Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist logician, built an entire philosophical system around one uncomfortable move: taking the concept you rely on most and showing that it cannot support its own weight. He called the method *prasanga* — reductio ad absurdum applied not to your opponent's claim but to your own foundational categories. Product leaders rarely do this to their mental models. They refine them, extend them, stress-test them against new data — but almost never ask whether the model's core terms actually refer to anything stable enough to build on. Consider 'user need.' That phrase quietly holds an entire product strategy together. But Nagarjuna's question would be: does 'user need' name a fixed thing that exists independently of how you measure it, or does the act of measuring it — through interviews, analytics, NPS — constitute it? If the latter, then the model is partly self-generating. What you find is shaped by what you were looking for. The practical consequence isn't skepticism; it's a specific discipline. Once a quarter, pick the one term your product strategy most depends on and try to define it without using your own outputs as evidence. If the definition collapses, the model is load-bearing in a way you never stress-tested.

What is the one term at the center of your current product strategy — and what would it mean if that term is defined by how you measure it rather than by something that exists independently of your measurement?

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