For most of computing’s history, the constraint has been capability. Could you build it at all? Could you build it fast enough? Could you build it for the price your customers would pay? Companies that solved those constraints were rewarded enormously, and the rewards trained a generation of leaders to think of technology as a capability problem.
That problem is, increasingly, solved. The frontier capabilities of five years ago are now line items in a SaaS contract. The frontier capabilities of today will be line items in five years. What remains is the question of what to do with all of it — and that question is not a capability question. It’s a taste question.
Taste is a deeply unfashionable word in technology. It sounds soft. It resists measurement. It can’t be A/B tested. And yet the most valuable companies of the last twenty years have been the ones whose leaders had it, and the least valuable have been the ones whose leaders thought it was someone else’s job.
The next decade will not reward the organisations that can build the most. It will reward the organisations that can build the right things. Hire accordingly.
Alex
