Every product team has a theory of what their users cannot tolerate — and almost none of them have tested it. The 11th-century Sufi thinker Ibn Arabi wrote about what he called the 'limitation of the divine names': every conception we hold of something real is also, necessarily, a constraint on it. Applied to product work, this cuts sharply — the moment your team reaches confident agreement about what users will 'never accept,' you've stopped describing users and started describing your team's imagination of them. The threshold of user tolerance is one of the most consequential untested assumptions in any product cycle, and it tends to get treated as bedrock precisely because it feels empirically grounded. It isn't. It's a negotiated fiction, solidified by repetition. The practical move: take one 'users would revolt' assumption from your current strategy — slower load time, a paywall, a removed feature — and ask whether you've actually tested that claim in the last year, or whether you're working from a story someone told confidently in a meeting.

Pick one constraint on your current roadmap that exists because 'users won't tolerate it' — what is the actual evidence, and who last checked?

Drawing from Sufi metaphysics / Islamic philosophy — Ibn Arabi (Fusus al-Hikam, c. 1229)