Every product team eventually builds a roadmap that is secretly a confession — a list of bets that reveals, more than any strategy doc, what the team actually believes about their users. Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century North African historian, noticed something structurally similar about dynasties: that the decisions rulers made in years three through seven were not rational responses to their situation but replays of the founding crisis, the original moment of scarcity or threat that gave the group its identity. He called this 'asabiyyah — the binding solidarity formed under pressure — and argued it was both the engine of early success and, later, the invisible hand steering decisions long after the original conditions had vanished. Product teams do the same thing. The feature your team fights hardest to protect, the metric your leadership treats as sacred, the 'obvious' user need no one questions — trace it back and you will almost always find a founding moment: an early churn crisis, a competitor that terrified you, a launch that nearly failed. Ibn Khaldun's insight is that this emotional sediment doesn't dissipate; it calcifies into process, into roadmap assumptions, into what counts as 'obvious.' The discipline he was gesturing at — though he applied it to civilizations, not sprint cycles — is periodically asking which of your current product convictions are responses to a present reality and which are re-enactments of a founding fear.

Trace your team's most defended product assumption back to its origin — what was actually happening in the company when that belief first became 'obvious,' and does that context still exist?

Drawing from Islamic historiography / Khaldunian social philosophy — Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddimah, 1377)