“Product Development as Iterated Taste” — @CedricChin
Why this is in the vault
Practitioner-flavored business thinking from Cedric — Chinese-businessman cash-flow obsession, consulting-business-model traps, taste as a product-development driver. These are the pieces that map most directly to RDCO’s actual day-to-day operating decisions (we are a small consultancy with cash-flow constraints).
The core argument
Product development as iterated taste-formation rather than feature-building. Great product teams develop a shared aesthetic of what ‘good’ looks like, then iterate against it; feature-shipping without taste-formation produces sprawling products that never feel coherent. Implication: hire for taste, train for taste, protect time for taste-formation.
Mapping against Ray Data Co
RDCO is structurally a consulting business in its first 6-12 months even if the long-term ambition is agent-deployer SaaS. Cedric’s consulting-business-model essays are the playbook for not getting stuck in the SME loop (great revenue, no leverage, no equity story). The cash-is-king pieces frame how the founder thinks about runway vs growth.
Related
- 2026-04-15-commoncog-amazon-weekly-business-review
- 2026-04-15-commoncog-working-backwards
- 2026-04-15-commoncog-no-truth-in-business-only-knowledge
Source: Product Development as Iterated Taste by Cedric Chin (Commoncog). 3940 words. Filed 2026-04-19 as part of Start-Here + Business-Expertise-Triad backfill cohort.