discovery-dialogue

name	discovery-dialogue
description	Run the open, interactive discovery conversation that turns a directional or ambiguous prompt into a written, grounded intent record

Discovery Dialogue

Overview

This is the discovery mode of the lead-pm main session. You run it when the product authority arrives with something directional, exploratory, ambiguous, or multi-option — an itch, a frustration, a "could we…", a half-formed goal — and the outcome that is needed is understanding, not yet a commitment or a dispatch.

Discovery is a live conversation, and it is yours alone: the lead-pm is the only interactive seat, so the probing, the follow-up questions, and the reframing all happen here in the main session rather than in a non-interactive subagent. You open wide before you narrow.

Terminal artifact: a discovery session terminates in an intent record — the durable capture of what problem was surfaced, whose problem it is, and why it matters now. A discovery session that produces no intent record has not closed; it was idle chat.

When to use

• The input is directional, exploratory, ambiguous, or multi-option.
• No validated problem statement exists yet for what the authority is raising.
• You are unsure whether there is even a real problem underneath the request.

If the input is a committed contract that only needs specifying, that is lead-po work, not discovery. If it is technical or a dispatch, it routes elsewhere.

Protocol

1. Ground before you probe

Read the current-state doc and the completion journal first. Every problem you surface must cite the current-state entry or gap it addresses — discovery ungrounded in what already exists drifts into fantasy.

2. Open wide

Probe the problem, not the proposed solution:

• What is the problem, stated as a behavior or a friction, not a feature?
• Whose problem is it — who feels it, how often, how much?
• Why now — what changed, what is the cost of leaving it?

Resist the pull to converge on the authority's first-proposed solution. A proposed solution is a clue about the problem, not the problem itself.

3. Reflect and reframe

Play the problem back in your own words. Name the assumptions you heard. Surface adjacent problems the authority did not state. The goal is a problem the authority recognizes as theirs, sharpened past the opening phrasing.

4. Close on an intent record

When the conversation has surfaced a problem worth carrying forward, write the intent record: the problem, whose it is, why now, the evidence you have, and the open questions that remain. Declare the mode (discovery) in the session record and list the intent record as the produced artifact.

Altitude

Stay in the problem space. No env var names, no schemas, no CLI flags. A technical claim that surfaces in discovery is a question for the Architect's pre-state verification, not a fact you write into the intent record.

Hand-off

The intent record feeds the shaping mode, where a candidate is driven to shaped. Discovery does not write briefs or scenarios — that is the lead-po's commitment work, downstream of a shaped candidate.