The moment a product team locks down a specification, something subtle happens: the document starts protecting itself. Meetings shift from 'what does the user need?' to 'what did we write?' This drift has a name in Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka philosophy — he called it 'reification,' the moment a useful conceptual tool gets mistaken for the thing it was meant to describe. Writing in 2nd-century India, Nagarjuna argued that all our categories — even the most carefully constructed ones — are provisional scaffolding, not load-bearing walls. The map, once laminated, becomes the territory. What this means practically: the spec, the persona, the OKR, the north-star metric — each of these is a finger pointing at something real, but the moment your team starts defending the finger rather than looking where it points, you've crossed from product thinking into institutional self-preservation. The antidote Nagarjuna would recognize: build a scheduled ritual of de-reification. Once a quarter, take your most defended artifact and ask only: 'Is this still pointing at something true, or are we pointing at the pointing?'

In the last 30 days, which artifact — a doc, a metric, a stated principle — did your team cite to close down a conversation rather than open one?

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