Continuous Discovery produced the role taxonomy and service model the rest of the program built on. Double-diamond, stakeholder interviews across four functions, journey + service mapping, RACI. The deliverable wasn't a report — it was a structure other people could design against.
Every Elanco knowledge handoff happens between these four actors, in this order. The whole project's job was to make the spaces between the lanes legible.
The tinted cells are where information loss was measurable: missing structured handoff, lost provenance, missing citations. Those three cells became the brief for everything that followed.
First pass: read everything, tag by speaker function. Resist the urge to theme prematurely. Every interview gets at least one quote that does not fit anywhere yet. Those unsorted quotes become the heaviest signal at synthesis.
Initial clustering attempted by topic (dosing, contraindications, market positioning). It didn't compress. Re-clustering by speaker function did — every function had its own version of the same complaint about handoff.
Measured handoff loss by tracing 12 customer-facing answers back to their regulatory source. 61% traced back to a regulatory or veterinary source. Only 8% cited it. The bottleneck wasn't access. It was structured transformation.
Service blueprint v1 looked like a process diagram and stakeholders ignored it. v2 reframed it as a contract between roles — what each function commits to producing, what shape it has, and what the next role can depend on. That's when execs paid attention.
Discovery's last deliverable wasn't the research write-up. It was a naming taxonomy — RegulatoryCard, VetBrief, CommercialThread, CustomerInquiry — that became the EDS information architecture. The design system was named by the research.
The output had to be something downstream designers and engineers could build against. A research write-up couldn't do that. A role taxonomy could.
The v1 process-diagram dead end cost three weeks. A 30-minute stakeholder review after the first cluster would have caught it.