Pragmatist philosopher William James drew a distinction that most product teams accidentally ignore: the difference between a concept's *cash value* — what difference it actually makes in concrete experience — and its merely verbal meaning. A feature spec that reads well, a strategy doc that flows logically, a roadmap that stakeholders nod at: these can all be semantically coherent while having zero cash value. James's test was ruthless. Strip away the language and ask: what observable difference does this make in someone's actual life, on a Tuesday afternoon, when the stakes are low and attention is scarce? If you can't answer that with something you could film, the idea hasn't been thought through yet — it's been written through. The practical discipline this suggests isn't more rigor in the writing; it's building a habit of forcing every product claim down to a specific moment of use before it earns a place on the roadmap.

Pick one item currently on your roadmap — when did you last watch a real user encounter the problem that item is supposed to solve, and what did you notice that the spec didn't mention?

Drawing from American Pragmatism — William James (Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907)