The Product Oracle: When Intuition Replaces Discipline

There is a recurring organisational pathology that hides behind the language of product leadership, customer focus, and business alignment. It has nothing to do with customers themselves.

It is entirely internal.

I call it The Cult of One.

The Cult of One emerges when one or two product figures begin to believe they sit at the centre of the organisation. Not as coordinators, not as integrators, but as the primary source of truth. Strategy, priority, and direction become synonymous with their judgement.

This is not leadership. It is gravitational capture.

How the Cult Forms

The pattern is consistent. An organisation grows. Complexity increases. Trade-offs multiply. At some point, clarity becomes work.

Instead of investing in structured thinking, shared framing, and written strategy, a shortcut appears: personal authority.

Someone reaches a senior product position without mastering foundational disciplines:

• Writing clear specifications
• Separating problem framing from solutioning
• Reasoning at system level rather than feature level

Confronted with ambiguity, they default to intuition and proximity. Their opinions harden into direction. Their urgency becomes priority. Their narrative replaces strategy.

From there, the organisation begins to orbit them.

Strategy by Proximity

In the Cult of One, strategy is not articulated. It is inferred.

Decisions cluster around whoever speaks most confidently, attends the right meetings, or claims proximity to “the business.” Roadmaps emerge from conversations rather than documents. Alignment is assumed because dissent is interpreted as resistance.

Data is notably absent.

Metrics are treated as optional. Evidence is dismissed as lagging. Anything that contradicts the centre’s intuition is reframed as incomplete, naïve, or irrelevant. When numbers are used, they are selectively invoked to support a conclusion already reached.

The dominant belief becomes explicit or implicit: we know better.

Sometimes this superiority is even extended beyond the organisation itself. Customers are no longer sources of signal, but entities to be interpreted, corrected, or educated. Feedback that does not match the internal narrative is discounted. Direct evidence is replaced by second-hand storytelling.

This is how strategy quietly disappears.

Not through incompetence, but through substitution. Personal intuition replaces collective reasoning. Storytelling replaces structure. Certainty replaces curiosity.

Everyone else is expected to adapt.

Teams as Satellites

Once this pattern settles, teams stop being autonomous units of ownership. They become satellites.

Engineering, platform, and operations are reframed as execution layers. Their role is to deliver against priorities defined elsewhere, often without full context, stable framing, or technical respect.

Product discipline quietly evaporates.

There is no shared definition of ready. No clear definition of done. Specifications are partial, shifting, or entirely implicit. Acceptance criteria are discovered late, usually during delivery, sometimes after.

Why should anyone care? Responsibility has already been delegated.

When outcomes disappoint, blame has a convenient destination: engineering.

Internal priorities are questioned whenever they conflict with the centre’s narrative.

“Why are you working on this?”

The question is never asked out of curiosity. It is asked to reassert control.

Product becomes directional without being accountable. Engineering becomes accountable without being empowered.

Over time, teams learn the rules:

• Depth is optional
• Stewardship is invisible
• Discipline is unnecessary upstream
• Compliance is rewarded downstream

This is how systems decay without anyone explicitly breaking them.

The Illusion of Centrality

Those at the centre of the Cult rarely see the damage. They experience influence, not responsibility.

They believe they are connecting dots, unblocking progress, and protecting outcomes. When challenged, they frame opposition as lack of alignment, lack of urgency, or lack of business understanding.

When reason fails, emotion is deployed.

Decisions are justified through rhetorical pressure rather than evidence:

• “We are doing this to avoid risk.”
• “This customer pays a significant portion of your salary.”
• “We cannot afford to say no.”

These statements sound serious. They are rarely substantiated.

Risk is invoked without being defined. Revenue is cited without context. Urgency replaces analysis. Emotional leverage substitutes for data.

Trust is weaponised.

Teams are pushed to comply not because the decision is right, but because resisting it feels irresponsible. Questioning becomes framed as disloyalty. Asking for evidence is interpreted as lack of commitment.

This belief is self-reinforcing.

The more the organisation bends around emotional pressure, the more indispensable the centre appears. The less the system pushes back, the more convinced they become that they alone see clearly.

This is not malice. It is unchecked centrality.

Why This Pattern Is So Dangerous

The Cult of One does not create loud failures. It creates silent ones.

Written strategy atrophies. Architectural coherence erodes. Decision-making becomes opaque. Accountability blurs, because authority is personal rather than structural.

When outcomes degrade, blame flows outward:

• Teams did not execute fast enough
• Engineers overcomplicated things
• The organisation resisted change

The centre remains untouched.

And when the damage is done, the pattern often completes its final loop.

Those who pulled the organisation down rarely leave quietly. Their exit narrative is already prepared. They pitch themselves to their next employer as misunderstood visionaries, leaders with a master plan that was never implemented because the company "did not listen."

Failure is reframed as resistance. Collapse becomes proof of foresight. The absence of results is explained by a lack of obedience.

This is how the Cult of One preserves itself beyond a single organisation.

Eventually, three things happen:

1. The system becomes brittle and slow
2. Strong operators disengage or leave
3. The organisation loses its ability to reason collectively

At that point, everything feels political, because nothing is explicit anymore.

The Antidote

The Cult of One cannot be fixed with process. It can only be fixed with discipline.

That discipline starts with restoring symmetry.

Product discipline must be held to the same standards as engineering discipline.

If engineering is expected to define, estimate, deliver, and operate with rigour, product must be expected to frame problems with equal precision. Definitions of Ready and Done are not optional hygiene. Specifications are not suggestions. Strategy is not a personality trait.

Written strategies must survive their authors. Specifications must expose assumptions and trade-offs. Ownership boundaries must be explicit and enforced.

Most importantly, leaders must be willing to decentralise themselves.

Not by disappearing, but by making their thinking replaceable.

Known Patterns in the Wild

The Cult of One is not theoretical. Variants of it have played out repeatedly in well-known organisations.

Nokia (late 2000s) is a classic case. Product and executive intuition overrode market data and internal engineering signals. Leadership believed they understood the customer and the future better than both users and their own teams. Decisions were defended emotionally and politically rather than empirically. By the time evidence was undeniable, organisational reasoning capacity had already collapsed.

BlackBerry followed a similar trajectory. Strong internal conviction replaced external signal. Product leadership dismissed user behaviour and ecosystem shifts as noise. Engineering warnings were ignored. What remained was certainty without learning, until the market rendered its verdict.

Boeing (737 MAX), outside pure tech, shows the same pattern in a more tragic form. Managerial intuition and schedule pressure overrode engineering discipline and safety data. Emotional arguments about competitiveness and risk avoidance replaced rigorous system reasoning, with catastrophic consequences.

More quietly, the same dynamic appears in countless mid-sized tech companies. It does not make headlines because it does not explode. It slowly erodes trust, talent, and coherence until performance degrades enough to justify another round of intuitive restructuring.

The scale varies. The mechanism does not.

Final Thought

If your organisation only works when one or two people are in the room, you do not have leadership. You have dependency.

And if dissent is treated as friction rather than signal, you are not building alignment.

You are building a cult.