Discovery Is Messy: How Do We Keep Track of All That We Are Learning?

Teresa Torres argues that continuous discovery generates a lot of artifacts, and teams often waste effort by creating separate documents for doing, communicating, and archiving work. She recommends using one set of artifacts for all three purposes, such as the opportunity solution tree and story maps. During active work, iterations are expected; when communicating, share only the highlights and current thinking; when archiving, keep final versions and key decisions. This matters because it reduces overhead while keeping discovery work traceable and reusable for stakeholders and future decisions.

01Key takeaways

• Use one set of discovery artifacts to serve doing, communicating, and archiving rather than creating separate documents.
• Expect messy iterations while working, and let the structure stabilize over time as you learn.
• When communicating, share top-level opportunities and the currently active branch, not every explored path.
• Archive final versions of artifacts for chosen outcomes and solutions, plus key decisions, to avoid clutter.
• Keep a lightweight decision journal and delete raw interview notes and recordings periodically to limit storage and privacy risk.

02Key sections

Doing vs. communicating vs. archiving

Discovery artifacts serve three purposes: working as a team, communicating to stakeholders, and remembering past work. Teams often waste time making separate artifacts for each purpose.

Doing the work

Discovery is messy and iterative, so artifacts like opportunity solution trees evolve and then stabilize as the team learns. These iterations keep the trio aligned.

Communicating with stakeholders

Stakeholders want the current thinking and highlights, not every iteration or dead-end solution. Teams should share a filtered subset of existing artifacts rather than create new ones.

Archiving key decisions

Teams archive too much, which makes important material hard to find. Keep final versions of trees, story maps, and assumption tests for chosen paths, plus a history of key decisions.

Day-to-day practice

Teresa describes her own setup: a Miro board per outcome, interview snapshots in slides, a decision journal, and periodic cleanup of archived material.

03From the post

“As you start to adopt the continuous discovery habits, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by how much stuff you generate. What do I mean by “stuff”? Opportunity solution trees, experience maps, interview snapshots, interview notes and recordings, story maps, assumption maps, assumption test plans, and results. Inevitably, you might”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.