, original reporting. Smart, well made, defensible on a whiteboard. Then the audience showed up and, in his words, nobody gave a shit about the aggregated headlines. Four legs became three. Three became two.
He told me later that in the beginning they’d planned the company around what VCs wanted to hear, and only when they threw that out and found their own way did Skift become the thing that actually worked.
Building the product was never the problem. Ali had to find out in public which parts people actually wanted, and kill the ones they didn’t.
Now here’s the thing that should scare you a little. Ali found out because building all four legs cost him real time and money, and that cost made him look hard at what was actually working.
Run that same launch today and AI builds you all four legs by Thursday, and probably two more you didn’t ask for (thanks, Claude!). Maybe they’re good. They’re probably not. But they all look finished. And the thing that told Ali to cut gets buried under how easy it’s become to just keep everything.
None of this is a knock on how well we create products. We’ve never made them better. What’s missing is anyone stopping, before the work starts, to ask the boring questions. Who is this for? Do they actually want it? Should it exist at all?
Standards are how you build it right. Strategy is whether you build it at all. When building costs nothing, the second question is the only one holding any real leverage, and it’s the one nobody wants to write about, because “figure out what’s worth building” doesn’t trend like a shiny new practice with five steps and a downloadable template.