When you're deep in roadmap decisions, there's a seductive feeling of clarity — you know the user, you know the problem, you know what to build next. The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer called this 'horizon fusion,' the moment when your interpretive framework and the thing you're studying merge so completely that you stop noticing the framework itself. That's exactly when your mental model stops being a lens and becomes a blindfold. Gadamer's insight, drawn from his work on how humans understand texts and traditions, is that genuine understanding requires first recognizing the prejudices — his word, not a slur, simply the pre-judgments — you bring to any encounter. In product terms: the model you used to correctly read the last market is now the distortion field through which you're misreading this one. The practice isn't skepticism for its own sake. It's periodically asking which of your current assumptions were conclusions from a previous context that you never consciously retired.

In the last two weeks, which user insight felt so obvious it didn't need checking — and what would it mean if that certainty is exactly where your model has calcified?

Drawing from Hermeneutic Philosophy — Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method, 1960)