The Handoff Chain Trace
Use this when a shipped feature surprised the people it was built for and you want to see exactly where the meaning changed. Worked in “Every Handoff Loses Information.”
The Handoff Chain Trace: one row per link, the user’s words at the top.
| Link, and who | What it became (their exact words or artifact) | What it kept, and what it dropped |
|---|---|---|
User: |
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Support: |
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Customer Success: |
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Product: |
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Design: |
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Engineering: |
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QA: |
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Internal UAT: |
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User: |
Fill in the middle column from the actual artifacts, never from memory, and skip or add links to match your feature’s real path. Then read the right-hand column top to bottom: the first row where the decision the user was trying to make disappears is where the next feature needs a real user in the room.