When a product team ships something and it flops, the post-mortem almost always focuses on the artifact — the feature, the copy, the onboarding flow. Rarely does anyone ask: what story were we telling ourselves about the user that made this seem obviously right? The 19th-century American philosopher Josiah Royce argued that the self is not a private interior thing but a *community of interpretation* — a chorus of past commitments, inherited narratives, and social roles that we mistake for singular, clear-eyed judgment. The same structure applies to teams: a product org's 'intuition' is really the accumulated weight of whoever spoke loudest in the last three planning cycles. Royce's corrective was loyalty — not blind allegiance, but conscious, chosen commitment to a cause larger than the story you're currently inside. In practice, this means occasionally asking not 'what does the data say' but 'what cause is this team actually loyal to, and is that cause worth being loyal to?' The answer is rarely on the roadmap.

Name the last decision you made that felt obviously right — then name the group or past commitment whose voice you were actually channeling.

Drawing from American Absolute Idealism / Philosophy of Loyalty — Josiah Royce (The Philosophy of Loyalty, 1908)