When a product team falls in love with their roadmap, something subtle happens: the map starts dictating the territory. The philosopher Nagarjuna — writing in 2nd-century India — argued that our conceptual categories don't carve nature at its joints; they create the joints, and then we forget we made them. He called this 'prapañca' — the proliferation of mental constructs that mistake themselves for reality. Product managers live inside this trap daily. The user story, the persona, the OKR — these are useful fictions that harden into invisible prisons. Nagarjuna's remedy wasn't to abandon frameworks but to hold them with what he called 'śūnyatā' — emptiness of inherent existence — meaning: use the model, but remember it has no independent ground beneath it. Practically, this looks like scheduling a quarterly 'deconstruction session' where your team asks not 'are we executing the model correctly?' but 'what does our current model make it impossible for us to see?'

Which mental model in your current work are you executing faithfully — and what kind of evidence would that model structurally prevent you from noticing?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 150 CE)