Categorization shapes what you can see. Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American linguist who founded general semantics, made this point with surgical precision: 'The map is not the territory' — but the sharper, less-quoted claim underneath it is that the map actively distorts the territory by forcing continuous, flowing reality into discrete, labeled boxes. Product managers do this constantly with users. 'Power user.' 'Churned.' 'At-risk.' The moment you apply the label, you stop perceiving the person and start perceiving the category — and the category is static, built from past observations, while the person keeps moving. The practical consequence: your most dangerous blind spot isn't the user you haven't talked to. It's the user you've already filed away under a label you stopped questioning six months ago.

Which user segment label in your current work would change your behavior most if you deleted it entirely for one week?

Drawing from General Semantics — Alfred Korzybski