Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist philosopher, built his entire career dismantling one assumption: that things have *svabhava* — inherent, fixed essence. A table isn't essentially a table; it's a temporary convergence of wood, labor, use, and the people who agree to call it furniture. The insight sounds abstract until you apply it to a product feature. Most features accumulate *svabhava* — they become 'core,' 'essential,' 'what we are' — not because they're genuinely load-bearing, but because the team has agreed, implicitly, to stop questioning them. The feature isn't holding the product up. The story about the feature is. Nagarjuna's method, called *prasanga* — reductio ad absurdum, following an assumption to its breaking point — was a tool for exposing exactly this: the moment an 'obvious truth' starts requiring increasingly elaborate defenses, it's signaling its own contingency. For a PM, this translates to a specific practice: when someone says 'we can't cut X,' the move isn't to argue directly but to ask what would have to be true for X to be cuttable. Follow the conditions backward. You'll usually find not bedrock, but accumulated institutional story-telling.

Pick one feature your team currently treats as untouchable. What would have to be true — about users, the market, or your own product thesis — for it to be the first thing you cut?

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