The Expensive Mistake of Confusing Work with Product

Why your team needs a clear line between work coordination and product knowledge

Most teams treat Jira or Trello tickets as the primary record of their product requirements. That’s wrong, and it’s expensive. Tickets are a work coordination tool, not a product definition system. When teams use them as documentation, they embed designs, requirements, and test cases inside transient records that disappear once the work is done. This leads to confusion, wasted effort, and a steady erosion of product knowledge.

Separate Product Documentation from Work Items

Before diving into the structure of products, it’s important to recognise a key principle: documenting the product is not the same as managing the work to build or change it. Most organisations mix these two things together. They muddy the waters by embedding the details of the product in the work tickets. Those tickets are often full breakdowns, including detailed descriptions, requirements, designs, and even acceptance test cases. Over time, this leads to a loss of intellectual knowledge, drowned in a sea of old, disconnected tickets.

You need a clean separation. One space for tracking short-term work. Another for maintaining the long-term understanding of the product itself. Without this, you’re building confusion and loosing your valuable intellectual property.

Every Product Is Made of Features

Every product is made up of features. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something you can touch, use, or experience. Every product is just a collection of features. Some of them are easy to see, like the handle on a kettle or the ability to track a parcel in a courier app. Others are buried deeper, like the insulation that keeps water hot or the automation that sends the delivery notification. But those features are sub-features and nested features

Once you understand this, you start to see something important. Features can contain other features. A product is essentially made of features, which are made of more features, all structured together. A phone camera includes low-light adjustment, image processing, and autofocus. A booking system includes search, selection, payment, and confirmation. This is not just interesting, it is foundational. It’s how products are structured.

This is important to understanding the taxonomy of products. The essence here is to see a product is made up of a hierarchy of features.

Product
├── Feature [grouping or area]
│   ├── Feature
│   └── Feature [external product or component]

The Real Problem: We Confuse Work with the Product

Most teams use tools like Jira, Trello, or Azure DevOps to manage the work of changing a product. These tools are designed to track tasks, bugs, enhancements, and features through a delivery cycle. The problem is, many teams use these tools as their only source of truth for the product itself.

That’s where it starts to break down. Because once a piece of work is done, the ticket is closed. It disappears. If the feature only exists in a ticket, then it gets lost. A new change gets a new ticket. Another change gets another ticket. Over time, you don’t have a product definition. You have a graveyard of old tickets.

Ask yourself this: could a new developer join your team and understand what your product is just by looking at Jira? Could they see what features exist, how they work, and how they’ve evolved over time? For many teams, the answer is no.

The Costs Stack Up Fast

This isn’t just about clarity. It has real cost implications. Think about how much money is wasted writing requirements that disappear into a work system. Take a look at any old business requirement document. It took weeks or months to write, involved multiple people, meetings, and reviews. And today? The product doesn’t match what’s in that document. Some parts are outdated, some still matter, but no one knows which is which.

As a leader, look at the cost to company:

• Cost-to-company for the people writing, reviewing, and managing the requirements

• Hours spent researching and discussing them

• Time wasted reading outdated documents trying to figure out what’s still true

• Delays caused by misunderstanding or outdated requirements

• Rework created when decisions are made without knowing past choices

All that money spent, and the outcome is confusion. That’s not just wasteful. It’s damaging.

The mistake is clear. We’ve been using the wrong tools for the wrong job. Managing work and describing the product are two different things.

Why This Happens

It’s easy to fall into this trap. When deadlines loom and teams are stretched, it feels efficient to drop everything into the ticket. But short-term convenience creates long-term pain. A ticket isn’t designed to carry the memory of your product. It’s there to track the work while it’s happening.

Still, not every team is the same. In some fast-changing environments, documentation can feel like overhead. In regulated industries, traceability might require work records to carry more detail. That’s fine, but even then, product knowledge should be captured in a stable, referenceable place. Use tickets to trace activity, but point to a permanent record. That’s the problem. We’ve been using temporary scaffolding as permanent documentation.

A metaphor example is architectural design and building. Builders use construction drawings to guide the build, but those drawings live separately from the daily work schedule. The plans are updated, versioned, and remain the source of truth. That’s what your product documentation should be: evergreen, structured, and maintained.

What Work Items Should Be

Work tickets have a job to do, but it’s a simple one. They are disposable placeholders used to coordinate short-lived tasks. Their purpose is to define what needs to be done, not to explain how the product works.

Tickets should contain just enough context to identify the work. A short title or sentence. A status like "to-do," "in progress," or "done." Some teams may also track who is doing what, or break things down into smaller activities to help coordinate and focus effort. That’s fine, as long as the information stays short, sharp, and focused on the work, not the product.

All detailed information, such as descriptions, designs, test cases, and decisions, should live in the product documentation. Tickets can link to that documentation, but should never try to replace it.

You’re free to structure your documentation in whatever way fits your context. The point is that it must exist, and it must be separate. Your documentation, test cases, and designs should not sit inside a ticket that disappears once the work is done.

A Better Practice: Permanent Product Knowledge, Disposable Work Tickets

This is a core design principle. Work tracking tools are for managing short-lived tasks. They help coordinate what needs to be done. That’s it. They are not product documentation.

Product documentation needs to live elsewhere. It needs to be continuous, structured, and treated as a living artefact. A single place that explains what the product is, how each feature works, and how it has changed over time. It may contain design and technical information that needs to be retained for knowledge sharing and future trouble shooting. See this as future proofing your knowledge. It is also a single source of truth as to what the product is.

Use a tool like Confluence or another structured wiki to build a clear, navigable product record. Here’s a simple example:

Product 
|- Feature
   |- Sub-feature
      |-Test Cases

Standardize how product features are documented:

• What it is

• Why it exists

• Linked test cases

• Design references

• Dependencies

• Change history or decisions

This becomes the source of product truth.

You don’t need a rigid format. It should suit your context, product, and needs. Start small and improve it using the Practiqual™ BEEEE cycle™. Be brutal in reducing low-value information, especially if it doesn’t need long-term retention. Pay attention to where teams get stuck or where information and understanding are unclear, especially when new people join.

This kind of structure allows new team members to onboard faster, helps existing staff avoid rework, and makes feature behaviour discoverable at any time.

You still use Jira or Trello to track the work, but understand its role. These tools are designed for short-lived coordination. They help manage who’s doing what, when, and whether it’s done. That’s it.

Product documentation, on the other hand, belongs in a platform built for long-lived product understanding, like Confluence or an equivalent. That’s where you maintain clarity on what features exist, how they behave, and what decisions shaped them.

Make the boundary clear. Document it. Communicate it. Tickets are ephemeral. Product knowledge is enduring.

Practiqual’s Take on Product Knowledge

Practiqual approaches this as a systemic challenge. It recognises that teams must distinguish between work tracking and knowledge preservation. Simple tickets give you traceability—who did what, when—but they shouldn’t be burdened with deep detail. Intellectual property, on the other hand, must be retained. If people move on, we still need that knowledge.

Practiqual supports this through structural separation. Each product or service is expected to maintain a documented feature catalogue, supported by version-controlled tools that allow product knowledge to evolve without being lost. That creates a single source of truth. One that increases transparency, enables shared understanding, and dramatically reduces time to learn. It’s a practical decision that balances lean delivery with long-term resilience.

This isn’t a process suggestion. It’s a structural fix.

Additional Suggestions

Here are some practical suggestions to make it stick:

1. Make Documentation Part of the Workflow
   Update documentation as part of your Definition of Done or Quality Standards. Include it in product reviews or release notes. Assign reviewers or owners to check for accuracy at each increment.

2. Establish Shared Ownership of Product Knowledge
   Every team member should be accountable and responsible for keeping product documentation accurate and current. Make this a team norm. Shared ownership ensures that updates happen naturally as part of the work—not just when someone is explicitly asked.

3. Audit and Purge Regularly
   Set a regular cadence (for example, quarterly) to review, archive, or update outdated documentation. Keep it clean. Your documents may be in a mess, and that’s okay. You may just need a few small efforts now and then to bring things into shape. Fix it iteratively and incrementally, but be disciplined and consistent. Over time, small improvements add up to a more usable and reliable product knowledge base.

4. Train Teams on the Why
   Help teams understand the cost of tribal knowledge and the benefits of having structured, accessible product documentation. Include it in onboarding and team education.

5. Adapt to Context
   In regulated or compliance-heavy domains, you may need to embed traceability into documentation practices. Don’t ignore these constraints—adapt your model accordingly. For example, on a Confluence page you could link the associated Jira tickets automatically.

6. Hire a Technical Writer

   In larger organizations, it may be beneficial hiring a technical writer to maintain a consistent standard across the documentation. The cost of establishing clear information pays for itself, because not having it means teams waste time reanalyzing, renegotiating, trawling thought reams of outdated knowledge Even worse making a wrong change and then having to repair it.

Summary

• Teams aren’t short on effort. They’re just spending it in the wrong place.

• Treating work tracking as product documentation causes insights to vanish when tickets close.

• This leads to duplication, delays, and lost understanding.

• The fix is not more documentation. It’s better documentation in the right place.

• Separate short-term work tracking from long-term product knowledge.

• Build documentation into the workflow:

  • Update regularly

  • Share ownership

  • Tidy it up over time

• Design for longevity, clarity, and traceability.

• Don't aim for perfect from day one. Start with the mindset that knowledge matters.

• This protects intellectual property, speeds up learning, and helps build products that last.

• Set up a regular inspection cadence to assess the effectiveness of work item tickets and product documentation. Use the BEEEE cycle to help do this.