Artifact Safari
Collecting the real decks, docs, and dashboards teams use
At Dotwork, we sometimes imagine ourselves to be anthropologists. After signing an NDA with a prospect or customer, we politely start asking to see documents, spreadsheets, dashboards, notes, Slacks, wiki pages, slides—anything we can get our hands on. We ask to see examples of “artifacts” to better understand how they can be easier to produce, improved with better insights, and easier to access as context for future decisions.
Real-world artifacts are gold because a company can talk as much as it wants about how they wish things worked, but artifacts in conjunction with rituals are really where the real operating system manifests. They are the foundation for how people interact.
Artifacts also reveal how information from different systems is stitched together in practice. A single slide might pull together data from 10 or more systems, tools, and ad hoc sources. Artifacts often act as inputs into key rituals as pre-reads, as show-and-tell items during the meeting, and as a way to capture action items afterward.
A key principle here is that artifacts are not judged.
We are not looking for the “official” template or the “right” format. We want the things people actually use. Sometimes they are beautifully structured. Sometimes they are hacked together the night before a meeting. Sometimes they contradict other artifacts. All of that is a useful signal.
Artifact Catalog Questions
| Question | What You Capture | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 1. What is the artifact? | Name, type, and a short description. | "QBR Deck – a 12-slide business review prepared monthly." |
| 2. Who creates it? | The role or team responsible for producing it. | "Product Ops drafts it, PMs update metrics." |
| 3. Who consumes it? | Decision makers, contributors, reviewers. | "VP Product, CTO, Finance Partner." |
| 4. When is it used? | The ritual, cadence, or trigger. | "Used monthly in the leadership review." |
| 5. What decisions depend on it? | What gets approved, aligned, or prioritized. | "Prioritization of next month's initiatives." |
| 6. What information does it combine? | Inputs, data sources, systems it pulls from. | "Mix of Jira exports, Looker charts, CRM snapshots, customer quotes." |
| 7. Where does it live today? | Where people go to find it. | "A Google Drive folder labeled 'QBR → Month'." |
| 8. How stable or repeatable is it? | Is it a template, reinvented each time, or inconsistent? | "New deck created from scratch every month. No standard template." |
| 9. What pain points exist? | Prep burden, duplication, conflicting data, manual steps. | "Takes 6 hours to build. Data often out of sync with BI dashboards." |
| 10. How could Dotwork help? | Opportunities to reduce prep, connect data, link systems. | "Auto-pull KPIs, link initiatives, reduce manual slides, version it over time." |
Example: Rolling Roadmap
A Rolling Roadmap is a blended near-term and medium-term planning artifact. The first 90 days are highly specific, covering the work that is already shaped, staffed, and well-understood. The following 90 days are directional and thematic, giving stakeholders a sense of what is likely coming without overcommitting to sequencing or scope.
Created by: Product Managers with input from Engineering and Design
Consumed by: Cross-functional partners, leadership, and adjacent teams
Used in: Monthly planning reviews, roadshows, and dependency alignment check-ins
Pain points: Often rebuilt from scratch each cycle, heavy copy-paste from multiple sources, unclear ownership of next-90 updates
Follow-Up: Anchor Artifacts (Horizon + Cadence)
As you review your artifacts, a useful next step is to clarify how each one behaves over time. Two simple questions reveal most of the hidden friction in an operating system:
- What horizon does this artifact represent? (Next 2 weeks, next 30 days, next quarter, next year, multi-year, etc.)
- How often is it meant to be updated? (Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, ad hoc, event-triggered.)
Teams often treat artifacts with short horizons as if they should be stable for months, or expect long-horizon artifacts to update every week. These mismatches create confusion, rework, stale context, and “is this final or not?” frustration.
| Item | What to Capture | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Artifact Name | The real name people use | "Rolling Roadmap" |
| Intended Horizon | How far ahead it looks | "Next 90 days + directional next 90" |
| Update Cadence | How often it should refresh | "Monthly" |
| Actual Behavior | What really happens | "Updated weekly due to leadership asks" |
| Misalignment | Where friction occurs | "Teams treat directional parts as commitments" |
| Dotwork Opportunity | How Dotwork can help | "Versioning, confidence ranges, auto-pulling updates" |
You're Done When
- You've collected real artifacts used across cycles and rituals.
- You've documented who creates them, who consumes them, and what decisions depend on them.
- You've described where each artifact lives and what information it combines.
- You've captured pain points and inconsistencies.
- You've mapped 3–5 anchor artifacts with their horizons and cadences.