Building a Taste-Driven Organization

In Part 1, we diagnosed the crisis: your brand is dissolving. In Part 2, you trained your eye over 90 days. You learned to see craft. You built vocabulary. You curated your reference collection.

Now comes the hard part: getting your entire team to see what you see.

Because here's the truth most CMOs won't admit: your personal taste is worthless if your team ships without it. You can have the most refined aesthetic judgment in the industry, but if your content team produces five pieces a day and you only review one, you're just watching the brand dissolve in slow motion.

The question isn't "how do I develop taste?" anymore. It's "how do I scale taste across 10, 20, 50 people—while AI is multiplying our output by 100x?"

That's what we're solving in Part 3. Grab a hot drink, let’s begin.

You've trained your eye. You can walk into any piece of content and immediately spot what's off-brand, what's lazy, what's mediocre, and what's excellent.

Congratulations. You're now the bottleneck.

Here's what happens next in most organizations:

Week 1: You review everything. Quality goes up. Team gets frustrated with constant feedback.

Week 4: You're spending 20 hours a week on reviews. Other work suffers. Team waits on your approval.

Week 8: You give up reviewing everything. Quality immediately drops. You review only "important" pieces. Everything else ships at whatever level the team thinks is acceptable.

Week 12: Your brand looks inconsistent again. The pieces you touched are great. Everything else is... not. This is the taste scaling paradox.

You can't review your way to brand coherence. So what actually works?

You build systems that embed your judgment into the organization. Not guidelines. Not rules. Not brand books. Systems that teach people to see what you see—and make decisions the way you'd make them. Here's how.

Brand guidelines fail because they're prescriptive. "Use this font." "Don't use these colors." "Maintain 2:1 ratio of image to text." Guidelines tell people what to do.

They don't teach people how to think.

Taste-driven organizations run on principles. Principles are different. They teach judgment, not compliance. Here's the difference in practice:

Guideline: "All headlines should be under 60 characters and include a clear benefit."

Principle: "We write headlines for busy executives who skim. If they only read the headline, they should understand the value. Test: Can you cut this headline in half and still convey the point?"

The guideline creates a checklist. The principle creates a decision-making filter.

Start with your "What We Are / What We're Not" framework.

Take your reference collection from Part 2. For each example in your "North Stars" section, ask:

Then flip it. For each example in your "Not This" section, ask:

Document 5-10 core principles. Not 47. Not a 40-page brand book. Five to ten statements that capture how you make aesthetic decisions. Example principles (these are illustrative, yours will be different):

These principles become your team's decision-making filters. When someone asks "should we add another CTA button?", the answer isn't "check the brand guidelines." It's "what does 'restraint over abundance' tell you?" That's how judgment scales.

Let's talk about the thing nobody wants to address: who gets to say "this isn't good enough"? In most organizations, the answer is fuzzy.

The result? Nobody owns aesthetic coherence. Taste-driven organizations are clear about approval architecture. You need someone with final say on whether work meets your standards. Not everything needs approval, but someone needs the authority to pull work that doesn't hit the bar—even if it's "on strategy" or "the data looks good."

This is typically:

The critical thing: this person needs actual authority. Not "provide feedback" authority. Kill-the-work authority. Because if your taste council can only suggest changes that product marketing can ignore, you don't have a taste council. You have a suggestions box.

Build tiers of review based on visibility and risk:

The goal isn't to review everything. The goal is to create enough checkpoints that quality becomes the expectation, not the exception.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: if your performance reviews don't include aesthetic judgment, your team won't develop it. You can talk about brand coherence all day.

However, if your copywriter is promoted based on shipping volume rather than quality, they will likely optimize for volume. If your designer's bonus is tied to hitting asset deadlines, they'll hit deadlines—not aesthetic standards. Taste becomes a cultural value when you reward it explicitly.

Add taste to performance reviews:

Celebrate taste publicly.

When someone flags work that's off-brand before it ships, recognize it. When someone rewrites copy five times to get the rhythm right, call it out. When someone says "this converts better but it's not us," tell the whole team. You're teaching the organization what you value. Make taste visible.

Hire for taste. Ask portfolio questions that reveal judgment:

You're not looking for people who have perfect taste already. You're looking for people who can see craft, articulate choices, and have a point of view. Those people can be trained. People who can't see quality gaps can't.

Foundations are philosophy. Operations are systems. You need both.

Most content goes through some version of: Draft → Review → Ship.

Taste-driven organizations add checkpoints at each stage:

Gate 1 - Pre-Production Taste Check

Before you make the thing, does it belong in your aesthetic territory? Quick 10-minute review:

This gate prevents you from spending two weeks executing something that was never going to meet your standards.

Gate 2 - In-Production Quality Gates

While you're making it, are you maintaining craft?

For copy:

For visual:

This is where your principles become checklists. Not rules like "use 16pt font," but questions like "would this pass our 'precision over poetry' test?"

Gate 3 - Post-Production Coherence Review

Before it ships, does it feel like us? Run the brand dissolution test from Part 1:

If the answer to any of these is no, don't ship it. Fix it or kill it.

These gates sound like more process. They're not. They're decision points that prevent expensive rework later. An hour of pre-production thinking beats 10 hours of post-production fixing.

In Part 2, you built your personal reference collection. Now you make it a team resource. Set up a shared folder (Notion, Google Drive, wherever) with three sections:

Update this monthly. As your team's eye develops, some examples that felt right in month one will feel off in month six. That's growth. Let the collection evolve.

Use this library in two ways:

For briefs: "We're aiming for something in the territory of [North Star example]—not trying to copy it, but capturing that level of craft and commitment."

For feedback: Instead of "this doesn't feel right," you say "compare this to [North Star example]—notice how theirs uses restraint and ours adds decoration. That's the gap."

You're teaching the team to see what you see by giving them the same reference points.

Here's how AI fits into taste-driven operations: AI is your first-pass filter, not your final arbiter. Use AI to generate options. Lots of them. Then apply human judgment to choose the best.

The workflow:

This is faster than starting from scratch and higher quality than using AI's first output. Train custom models on your brand's aesthetic:

Let it learn your aesthetic territory. Not because AI will replace your judgment. Because AI trained on your taste saves you from reviewing garbage. It brings you options that are already in the ballpark.

The weekly application sprint:

Document what you learned. By week 12, your team is self-correcting before work hits review. That's when you know the system is working.

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You've built foundations. You've established operations. Now you scale without dissolving.

AI lets you produce 100x more content. That's the promise. It's also the threat. Most organizations approach multiplication like this: "We made 10 pieces a week. Now we can make 100. Let's make 100." Then they wonder why their brand feels incoherent six months later.

Taste-driven organizations approach multiplication differently: "We made 10 pieces a week at a quality bar of 8/10. How do we make 100 pieces while maintaining that bar?" The answer isn't "review everything." It's "build modular systems that maintain consistency."

Modular systems that work:

The goal: Give your team 80% of the structure so they can focus their creativity on the 20% that matters. Templates aren't the enemy of taste. Bad templates are. Good templates are scaffolding that lets craft shine.

When to slow down?

You'll hit moments when volume threatens quality. Your team is shipping fast, but you're seeing drift. Aesthetic coherence is slipping. That's when you slow down. Pull everyone together. Run a taste audit:

Then resume. This happens every 6-8 weeks in the first year. Eventually, it becomes second nature.

This is the part where you have to get political. Someone—probably in finance, maybe in product—will eventually say: "This version tested 3% better. Why aren't we using it?" Your answer can't be "because I like the other one better." That's a career-limiting statement. Your answer needs to be: "Because 3% better CTR this quarter isn't worth eroding brand value over five years."

Make the business case for taste. Taste isn't fuzzy. It's measurable. You just have to track different metrics:

These metrics move slowly. But they matter more than this month's CTR. Build a dashboard that includes aesthetic metrics alongside performance metrics. Show leadership the long game.

You'll face the "uglier but converts better" dilemma constantly. Here's the framework:

If stakeholders push back, offer a compromise: "Let's A/B test for one quarter, measure both short-term conversion and brand perception, then decide."

Most of the time, the performance difference isn't as big as people think. And even when it is, it doesn't last. Ugly wins the quarter. Beautiful wins the decade.

You'll know the transformation is working when you see these milestones:

30 days: Your team can articulate what "on-brand" means beyond "uses our colors and fonts."

60 days: People start self-correcting before you review. "I ran this through our principles and caught three things."

90 days: The quality of first drafts noticeably improves. You're refining, not rebuilding.

180 days: You can ship 10x more content and it still feels coherent. Brand recognition is measurably stronger.

The moment you know it's really working: Someone outside your org says "I knew that was you before I saw the logo." When your aesthetic becomes recognizable without your name on it, you've built something that scales.

The Long Game Taste compounds. Every piece of content that meets your standard reinforces what you stand for. Every piece that doesn't dilute it. Over one year, the difference between "good enough" and "excellent" is 365 pieces of coherent work versus 365 pieces of chaos.

Customers might not consciously notice the difference in one piece. They'll absolutely notice the pattern over time. That's your competitive moat. Not your product. Not your features. Your aesthetic coherence. The fact that everything you make feels like it came from the same place. That it has a point of view. That someone gave a damn about craft.

We've covered the what (Part 1), and the how to develop individual and applicable taste (Part 2). Now we covered how to scale it. But here's the question we haven't addressed: Why will the next decade belong to curators, not just creators? And why will the organizations that build taste first capture disproportionate value?

That's Part 4: The Taste Economy. We'll show you:

If you've done the work in Parts 2 and 3, you're already ahead. Part 4 is about understanding why that work matters—and where it's taking you. Because the market is already deciding. You might as well decide first.

Next: Part 4 - The Taste Economy (Why Curators Will Win the Next Decade)

This is Part 3 of a 4-part series. Read Part 1: The crisis in taste and why AI might make it worse and Part 2: How to train your taste using AI if you missed them.

— Peter & Torsten

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