A product manager who keeps every feature request in play isn't being thorough — they're avoiding a kind of grief. The 11th-century philosopher Al-Ghazali, in his *Ihya Ulum al-Din*, argued that genuine discernment requires what he called 'cutting off' — the deliberate, almost painful act of severing attachment to possibilities you've genuinely loved, not because they're bad, but because holding them open costs you the clarity to act on what's real. This maps directly onto one of the hardest PM skills: not prioritization in the abstract, but the emotional labor of closing the door on a good idea at the right moment. The backlog that never shrinks isn't a sign of ambition; it's a sign that the work of mourning hasn't happened yet.

What is one item on your roadmap or backlog that you keep revisiting not because the evidence supports it, but because letting it go feels like losing something about yourself?

Drawing from Sufi Philosophy (Al-Ghazalian branch) — Al-Ghazali (Ihya Ulum al-Din, c. 1107 CE)