When a product team argues about which feature to build next, they think they're having a prioritization debate. They're usually having a language debate. Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American philosopher behind General Semantics, observed that most human conflict isn't about facts or values — it's about people using the same words to point at different territories. 'Engagement' means daily actives to the analyst, emotional resonance to the designer, and retained revenue to the CFO. They're all nodding at the same word while picturing entirely different things, and the product roadmap gets built on that shared misunderstanding. Korzybski's discipline — training yourself to ask 'what specific observable thing are you pointing at?' before agreeing on anything — is arguably more useful in a product review than any prioritization framework. Today, before your next meeting, pick one word your team uses constantly (retention, quality, value, north star) and ask everyone to write down concretely what they'd measure to know if it improved. The number of different answers you get is the real size of your alignment problem.

Name one word your product team treats as shared vocabulary — then write down exactly what you would measure to prove it improved. Does your answer match what your stakeholders would write?

Drawing from General Semantics — Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)