When you hold a mental model long enough, it stops being a tool and starts being a floor — invisible, load-bearing, and never examined. The 18th-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico called this 'the conceit of scholars': the tendency to mistake the maps we made during a formative period for the territory itself. He was writing about how civilizations misread history, but the mechanism is identical in anyone who built their product intuition in one market era and now navigates a different one. Vico's corrective was what he called 'fantasia' — not imagination in the fluffy sense, but the disciplined effort to reconstruct the mental world of a different time or context from the inside, on its own terms. For a PM or leader, that means the live question isn't 'what does the data tell me?' but 'what would I have to believe about users, markets, or my team for this evidence to make sense to them — not to me?' The model you built in 2020 is a historical artifact. Treat it like one.

What would someone with no history in your market conclude from your current evidence — and where does that diverge from your conclusion?

Drawing from Neapolitan Historical Philosophy / Vichian Epistemology — Giambattista Vico (New Science, 1725)