Energy of the Tastemakers

In most companies, the quality of work comes down to a few people. People who have taste, who can make decisions, and who have the energy to keep showing up and holding the bar.

Taste is upheld through three things: authority, systems, and energy.

Authority means the right people are in charge. People with judgment who know what good looks like and have the power to act on it. Systems help carry that judgment forward. Reviews, principles, frameworks, structure. And energy is what keeps it all working. The day-to-day effort. The attention. The unwillingness to let things slide.

All three matter. But energy is the most fragile. Authority might be stable once established, and systems erode slowly over time, but energy can disappear overnight. Someone has a bad week, gets frustrated, feels like they’re fighting the same battles over and over. And suddenly they just stop caring as much.

Energy is entirely dependent on individuals choosing to expend it. Day after day. Authority and systems are institutional. But energy? That’s at the volition of individuals. Someone can wake up tomorrow and decide they’re tired of being the quality police. They can choose to let things slide.

That fragility is what makes it so dangerous. You can lose years of quality standards in weeks if the right people just stop trying as hard.

The few who hold the line

The amount of good work that gets done is all down to the energy of the people who maintain taste.

Products have a tendency to decay over time. Quality drops, bugs creep in. People start being “okay” with dropping standards because nobody wants to create trouble.

Taste requires resistance. Requires someone to say the lack of quality is not okay. And usually it’s a handful of people in a company. One, two, five, ten. Never a lot.

You can’t hire for taste at scale. Taste remains concentrated. Focused among the few.

It takes an insane amount of personal sacrifice to show up every day and fight against the forces that make products mediocre. Sometimes it’s expectation, but more often it’s a choice. The choice to expend this energy. Spend days debating, discussing, arguing, articulating, advocating and acting to make quality continue to be important. You have to will it into existence. You have to want to want it.

You’re spent by the end of such days. You’re done. But you feel it was worth it because that’s what it truly takes. Authority and systems alone aren’t enough. Without energy, both fail.

We’ve all seen this play out. The founder leaves, the core tastemaker leaves and it all falls apart. Look at Spotify’s product now. Started as a great experience where every pixel mattered. Now it feels like random priorities strung together.

Same with Apple. iOS used to stand for a principled experience. Every bit was considered and thoughtful. It required people to keep showing up and maintain the bar.

In a startup, imagine you’re the tastemaker. You want to vet every decision, every feature. It requires influence and visibility into everything. It’s literally a life of pain and misery. And you do it anyway because you’re wired to not let poor work slip out.

And one day you run out of gas. You’re frustrated because you don’t feel supported. Recent hiring has been poor and you’re starting over on the quality bit.

That’s what it’s all about. How much energy you have. How many days can you wake up energized to fight the inertia and forces against taste.

The invisible work

This dynamic is invisible to most people in an organization. They see the systems, they know who has authority, but they don’t see the daily expenditure of energy that keeps quality from sliding.

It looks effortless from the outside. Of course the design is thoughtful, of course the code is clean. But behind that is someone burning calories every day to prevent entropy.

You can’t hire ten more people with taste and expect them to maintain the same standards. Taste isn’t just aesthetic judgment. It’s the willingness to be unpopular, to slow things down, to fight the same battles repeatedly. Most people don’t want that job. They want to build, not constantly defend.

The cruel irony is that the better someone is at maintaining standards, the more invisible their contribution becomes. When everything works smoothly, it looks like it maintains itself. Only when they stop does everyone realize how much energy was being spent.

When the energy runs out

A product starts feeling different. Decisions seem less considered. The attention to detail that once made something special begins to fade.

It’s not a sudden collapse. It’s gradual erosion. A naming convention ignored. An interface element rushed. A feature shipped without polish. Small compromises that compound.

The people who notice are often the same people who used to fight these battles. But fighting every day is exhausting. You start picking battles. You let smaller things slide to save energy for bigger ones. Except those smaller things add up.

Eventually, the person who used to catch these things moves on or burns out or just stops caring as much. The institutional memory of what good looks like fades. Standards that once felt non-negotiable become suggestions.

Taste is a function of energy. Often, of a few individuals.

The path forward

If you’re building a company, recognize that maintaining quality is not a system you can set up once. It’s an ongoing human effort. The people who do this work aren’t easily replaceable. They’re making judgment calls that shape your product every day.

If you’re one of those people holding the line, know that what you’re doing matters more than most realize. But it’s not sustainable to do alone forever. Build systems, yes, but also cultivate other people who share your standards.

If you’re watching a product you love start to decay, understand it’s probably not because the team stopped caring. It’s because the people who used to hold the bar couldn’t keep doing it.

Taste requires energy. Energy is finite. When it runs out, everything else follows.

The companies that protect and nurture the people who maintain their standards keep their edge. The ones that don’t become cautionary tales about what happens when the energy to care runs out.