Stories Connecting Dots, Ep. 40: Dr. Else van der Berg – Is Taste really the last frontier?
Why can engineers hand work to autonomous loops, but product managers can't? Dr. Else van der Berg and Markus on taste, judgment, and whether discovery is the real bottleneck.
Dr. Else van der Berg is a one-of-a-kind Product Manager: deeply knowledgeable and experienced in traditional product theory and practice, but curious enough to be one of the most knowledgeable AI-native PMs in Germany.
How this conversation came about
Engineers are building loops that write their own prompts and ship overnight. Product managers stare at the same tools and can’t find a single task to hand over. Why?
That question kicked off this spontaneous recording. Our answer, in short: software spent sixty years building a second loop that checks the first — compilers, linters, tests. Product never defined what “correct” even means.
So the industry retreats to its last line of defense: taste and judgment. Which sounds noble, until you look at the numbers. Kohavi spent a lifetime on research, some famous numbers: at Microsoft, a third of tested features create value, a third do nothing, a third destroy value. That’s not judgment. That’s rolling the dice. Not a high bar exactly.
We both ran an experiment each, anyway. Else built a pipeline that pulls opportunities out of interview transcripts — and it picked the same #1 opportunity five times in a row. Markus built a two-hour business-case agent whose results his clients call mind-boggling. Both hit the same wall: the output isn’t the problem. Trusting a result you didn’t witness is. Combining skills, watching them build something, and steering it along the way — that makes sense. An agent just doing it on its own, unwitnessed — not for us.
Along the way: Bell Labs and idealized design, Pixar’s hit machine, why three people take three different notes in the same interview, what a B2B marketplace for car dealers taught us about completeness, why CEOs hire loyalty instead of correctness — and how taste sneaks right back in through the back door.
Discovery is the bottleneck. Judgment is our moat. Pick one.
Dr. Else van der Berg — LinkedIn · Substack
Chapters
- 0:00 — Why can’t PMs build autonomous loops?
- 5:49 — Taste, judgment, and how good humans actually are
- 12:10 — Two experiments: skills, agents, and the definition of done
- 22:34 — The artificial cut: correctness vs. completeness
- 40:00 — Get the voodoo out: what humans are still for
- 53:15 — Trust, loyalty, and humans on the loop
- 1:12:01 — Taste comes back through the back door