Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century Arab historian, noticed something that modern product managers still stumble into: the people closest to a successful system become its least reliable observers. He called this 'asabiyya' — the social cohesion that builds a civilization — but his deeper insight was about what happens after the building is done. The founders who fought for every decision develop what he called a kind of 'sedentary' blindness: they mistake their accumulated workarounds for wisdom, and their scar tissue for strategy. In product terms, you see this when a team can't explain why a core feature works the way it does except by saying 'that's how we built it.' The knowledge lives in the artifact, not in anyone's head — and so the team navigates future decisions by reverse-engineering their own past. The corrective Ibn Khaldun implies isn't more documentation. It's deliberate re-exposure to the original friction: talking to users who don't understand your product yet, the way early users didn't understand it. Their confusion is data. It reconstructs the problem your product was actually solving, before the team learned to stop seeing it.

What does a new user struggle with in your product that your team has completely stopped noticing?

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