Main idea

A method document that presents itself as complete is lying, because no method is complete at the moment it is written. The method document of a product description project therefore carries an explicit section of unsettled questions: how far to push rigour of format, how to attach an old piece of data to the right state of an object rethought since, who reviews a card and against what criteria before it enters the reference model, how often to refresh the starting point.

Those lines are not excuses. They are questions that have been asked, and are therefore workable, and the section shrinks as they get settled. A document without that section has no fewer holes: it has the same ones, unwritten, and every reader rediscovers them by walking into them.

The same mechanism applies to the negative choices, written alongside: what was decided against — no reconstruction of the product's history, scope closed on data exports, no scholarly tooling until some use calls for it.

Why it matters

This changes the status of a method: from a prescriptive text you either apply or reject, it becomes a work in progress whose maturity you can see. A reader knows straight away where they will have to decide for themselves.

And it supplies the work plan for the next round: the list of open questions is the agenda of the next version.

Nuances and limits

The section can serve as a refuge: housing a question there exempts you from settling it, and a list that doesn't shrink signals that the decision has been replaced by its inventory.

Nor does it replace the discipline of writing down what is settled: a method whose certainties remain implicit isn't made honest by the admission of its uncertainties.

Open questions

• At what point does a question left open become a default choice that nobody will reopen?