The discourse map

FDD is being developed in public by several voices. None of them own it. All of them are right about the part of the elephant they're touching.

Jakob Nielsen / UX Tigers treats FDD as a new consulting category: a hybrid of ethnographic researcher, macro-systems service designer, and AI product strategist. He emphasizes the 40% trap, zero-based workflow design, and the symbiosis between FDD and FDE. His entry point: enterprise AI transformation.

David Hoang / Proof of Concept treats it as a squad model: three people, no PM, four-to-eight-week rotations, a startup within a company. He emphasizes AI tools collapsing the cost of exploration and the rotation model preventing calcification. His entry point: tech companies spinning up internal discovery teams.

Ron Bronson / 18F lens treats it as an organizational culture: generalist designers, ambiguity tolerance, working in the open, refusal to be downstream. He emphasizes hiring for multiple hats, adjacent skills surfacing demand, and the structural reality that design often has to justify itself more than other practices. His entry point: government and civic tech.

Roger Wong / Utsubo treats it as a commercial embedded practice: brand, product, and launch as one continuous engagement, the embed as the unit, vendor-neutral. His entry point: studios and startups embedding with customers.

Ron Bronson / Trajectory Management treats it as a steering layer underneath any embedded practice: five artifacts (Outcome Map, Workaround Log, Friction Analysis, Responsibility Matrix, Progress Protocol) that keep a program oriented toward its funded outcome regardless of organizational chaos. His entry point: any complex program that cannot be reorganized.

This site is a commons, not a doctrine. Pick the entry point that matches your context. The shared resources work across all of them.