Here's a trap product managers fall into constantly: the roadmap becomes the product. You spend so much energy defending priorities, sequencing releases, and aligning stakeholders that the map quietly replaces the territory it was meant to describe. Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist philosopher, called this kind of mistake 'reification' — treating a useful conceptual tool as if it were the thing itself. His Mūlamadhyamakakārikā argues that all frameworks are empty of inherent existence; they're useful fingers pointing at the moon, not the moon. Now combine that with what Chris Argyris called 'double-loop learning' in his work on organizational behavior — the difference between adjusting your actions within a system versus questioning whether the system's assumptions are right in the first place. Most roadmap reviews are single-loop: did we ship on time? Double-loop asks: does this roadmap even reflect what users actually need, or just what we committed to last quarter? Monday is a good day to look at your roadmap and ask which items are there because they're genuinely the best next move — and which are there because removing them would require an uncomfortable conversation.

When did you last change your roadmap because your assumptions were wrong, rather than because circumstances forced your hand?

Drawing from Buddhist Philosophy synthesized with Organizational Learning Theory — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, ~2nd century CE) synthesized with Chris Argyris (Organizational Learning, 1978)