Here's a strange feature of product work: the moment you feel most certain about what users want is often the moment you're most wrong. The Bhagavad Gita distinguishes between two orientations toward action — 'sakama karma,' acting in pursuit of a specific fruit, and 'nishkama karma,' acting from engaged presence without grasping at outcomes. Most PMs operate in the first mode: building toward a predetermined conclusion, unconsciously filtering discovery sessions and user interviews to confirm what they've already decided. The psychologist Gary Klein, who spent decades studying expert decision-making in high-stakes fields, called this 'premature closure' — the mind snaps shut not from laziness but from the discomfort of holding open questions. The practice these two traditions suggest is the same: stay genuinely curious during discovery long enough to be surprised. Before your next user conversation, write down your current conviction about what they'll say — then treat disconfirming evidence as the more valuable data point.

In your last three product decisions, did you gather evidence to learn — or to confirm what you'd already decided?

Drawing from Indian Philosophy synthesized with Naturalistic Decision-Making — Bhagavad Gita (~5th–2nd century BCE) synthesized with Gary Klein (Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, 1998)