Your mental map of a problem is never the problem itself — and the gap between the two is where most product decisions quietly go wrong. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce spent decades studying how beliefs function not as pictures of reality, but as habits of action: what you believe shapes what you do, not what is true. This means that when a product team is 'aligned,' they may simply have synchronized habits, not shared understanding — a dangerous thing to mistake for clarity. Today, pick one assumption your team treats as settled and ask what behavior it actually produces, not what it theoretically means.

What is one belief about your users that you act on daily but have never directly tested — and what would you have to change if it turned out to be a habit rather than a fact?

Drawing from American Pragmatism — Charles Sanders Peirce (How to Make Our Ideas Clear, 1878)