Here's a trap most product managers fall into without realizing it: the better you get at articulating your product vision, the more dangerous you become to its success. William James, the father of American Pragmatism, argued that beliefs are not mirrors of reality — they are tools we use to navigate it, and a tool that works too smoothly stops getting questioned. In product terms, your roadmap narrative can become so internally coherent, so persuasive, that it immunizes itself against disconfirming signals from users. Daniel Kahneman called this 'theory-induced blindness' — the very fluency of your story closes off the perceptual channels you need most. The practical move: once a week, deliberately hand your roadmap to someone whose job is to break it, and ask them not 'what's wrong with this?' but 'what would have to be true for this to fail quietly — without anyone noticing until it's too late?'

Which belief about your users or your product has gone unquestioned the longest — and what would it cost you to deliberately try to falsify it this week?

Drawing from Pragmatism — William James (Pragmatism, 1907) synthesized with Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011)