Nagarjuna, the second-century Buddhist philosopher, argued that every concept contains the seeds of its own negation — not as a flaw, but as the condition for its usefulness. He called this śūnyatā (emptiness): nothing has fixed, independent meaning; meaning arises from relation and context. Product managers rarely think about their feature definitions this way, but they should. The word 'user' in your product spec is not describing a fixed entity — it's a temporary coalition of contexts, and the spec written for Monday-morning-commute-user may be actively wrong for Friday-afternoon-deadline-user. The practical consequence is quieter than it sounds: before your next roadmap review, identify one term your team treats as self-evident — 'engagement,' 'activation,' 'core workflow' — and ask what its opposite would have to look like. If you can't describe the opposite clearly, you don't yet understand the concept well enough to build confidently around it.

What is one term your team uses daily in product discussions whose opposite nobody has ever named out loud — and what does that silence cost you?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 2nd century CE)