Throughline Tacking: a meta-pattern for discovering the throughline of your product.
It can be hard to balance the messy reality of the world-as-it-exists and the world-as-we-think-it-ought-to-be.
It's easy to go to either one extreme.
Here's a meta-pattern for keeping both ends on track.
Like in sailing, you can sail into the headwind by tacking back and forth.
First, start with a messy-real-world thing that works.
Now, look at it and try to understand: why does it work?
Not "What do we want to work," but "actually, what parts resonate?"
Actual products evolve from feedback and adaptation continuously.
But if you wanted to tell a convincing narrative about why it ended up where it is, what would it be?
This is a process of retconning.
The retcon is in some ways fake (that's not why you built the product this way) but it is in a deeper sense real.
If the throughline points to a destination you want to go, great.
Now that you have documented the throughline, you can make the product more like the throughline.
Now, continue this process continuously.
By tacking back and forth you're sailing along the throughline.
This process allows your product to become more what it wants to be.
This is a process for discovering and extruding emergent fractal coherence in a product.
This process works for any emergent artifact you care about, not just products.
Team culture.
Works of art.
Organizational bylaws.