Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist logician, argued that things have no fixed, intrinsic nature — not as mysticism, but as a logical claim: every object or concept only makes sense relative to something else, and those relational conditions are always shifting. Product teams tend to violate this at exactly the wrong moment. They define a feature's value by its initial reception, then treat that valuation as a permanent property of the feature itself — as if 'users love this' were an attribute like weight or color, rather than a relationship between a capability and a context that has since moved on. The search function that earned rave reviews in 2022 is now the thing people blame when they can't find anything, because the data it indexes, the expectations it sits beside, and the alternatives users compare it to have all changed. Nothing you shipped has intrinsic value; it has relational value, and relations rotate. The practical discipline: stop auditing features against their launch metrics and start auditing them against the current ecosystem of user expectations, competing affordances, and adjacent capabilities — the conditions that now constitute their context. A feature's meaning is always borrowed from its surroundings. When the surroundings change, the meaning changes with them, whether you've noticed or not.

In the last month, which capability in your product have you defended primarily by pointing to past performance rather than examining its present relational context?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 2nd century CE)