Every experienced product manager eventually hits the same invisible wall: you've shipped the right thing, users are behaving as predicted, and yet the product feels like it's drifting. The roadmap is coherent but somehow the *why* behind it has gone fuzzy. The 18th-century philosopher Giambattista Vico argued something counterintuitive about how humans understand things — he called it *verum factum*: we fully understand only what we ourselves have made. Not what we've observed, not what we've analyzed — what we've built. The implication for product work is sharper than it first appears: the act of building is itself a form of knowing, not just a consequence of knowing. Which means the drift you feel when a product loses its soul isn't a strategy problem. It's that the making has been handed off so completely — to process, to delegation, to documentation — that the understanding has been handed off with it. Vico's insight suggests a corrective that isn't about better planning: periodically, the person responsible for the product's direction needs to get their hands back into the actual material — talk to support tickets raw, trace a user flow themselves, write a spec for something small. The understanding doesn't live in the deck. It lives in the making.

What part of your product have you not personally touched, traced, or built in so long that you're now working from a memory of understanding rather than understanding itself?

Drawing from Neapolitan Historical Philosophy / Philosophy of Knowledge — Giambattista Vico (Scienza Nuova / New Science, 1725–1744)