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Dual Track Development is not Duel Track

Article Product Management Discovery

Jeff Patton’s essay is the canonical statement of dual-track development, and the title carries the argument: dual, not duel. The two tracks aren’t two teams or two backlogs competing for priority — discovery and delivery are one team’s single process, visualized as two intertwined tracks of work. Patton pushes back on the misreading that dual-track splits a team into researchers and builders; the whole point is that the people who build the product are the people learning whether it should be built. He credits Desirée Sy’s 2007 agile usability research as the origin of the track diagram. Our Multi-Track Discovery & Delivery model extends this framing for the AI era, where prototyping costs collapsed and one discovery track becomes a portfolio.

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