Jul 9, 2026Research
What 40 sticky notes taught me about scope
Affinity mapping surfaced three real problems hiding behind eleven feature requests. Clustering first, naming second — never the reverse.
Eleven feature requests arrived from four teams in one quarter. Building any of them would have been faster than understanding them, which is exactly the trap.
We wrote every request as an observed behaviour on its own note, then clustered silently before anyone was allowed to name a group. Naming early is how a workshop quietly ratifies the loudest opinion in the room.
Three clusters emerged, and two of them were the same underlying problem seen from opposite ends of the funnel. We shipped one change instead of eleven, and the requests stopped arriving.
