Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist philosopher, built his entire system around one unsettling move: he showed that any concept used to ground and stabilize understanding — 'foundation', 'essence', 'core' — is itself dependent on other concepts, all the way down. There is no bedrock. What he called śūnyatā (emptiness) wasn't nihilism; it was the recognition that systems only exist in relation to other systems, and the moment you treat one element as fixed, you've stopped seeing it clearly. Product management has a version of this problem that almost nobody names directly: the 'north star metric' — the single number that's supposed to anchor everything else. The north star feels like bedrock. But it was chosen in a specific competitive context, by a team with specific assumptions about what users valued, at a specific stage of growth. It is not a foundation; it is a historical decision that hardened into furniture. Nagarjuna's corrective isn't to abandon the metric — it's to hold it lightly, as one node in a web rather than a load-bearing wall. The practical implication: before your next planning cycle, trace your north star metric back to the moment it was chosen. What was true then that may not be true now? A metric that cannot answer that question is running on borrowed authority.

In the last quarter, which decision did your team treat as already-settled because the metric said so — and when did anyone last question whether the metric itself still fits?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna — Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), c. 150–200 CE