Where product context actually goes to die
It is not lost. It is filed somewhere with no path back to the decision it explains.
Teams describe context loss as forgetting. It is closer to misfiling. The reasoning almost always still exists somewhere; what is missing is the path from the decision back to the reason for it.
The four graves
- Synchronous conversation — the meeting where the real trade-off was argued, recorded but never revisited
- Threaded chat — a decision made in a reply, in a channel, with no ticket referencing it
- Superseded documents — v1 and v2 hold the reasoning; only v3 is read
- Departed colleagues — the constraint that lived only in someone's working memory
Why documentation discipline does not fix it
Every team that has lost context concludes it should write things down more carefully, and every team that tries this discovers the cost lands on the person with the least time. Discipline solutions fail for the same reason manual QA fails: they require the most effort exactly when the pressure is highest.
Retrieval beats discipline
The alternative is to stop trying to prevent the scattering and start being able to read across it. The artefacts already exist. What is missing is anything that treats a transcript, a ticket and a document revision as statements about the same product that can be compared.
Stop writing PRDs without understanding the product.
Anchor reads your interviews, tickets and docs first — then writes, citing every line.
