This post is excerpted from my newsletter, pamplemousse.

I recently started a new project at work that I’m really pumped for. Partly because it’s a large, substantive project, an opportunity for a foundational reframing of our product. But a big part of my excitement is more selfish, because this is an idea that I’ve been hovering around for a little while now. It’s something we’ve touched on previously, that we’ve talked about, prototyped, and even built towards tangentially — but haven’t addressed a truly foundational, big picture way.

When I’ve explained this project to my colleagues, there’s a pretty consistent response across the board: “Oh. It’s just like X.” Or: “Oh, so we’ve gone back to X.” Or: “So we’re doing X all over again.”

And this is a natural reaction. In order to make sense of things, we relate new ideas to ones we’re already familiar with, trying to fit them into existing mental models so we can better understand.

We’re all familiar with the assertion, “history repeats itself.” It can definitely feel that way sometimes — when you’re at an organization for a long enough period of time, patterns will inevitably start to emerge. And there will be some repetition in those patterns. But when it comes building products, it’s an oversimplification to say that history simply repeats itself, implying we’re doing the same thing over and over again.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that rings of history overlap, each successive one spiraling outwards, covering a bit more of some new territory with every circle.

Product development is a messy, iterative, multi-disciplinary process. It often seems like the same ideas continue to repeat themselves, masked in thinly veiled disguises. They appear with the familiarity of an old acquaintance, making you feel like, “hey — haven’t I seen you before?”

But despite any repetition in ideas or familiarity, I don’t think they will ever turn out to be the exact same ideas. There could be similar elements for sure, or they might be addressing the same underlying problem. But with time comes context. It’s not merely repeating history.

Every time you come back on a repeated notion, you are not the same. You have more context. You’ve had opportunities to learn, experiences to shape your understanding. You’ve gained new knowledge. This effect is multiplied at the organizational level.

If product ideas previously pursued didn’t turn out to be successful, that alone does not guarantee any future failure. Nor is it a solid rationale for why a similar idea shouldn’t be pursued going forward. There are so many variables, and in the end, a lot comes down to timing. Take this project I’m working on now. It’s something I had initially conceived of a year and a half ago. But our system was much simpler back then, so the idea was inherently more narrow in scope. Not to mention I hadn’t a clue about how to ship product — I was just an engineer with an idea for hack week.

Now that we’re building it for real, we have an array of new information, knowledge, and experience at our disposal. (Also in the last 1.5 years, I’ve actually shipped some product! So that helps.) Our understanding of the underlying problems has also evolved — we’re viewing an old, familiar idea through a new lens, which illuminates a fresh

So despite the all-too-human tendency to dismiss a repeated idea as a shadow from the past we should avoid — coming back around on these previously explored concepts is not a bad thing.

We’re not just running around in circles.

It’s all just a part of the process.