Every product team has a theory of what their users want — but the theory itself rarely gets named, examined, or questioned. The 14th-century Moroccan scholar Ibn Khaldun built his entire philosophy of history around a single diagnostic observation: institutions fail not because of bad intentions, but because the internal logic they use to explain their own success slowly becomes disconnected from the conditions that made the success possible. He called this the decay of 'asabiyyah — the group cohesion and shared sense of reality that once kept a civilization calibrated to the world outside it. Product teams do exactly this. A mental model forms early — 'our users are overwhelmed, so simplicity wins' — and then, long after the user base has shifted, the pricing has changed, and the competitive landscape has moved, the team is still optimizing for the original insight. The model outlives its conditions. What Ibn Khaldun understood is that the dangerous moment isn't when a model is wrong — it's when the model has become the lens through which all new evidence gets filtered. A support ticket that contradicts the model gets rationalized. A metric that doesn't fit gets deprioritized. The team isn't ignoring reality; they're genuinely seeing through a framework that once worked. The practical move is blunt: periodically ask not 'what does the data tell us?' but 'what would have to be true for our foundational belief about this user to be wrong?' That question doesn't live in the data. You have to bring it yourself.

What foundational belief about your users — something so assumed it never appears in a doc — has never been directly stress-tested?

Drawing from Islamic historiography / Philosophy of civilization — Ibn Khaldun