Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
Primary material produced over the course of a working exchange, which keeps speech as it came out along with what was clarified, corrected, confirmed or rejected during that exchange.
Full definition
The word "source" ordinarily designates a document produced elsewhere, finished, read once. The session source differs from it on a single trait: it grows while you work, and it can answer back — you can ask it on the spot what you meant.
In the articles on this blog, it is what receives a spoken thought, before any formatting. It is oral, disordered, sometimes repetitive or incomplete, and that state is not a tolerated flaw: it is its function. It also keeps the trace of the exchange itself, not just the initial monologue.
Layer added by "Session source: what your documents don't capture" (2026-07-20). The term isn't limited to the long working discussion. It designates a channel, and that channel receives an entire session in which a Product Manager explains a customer, corrects a hypothesis and adds details just as readily as a remark dropped by a customer at the end of a call, a sentence overheard in a corridor, or a tension you are only beginning to name. Its function is to receive a thought below the threshold that would justify a document, and its value is never observed on an isolated deposit: it comes from accumulation. Three conditions make it usable — a goal and a focus, without which it becomes a catch-all; a maintained separation between the primary material it keeps and the notes that formalize what deserves reuse; an ingestion able to accrete repetition rather than duplicate or deduplicate it. It therefore belongs to a logic of maturation more than of archiving.
Usage in the field
Used to designate the landing point of a capture, and to distinguish what is faithful to the moment from what is formatted for a reader.
Also used, at the scale of a product team, to name the third family of material in a workspace — the one no tool emits, alongside documentary curation and industrialized user research.
Synonyms and variants
"raw material", "primary material" when the emphasis falls on the place in the chain rather than on the mode of production.
Not to be confused with
- draft — the first state of a text meant for publication, already organized and already interpreted. The session source is what the draft rests on, and it outlives it.
- note — what you have understood, reformulated and made self-standing. The source keeps what was said, the note keeps what was drawn from it.
- transcription — a written rendering of speech, with no link to a workspace or an exchange. A transcription can become a session source; it is not one by nature.
- interview transcript — a complete and immutable rendering of a meeting or an interview, filed as is. It is closed at the moment it is produced, where a session source grows.
- meeting notes — minutes attached to the scope of the meeting: a project, a feature, a customer, a decision. They can feed a context without thereby becoming a session source.
- conversation history — the complete sequence of messages in an exchange with an assistant, kept by the tool. A session source retains what was deliberately filed, not what happened to occur.
- documentary base — the set of references and traces kept so they can be found again. It keeps what is established; the session source keeps what is in the process of being formulated around it.
Examples
An article idea spoken in the street, added directly to the right working set, then completed in the evening with the clarifications made while talking it through: together they form a single session source.
Ambiguities / debates
The status of corrections made during the exchange isn't settled: they belong to the material, but they are already an interpretation of what was said.