When a product is failing, the instinct is to add — more features, more research, more process. The 14th-century North African historian Ibn Khaldun noticed the same pathology in civilizations: the more elaborate their administrative machinery became, the closer they were to collapse. He called this 'asabiyya' erosion — the slow death of the binding force that made the thing coherent in the first place. For a product team, asabiyya is the shared intuition about what the product is *for* — not the roadmap, not the OKRs, but the animating idea everyone once held without needing to write it down. Complexity accumulates precisely when that intuition fades. The next time your team reaches for a new framework to align around, ask whether the framework is solving a coordination problem or masking the fact that nobody can say the core thing plainly anymore. Clarity first. Structure follows.

Name the one sentence your team could say — right now, without looking at a doc — that explains what your product is fundamentally *against*. If it takes a meeting to answer that, what does the silence tell you?

Drawing from Islamic Historical Philosophy (Ibn Khaldunian) — Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddimah, 1377)