Most product decisions don't fail because of bad logic — they fail because the person making them is too close to the work to see it clearly. The philosopher Simone Weil wrote about what she called 'attention': a quality of looking at something without immediately imposing your assumptions onto it, allowing the thing itself to reveal what it needs. She distinguished this sharply from mere effort or concentration. Effort narrows. Attention opens. For a product manager, this shows up in user research that confirms what you already believe, in roadmaps that solve your mental model of the problem rather than the actual problem, in standups where everyone is busy but nobody is watching. The practice Weil recommended is almost physical: pause, release the urge to interpret, and let the observation arrive before the conclusion does. Today, before your first synthesis or decision, try sitting with the raw signal — a support ticket, a usage drop, a piece of feedback — for thirty seconds without reaching for an explanation.

In the last 48 hours, what's one piece of user feedback or data you interpreted immediately — and what might you have missed by not sitting with it longer?

Drawing from Existentialist / Mystical philosophy — Simone Weil