Where discovery can make you overconfident

A process map can look complete because all the boxes connect, even when the decisions behind them haven't been tested.

Workshops on their own tend to produce the intended process. People simplify steps they know well and forget the files and tools they use without thinking. Walk through actual records and screens, and compare more than one completed case.

The loudest person in the room can end up treated as the owner of every stage. Management might understand the policy, operators know how it's really handled, and support staff deal with the corrections. Review each section with the role that does that part of the work.

Another common outcome is copying the existing product into a new technology stack. Screens, fields and permissions are easy to list, so the old constraints survive and the private work around them gets missed. And if you only design the successful path, retries, reversals, changed approvals and partial integration failures turn into expensive surprises during the build.

A discovery document can also grow into a catalogue of every possible variation without anyone making a call. Mark rules as confirmed, proposed, unresolved or out of scope, and give each unresolved item an owner and a review date.

Feature requests gathered before anyone understood the work need another pass. They're still evidence, but the suggested solution might be attached to a different problem than the one it names. Ask what event prompts the request and what the person can't currently see or do.

Leave uncertainty where people can see it. If two teams disagree about who owns something, or a rule has no source, mark the gap. A guessed transition drawn in to make the map look neat will look approved later.

Discovery sign-off has a date and a scope attached. Policies change, integrations behave differently under load, and proposed processes can turn out to be awkward once you test them. Keep the map tied to decisions and revisions so the team can update it without losing the reason a change was made.