Control what you can control

Stoic principles applied to product development means focusing on decision quality rather than outcomes, because outcomes are shaped by factors outside anyone’s control. Three practical tools support this: scenario planning for negative outcomes, the 10-10-10 rule (asking what a decision means in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years), and decision journaling to separate the quality of a choice from how it turns out.

Key Takeaways

• Outcome in product development is heavily influenced by factors outside anyone’s control, so decision quality is a more reliable focus than outcome quality.
• The Stoic principle of premeditatio malorum, preparing for bad events in advance, is a practical product management strategy, not pessimism.
• The 10-10-10 rule structures every significant decision across three time horizons: 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years, preventing purely short-term thinking.
• Judging a decision by whether it turned out well is a reasoning error Annie Duke calls resulting; a bad outcome does not make a decision wrong, and a good outcome does not make it right.

Most of what you chase, you cannot control

Stoicism rests on a single distinction: most things lie outside your control. Other people’s opinions, your health, the weather, how a product launch turns out. The only territory you genuinely own is your own mind. Your perception, your judgment, your response.

That sounds abstract until you apply it to work. Maryse Meinen, a product development coach who blends agile thinking with stoic philosophy, traces the idea back to figures like Seneca, Epictetus, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who tried to rule the Roman Empire according to these principles. The philosophy was never meant for the monastery or the mountaintop. It was built for people living in the middle of society, making decisions under pressure.

For software teams, the consequence is direct. You spend enormous energy on outcomes you can only partly influence: clicks, customers, adoption, revenue. Stoicism asks you to move your attention to the one place where you have real leverage, which is how you decide and how you act.

Stop judging decisions by how they turned out

A good decision and a good outcome are two different things, and confusing them is one of the most common errors in product work. Maryse borrows the term “resulting” from Annie Duke’s book “Thinking in Bets” to name the trap.

Picture quitting your job to join a startup. If the startup is later sold and you earn a fortune, everyone calls it a brilliant decision. If it goes bankrupt within a year and you burn out, the same people call it a reckless one. The decision was identical in both cases. Only the outcome changed.

This matters because outcomes carry too much noise to be a fair measure. So much sits outside your control that even a sound decision can end badly, and a poor one can end well. If you judge yourself by results alone, you learn the wrong lessons and reward luck instead of judgment.

The stoic move is to rethink the value you place on outcomes. Focus instead on decision quality: the information you had, the reasoning you used, the conditions under which you chose. That shift is uncomfortable for agile practitioners who pride themselves on being outcome-focused, but it is the more honest measure.

Prepare for bad things, because they will happen

The stoics had a phrase for it, premeditatio malorum, the deliberate anticipation of what could go wrong. The point is not pessimism. The point is readiness.

Life is unfair, and bad things arrive without warning. Maryse uses the blunt example of walking out of a room and having a heart attack. No intention of it, but it could happen. Treating misfortune as outrageous bad luck wastes energy. Treating it as something that simply happens lets you prepare.

For product teams, the practical tool is scenario planning, and the stoic addition is to build negative scenarios alongside the hopeful ones. Testers already know this instinct. You do not only test the happy path. You ask what breaks, and you plan for the worse outcome, not just the ideal one.

There is a wedding-day version of the same idea. Plan an outdoor celebration in October in Munich, and rain is a real possibility. You cannot control the weather. You can decide in advance what happens if it turns. Skipping that preparation and hoping for sun is, in Maryse’s words, not so smart.

Decide with the 10-10-10 rule

Most decisions get made on the shortest possible horizon. The 10-10-10 rule, which Maryse also draws from Annie Duke, stretches that horizon without losing the present.

The rule asks you to weigh a choice across three timeframes:

The short frame still matters. If you are about to cross at a red light, the ten-second judgment is exactly the one you want. The problem is when the short frame is the only frame.

Take the peanut butter on your morning sandwich. Tomorrow it makes no difference. Across ten years, the fat might matter for your heart. The rule does not dictate the answer. It simply pulls the longer view close enough to factor into the choice.

This is the correction agile culture often needs. Twenty years of iterative work trained teams to think in sprints and reviews, to focus on what lands by Thursday. That focus is valuable, but it can crowd out the ten-month and ten-year questions entirely.

Practice temperance: you can run the experiment, but maybe don’t

Temperance means holding yourself back, and it is the value that keeps capability from turning into clutter. The stoic is not the person without emotions. The stoic feels the pull and chooses not to act on the first impulse.

In product work, the pull is to do every interesting experiment because you can. Maryse, a product owner in infrastructure, calls herself a lazy product owner as a joke that carries a real principle. Before running something, she asks three questions. Do we really need to? Do we really have to do this? And do we have to do it now?

The supermarket version is familiar. After a long day, hungry, you want the chocolate. Temperance plus 10-10-10 often talks you out of it. The same restraint applies to a backlog full of tempting possibilities. The default answer to a new experiment is no, unless there is a real reason for yes.

Build a decision log, not an outcome log

Reflection is the stoic discipline that ties the rest together. Much of what survives of stoic thought comes from the journal Marcus Aurelius kept, his “Meditations”, written for himself while campaigning in Germania, recording how he wanted to conduct himself.

The business version is a decision log. Record how you make decisions, not how they turn out. The distinction is the whole point, because logging outcomes pulls you straight back into resulting.

Capture the conditions of your good and bad choices. Note when you decide well and when you decide badly. You already know that shopping hungry after a long day ends with a full cart, so write down what good conditions for you actually look like: not rushed, not under time pressure, with enough information to make smaller bets.

There will always be decisions forced on you under pressure, the supermarket trip after the long day. That is where the logging pays off. The training kicks in, and somewhere in the back of your mind a voice says you know this feels good for ten minutes but probably not in the long run.

Now let’s stop talking about being a good man, on how to be a good man, and just be one. — Maryse Meinen, paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius

Turn inward, then trust your moral compass

The final move is to step back from the noise and consult your own judgment. With so much you could be doing, the harder skill is knowing when not to.

Stoic decision-making is not only mechanics. It runs on moral values: courage, justice, temperance. These can serve as a compass when the usual pressures, more customers, more clicks, more growth, push you toward choices you would not otherwise make. Most product people do not weigh decisions this way, and that is the gap worth closing.

Turning inward does not mean retreating from the world. The stoics insisted you stay part of society, not secluded from it. But sometimes you take a step back, quiet the externalities, and let your own moral compass decide. Be fully present for what you choose to do, or don’t do it at all.