What specific exercises or habits help someone develop the "taste" and "high craft" required for a design team of one?

I'll start with an admission: I've said many times that taste is the one thing I haven't been able to teach to people. I've taught strong visual designers interaction design and systems thinking, but never the reverse. So if I can't hand it to you, how do you get it? Mostly by building it yourself, over a long time.

Steve Jobs had the best answer back in 1994: expose yourself to the best things humans have done and bring them into your work. That's still the foundation. The people I've enjoyed working with most, across every discipline, are the ones with taste in exactly this sense. They look at a lot of great work from well outside their own field, and it shows.

Exposure isn't enough on its own, though. You have to take things apart. Jared Spool laid out a loop that every self-taught "unicorn" seems to follow: pick a topic you don't know, take in a lot about it, practice it repeatedly, deconstruct as many designs as you can, seek out feedback, and then teach others. Teaching matters more than people think, because you don't really understand something until you can explain it.

Deconstruction is where taste turns into craft. When you look at something great, ask why every choice was made. That's the attention to detail I look for in hiring: someone who's thinking about all the different choices they're making, why they're making them, and what the impact of those choices is. Pair that with the big picture and everything in the middle sort of works itself out. Too many designers live in that middle zone and never push to either end.

A few habits help a lot when you're working solo. First, make your ideas visible. If they stay in your head, they stay there, and getting them out is how you find out whether they're any good. Second, refine in the final medium as soon as you can rather than polishing static mockups. Details only add up to quality when you can see them where they'll actually live. (That's much easier today, since AI tools let one person build the real thing quickly.)

Finally, be patient with the awkward phase. Learning moves from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, then conscious competence, and finally unconscious competence. Taste is basically that last stage: you've seen and made enough good work that your gut catches what's off before you can explain why.

So consume the best work, take it apart, make a lot of your own, and have someone sharper than you tear it down. Then repeat for years. There isn't a shortcut, but every rep counts.