before we build — closing
The last moment
Understanding degrades every time it crosses a boundary. Volume I established that. This volume has been about the work that happens before the first boundary is crossed — while the understanding still lives in the hands of the people who built it.
There have already been crossings. Someone watched Gal grade exams. They wrote it down. They mapped it into a journey. They extracted the meaning. They brought it to the trio. Each of those steps was a boundary — something was at risk of compression at every one. But all of those crossings happened inside the team that was there, close to the original.
The brief is the last artifact they control fully. After this, it travels without them. A developer who was not in the room reads it and decides how to implement. A QA engineer who was not in the trio reads the acceptance criteria and decides what to test. At every step, the understanding crosses another hand.
The brief does not prevent those crossings. Nothing does. What it does is give every person who makes one enough context to make it honestly.