The maps you use to navigate your work are also the walls that contain you. Ibn Sina — the 11th-century Persian polymath — described the intellect as something that advances not by accumulating more content, but by periodically recognizing that its current categories have become a cage. He called this the moment when the 'acquired intellect' must molt: you have to notice that you are no longer using your framework to think, but thinking only what the framework permits. For product managers, this shows up with uncomfortable precision: the mental model that made you effective at one stage of a product's life quietly becomes the lens that makes you miss the next stage entirely. The practice isn't to discard frameworks — it's to build in a regular audit of which assumptions you are no longer questioning, precisely because they work.

What is the oldest mental model you are still using — and when did you last actually test whether it still fits the product reality in front of you?

Drawing from Islamic Neoplatonic Philosophy / Avicennan Epistemology — Ibn Sina (Avicenna) — Kitab al-Shifa (The Book of Healing), c. 1027 CE