In this new AI world, “taste” is the thing everyone claims is the new supreme skill.
But I think “care” is the one I want to see in the products I buy.
Can you measure care?
Does scale drive out care?
If a product conversation is reduced to being arbitrated exclusively by numbers, is care lost?
The more I think about it, care seems antithetical to the reductive nature of quantification — “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic”.
Care considers useful, constructive systematic forces — rules, processes, etc. — but does not take them as law. Individual context and sensitivity are the primary considerations.
That’s why the professional answer to so many questions is: “it depends”.
“This is the law for everyone, everywhere, always” is not a system I want to live in.
Businesses exist to make money, so one would assume a business will always act in a way that maximizes the amount of money that can be made.
That’s where numbers take you. They let you measure who is gaining or losing the most quantifiable amount in any given transaction.
But there’s an unmeasurable, unquantifiable principle lurking behind all those numbers: it can be good for business to leave money on the table.
Why? Because you care. You are willing to provision room for something beyond just a quantity, a number, a dollar amount.
I don’t think numbers alone can bring you to care.
I mean, how silly is it to say:
“How much care did you put into the product this week?”
“Put me down for a 8 out of 10 this week.”