Control what you can control - Maryse Meinen

In this episode, I talk with Maryse Meinen about stoic thinking for product development and life. We ask what happens if you stop judging success by outcomes and start judging by decision quality. Maryse shares tools you can use today: scenario planning, the 10 10 10 rule, and a simple decision journal. Prepare for failure, accept what you cannot control, and act with courage, justice, and temperance. This fits agile work and the mess we face in tech and society.

"The only things you can control are the things inside your mind." - Maryse Meinen

Maryse Meinen is a product development coach who uses Agile and Stoicism to make teams and organizations more resilient and sustainable. She espouses the philosophies of degrowth and stoicism, which advocate working more efficiently with fewer resources and valuing what is already there. Her motto is: Achieve more with less!

Highlights:

• 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.

📌 Testing is a people business, humanity as a superpower. That is my talk on October 7 at HUSTEF 2026 in Budapest: See programme and tickets