Life isn’t always a river

There’s an old Jewish joke Oliver Burkeman shares in Meditations for Mortals.

A rabbi is on his deathbed. His students gather around, waiting for his final words.

The rabbi opens his eyes and says:

“Life is a river.”

The message moves solemnly from student to student.

Then the youngest one asks:

“What does the rabbi mean by ‘life is a river’?”

The question travels back up the line.

He opens his eyes, shrugs, and says:

“Fine. Then it’s not a river.”

That joke works because it exposes a very human expectation: when something is said with enough confidence, we assume there must be a deeper logic behind it.

We want meaning. We want coherence. We want the river to actually mean something.

And then the rabbi simply shrugs and takes it back.

Why it matters

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We want decisions to make sense.

We want hidden logic.

We want confidence, clarity and a straight line.

But product work rarely gives us that.

The product reality

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A Product Manager makes a call.

• The team aligns.
• Work starts.
• Designs move.
• Engineering explores.
• Scope gets shaped.

Then, a few weeks later… the decision changes.

• The priority shifts.
• The focus moves.
• The solution gets reframed.

And the reaction is often immediate:

“They don’t know what they’re doing.”

That reaction is understandable.

Nobody likes building on unstable ground.

But here’s the nuance:

A changed decision is not automatically a bad decision.

It may mean:

• New information appeared.
• The market responded differently.
• The technical cost was higher than expected.
• A dependency changed.
• The impact/risk/effort trade-off looks different now.

The original decision was a reasonable hypothesis, not a final truth.

The real problem

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The issue is not only that decisions change.

The issue is that many decisions are communicated as certainty when they are really bets. Product often has to move with incomplete information. Engineering needs enough stability to build well. That creates tension.

When Product says:

“We’re doing this.”

The team hears:

“This is settled.”

So when the decision changes, it feels like incoherence.

But when Product says:

“Based on what we know today, this is our best bet. Confidence is medium. If we learn X or Y, we’ll revisit it.”

The team hears something different:

“This is a decision, but not a dogma.”

That changes the conversation.

Healthy change vs. toxic change

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Not all change is the same.

Healthy change happens when:

• There is new information.
• The reasoning is explained.
• The trade-off is visible.
• The original uncertainty was acknowledged.
• The team can follow the logic.

Toxic change happens when:

• Priorities shift because of anxiety.
• No explanation is given.
• Decisions look improvised.
• Previous certainty gets quietly rewritten.
• The team only receives orders.

Healthy change can still be uncomfortable.

But toxic change creates cynicism.

And once a team loses trust in decision-making, it starts protecting itself.

• People ask fewer questions.
• They commit less.
• They document less.
• They wait longer.
• They distance themselves.

That’s when the system starts to degrade.

Not because there is uncertainty. Because the uncertainty is unmanaged.

What teams need instead

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Teams don’t need fake certainty. They need visible reasoning.

A useful product decision should make four things clear:

1. What we know.
2. What we don’t know.
3. Why this is the best bet now.
4. What would make us change our mind.

That gives the team more than a conclusion.

It gives them the logic behind it.

And when the decision changes, there is a story people can follow.

The bottom line

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Product maturity is not about never changing your mind. It’s about knowing the difference between learning and chaos.

Product, Management and Engineering don’t need to pretend they know everything.

They need to be honest about how much they know.

A useful principle

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We don’t need to understand everything to decide. But we do need to be honest about how much we understand.

That honesty helps teams avoid two traps:

The theatre of certainty.

The resignation to chaos.

Because in product, as in life, sometimes we have to act before the full explanation is available.

That doesn’t mean we don’t know what we’re doing.

It means we’re learning as we move.