Simone de Beauvoir made an observation about ambiguity that most people misread as pessimism: she argued that human projects are genuinely unfinished — not because we fail to complete them, but because completion is a fiction we impose afterward. The product implication is sharper than it sounds. When a team 'launches' a feature, they tend to close the mental file on it. The work of interpreting what happened — what the feature actually became in users' hands — gets skipped in favor of moving to the next thing. De Beauvoir called this 'bad faith': the habit of treating an open, living situation as if it were already decided. Your product isn't what you shipped. It's what it's becoming right now, in use, by people you haven't spoken to yet. One concrete practice: before scoping anything new this week, spend fifteen minutes reading recent behavior data or support tickets on something you already shipped — not to fix it, but to ask what it actually turned out to be.

Pick one thing your team considers 'shipped and done.' What evidence would you need to see before you'd reopen the file on it — and why hasn't that evidence arrived yet?

Drawing from Existentialism — Simone de Beauvoir