The medieval rabbi Bahya ibn Paquda wrote an entire book about the 'duties of the heart' — the interior obligations that have no observable outputs. No one sees you fulfilling them. No one rewards you for them. He was talking about spiritual practice, but the concept cuts straight through the center of product work: most of what makes a product manager excellent is invisible, and most incentive structures reward the opposite. The pull toward measurable activity — sprint velocity, feature count, quarterly OKRs — is not laziness or vanity. It's a rational response to what gets noticed. But Bahya's distinction, between outer duties (which others can verify) and inner duties (which only you can), maps onto a real gap in PM work: the invisible labor of genuinely changing your mind when the evidence warrants it, of killing a project you championed, of sitting with a failing metric long enough to understand it rather than re-frame it. The discipline he's pointing at isn't self-improvement for its own sake. It's maintaining a private standard that exists independent of what your stakeholders can see — which turns out to be the only durable protection against slowly optimizing for appearances.

What decision have you reversed in the last month, and did you reverse it privately — because the evidence demanded it — or after someone else named it first?

Drawing from Medieval Jewish Ethics (Musar / Bahya ibn Paquda) — Bahya ibn Paquda (Duties of the Heart / Ḥovot ha-Levavot, c. 1080 CE)