Hire for Taste. Build for the User. Ship Relentlessly.

There’s a specific kind of company that wins over and over again.

Not because they’re louder. Not because they’re first. Not because they have the biggest team or the fanciest tech stack.

They win because they make better decisions—especially when nobody is watching. Decisions about who they hire, what they build, and when they ship.

The slogan version is simple:

Hire for taste. Build for the user. Ship relentlessly.

But the real version is harder. Because each sentence is a fight.

A fight against ego. A fight against internal politics. A fight against “maybe.” A fight against the slow death of great products: feature creep, meetings, and fear.

And if you’re building AI products, the stakes are higher. AI makes it easy to do more—so your discipline has to be stronger than your capability.

1) Hire for taste

Most companies hire for competence and call it a day.

Competence matters. It’s the entry ticket. Steve Jobs once put it bluntly: when hiring senior people, competence is “the ante”—but the real question is whether they’ll genuinely fall in love with the mission and do what’s best for the company.

That idea hides a deeper truth:

You can hire talented people and still ship mediocre products.

Because talent doesn’t automatically produce quality. Taste does.

Taste is the ability to feel what’s right before you can fully explain it. It’s judgment under uncertainty. It’s knowing what to remove. It’s sensing when something is “almost” and refusing to call it “done.”

Jobs talked about taste in a way most leaders avoid—big, cultural, not cosmetic. In his Triumph of the Nerds interview, he criticized Microsoft by saying they had “no taste,” and he meant it as a failure to bring culture and care into the product.

That’s the point: taste isn’t decoration. Taste is strategy.

A company with taste doesn’t need ten committees to decide what “good” looks like. They can see it. They can feel it. And that becomes a competitive advantage you can’t copy with a feature list.

When you hire for taste, you hire people who:

• notice friction before users complain,

• hate confusing screens,

• argue for the user when it’s inconvenient,

• and are willing to delete work they already did.

And yes—taste is rare. That’s why recruiting is hard. Jobs described it as “finding the needles in the haystack,” and admitted you can’t know enough in a one-hour interview, so your judgment matters.

Hiring for taste means you stop asking only “Can they do it?”
You start asking: “Do they know what ‘great’ feels like?”

Because in the end, a product is a collection of choices. Taste is what makes those choices consistently good.

2) Build for the user

Here’s the tragedy of modern software:

Too many products are built from the inside out.

They start with the technology, then try to reverse-engineer a reason for someone to care.

Jobs warned against that exact mistake: start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology—not the other way around.

This matters even more in AI.

Because AI gives teams a new temptation:
“Look what the model can do.”

And users reply with one sentence:
“Cool. But what does it do for me?”

Building for the user means you make the user’s outcome the center of gravity.

Not your roadmap.
Not your architecture.
Not your internal org chart.
Not your pitch deck.

The user.

It also means you respect an underrated truth: users don’t experience your model. They experience your product.

They experience:

• whether it understands them,

• whether it wastes their time,

• whether it behaves predictably,

• whether it makes them feel smarter or smaller.

This is where taste and user-first design collide: the best teams remove anything that doesn’t directly serve the user’s job-to-be-done—especially “clever” features built to impress other builders.

If you want a brutally effective filter, use this:

If the user doesn’t feel the improvement in the first minute, it’s not real yet.

Not because users are impatient—because life is. Your product is competing with a thousand other priorities in their day.

3) Ship relentlessly

Now the hardest one.

Shipping has a bad reputation because many teams ship carelessly.

But relentless shipping isn’t carelessness. It’s seriousness.

It’s understanding that perfection in your head is worthless. The only thing that creates real feedback is reality.

That’s why the phrase “Real Artists Ship” became famous inside Apple lore—Jobs popularized it, and early Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld described Jobs using it as a push for finishing and delivering, not endlessly polishing.

Shipping is where product truth appears.

Because users don’t debate your ideas. They experience them.

They don’t care that the internal prototype was brilliant. They care that the app was confusing. They care that onboarding didn’t land. They care that one wrong AI answer made them stop trusting the whole system.

You learn that only by shipping.

Relentless shipping is also how you build trust—paradoxically.

Users trust companies that improve fast and fix what matters.

Not companies that vanish for six months and return with “big updates” that still don’t solve the core friction.

In AI, shipping relentlessly must include evaluation relentlessly—because shipping intelligence without measurement is gambling with user trust.

So the modern version of “ship relentlessly” is:

Ship. Measure. Learn. Tighten. Repeat.

Not once a year. As a system.

When you combine all three, you get something rare

Most companies can do one of these.

• Some hire brilliant people… but build for internal stakeholders.

• Some build for the user… but move too slowly to matter.

• Some ship constantly… but without taste, they ship noise.

The magic is the combination:

Taste keeps quality high.
User-first thinking keeps direction true.
Relentless shipping keeps learning real.

That trio is how you build products that feel inevitable.

Not because you got lucky.
Because your process makes luck unnecessary.

What this looks like at iWise

At iWise, this isn’t motivational text. It’s an operating philosophy.

We hire for judgment, clarity, and product sensitivity—because AI without taste becomes chaos.

We build from the user backward—because starting with technology produces demos, not products.

We ship relentlessly—because the market doesn’t reward intent. It rewards delivered reality.

And we treat trust like the main asset—because in AI, trust is the product.

FAQ

What does “hire for taste” mean in a software company?
It means hiring for judgment and product sensibility—not only technical skill—so teams can make consistently high-quality decisions under uncertainty. Jobs’ comments on “taste” and culture in products capture this idea.

What does it mean to “build for the user” in AI products?
It means starting with the customer experience and working backward to the technology—so the model serves a clear user outcome rather than showcasing capability.

Where does “Real Artists Ship” come from?
Steve Jobs popularized the phrase; Quote Investigator traces it to early Apple-era usage, including testimony from Andy Hertzfeld.