The Yoruba concept of 'ori' — the personal soul that chooses its destiny before birth — has a practical corollary that product managers almost never apply: you cannot optimize a path you have not first claimed as yours. In the Ifá divination tradition, before any strategy is set, the practitioner first asks: what is this person's ori? Not their circumstances, not their constraints — their deep volitional signature. Applied to product work, this reframes a failure mode that's everywhere: teams that are technically executing well on a direction no one has genuinely committed to. The plan is sound. The roadmap is populated. And yet something in the room is always slightly flat. Philosopher Wande Abimbola, who spent decades documenting Ifá's philosophical architecture, describes ori not as fate but as character made conscious — the difference between a path you're walking and one you've recognized as yours. The product implication is quiet but consequential: alignment theater, where everyone nods at the strategy doc, is not the same as the moment a team actually recognizes a direction as expressing something true about what they're trying to do in the world. That recognition changes the texture of the work — the quality of the tradeoffs you're willing to make, the conversations you're willing to have, the features you're willing to cut. Today, notice whether the direction your team is executing feels chosen or merely agreed upon.

If you stripped away the quarterly targets and stakeholder expectations, what problem would your team still want to solve — and when did you last make a decision that reflected that?

Drawing from Yoruba Ifá Philosophy / African Philosophy — Wande Abimbola — Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus (1976), on ori as volitional character rather than fixed fate