e51 Discovery artifacts are vacation photos, and agents were never there

Teams build shared understanding and intuition through product discovery. Discovery artifacts are an imperfect representation of what was learned, but help the team remember what they did together. Since agents don’t participate in the work, those imperfect artifacts need to get better to help them move in the right direction. Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash ☕ Discovery artifacts are vacation photos, and agents were never there You’ve almost certainly been there before. A friend comes back from a holiday and excitedly shows a photo on their phone of a sunset or a city, talking with clear energy about their experience. The photo is nice, but doesn’t particularly stand out, and somehow their excitement doesn’t transmit to your mood. You were not there to feel it as they do. A few years ago I heard the “vacation photo metaphor” from Jeff Patton, and it made me realize why I often felt the same about discovery artifacts, like maps, decks or rationale documents. Artifacts, just like…