Your best decision last year might be your worst decision today
Why yesterday's decisions don't define tomorrow
What if I told you that the most dangerous phrase in product management isn’t “we can’t do that” but rather “we’ve always done it this way”? Here’s something I find myself repeating in so many meetings: the status quo should be fluent.
What “Fluent Status Quo” actually means
When we made a decision last year about how to approach a feature, structure a team, or prioritize our roadmap, that choice was probably right for that specific moment in time.
But there’s a critical part that many people miss: a good decision from twelve months ago doesn’t automatically remain a good decision today, and it certainly isn’t guaranteed to be the right call for next year.
Everything around us is constantly changing
The reality of knowledge work is constant motion. Your people evolve and grow in their roles. Your organization restructures and scales. Your teams shift in composition and capability. Your software architecture matures and sometimes accumulates technical debt. Your business goals pivot based on market feedback. Your competitive environment transforms overnight. The entire world around us keeps changing, whether we’re ready for it or not.
Building adaptability into your team
This means we must adapt continuously. The status quo needs to be fluent and flexible, not rigid and unchangeable. We have to build adaptability into how we think and operate.
I’m not suggesting we should second-guess every decision we’ve ever made or create chaos by constantly changing direction. That would be equally destructive.
What I am advocating for is cultivating a specific mindset across your teams: one that embraces flexibility and stays open to evolution.
It’s about mindset, not process
What makes this challenging is that it’s not fundamentally an organizational problem that you can solve with a new framework or policy. It’s a mindset issue, which is infinitely harder to address. I want every person on my team to internalize that our future might require completely different structures, processes, and approaches than what works today. This isn’t about creating more rules or implementing heavier processes. It’s about shaping how people think about change itself.
Lead by example
And that’s precisely what makes this so difficult to implement. The encouraging part: you can embody this mindset yourself, starting today. When you consistently demonstrate this flexibility in your own decision-making, others will notice. They’ll see how you revisit past choices without ego, how you adapt when circumstances shift, and how you create space for better solutions to emerge.
Leadership by example remains one of the most powerful tools we have.
What I read
As usual, I will list some of the best articles I read on the Internet. I will keep a list of the best articles (currently >900) at https://www.digital-product-management.com. These are today’s picks:
Status Rules Everything Around Me: What establishes status? And other questions.
Publishing your work increases your luck: For every snarky comment, there are 10x as many people admiring your work.
Critical AI Literacy: The difference between knowing how to operate a tool and knowing when to trust what it produces.
What was best before isn't necessarily best now. What's best now won't necessarily be best later. And sometimes, what was best before comes back around to being best again.
What worries me is calling a decision good or bad based only on how it turned out. At the time, it really was the best choice available. Clinging too tightly to the past is risky — and so is reading the past through today's eyes.
Since all of this stays fluid, almost like a living thing, the real question isn't whether it was good or bad. It's what we do from here.
It was good before — so how about now? If it's not doing so well, what do we change? If it's working well enough, isn't changing the status quo just for its own sake the real risk? It comes down to: what do we do now?
Excellent work! Thanks for sharing!