Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist philosopher, spent his career dismantling a specific intellectual trap: the belief that things have svabhāva — inherent, fixed essence that exists independently of conditions. His argument wasn't abstract. He was pointing at how easily a perceiving mind mistakes its current view of something for what that thing fundamentally is. Product managers walk into this trap constantly, not with concepts but with features. A feature that solved a real problem at 10,000 users quietly acquires svabhāva in the roadmap — it becomes load-bearing, essential, definitional to what the product 'is' — long after the conditions that made it valuable have shifted. The insight Nagarjuna offers isn't that things have no identity, but that identity is always relational and contingent: it exists because of a specific web of conditions, not in spite of them. Which means when conditions change — user behavior, market, team capacity — what looked like a core capability may now be scaffolding around an absence. The practice this suggests is concrete: before your next planning cycle, pick three features you'd never cut and ask not 'what does this do?' but 'what conditions made this feel essential?' If those conditions still hold, keep it. If they've dissolved, you may be protecting a ghost.

Name one product decision you're currently treating as settled — and list the three conditions that originally made it the right call. Are all three still true?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna — Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Root Verses on the Middle Way), c. 2nd century CE, particularly the doctrine of śūnyatā as the absence of svabhāva (inherent essence) in all phenomena