Whether physical or virtual (a lá FigJam, Mural, Miro, etc...), there is something about stickies that doesn't feel right.
The reason it doesn't feel right is it feels like half the equation for effective optics into projects. Not merely with new things but also with existing things.
Primarly, the aformentioned tools are geared towards a design thinking approach with the representation being a trie and called a "discovery tree". I will henceforth refer to the "discovery tree" as either a "trie" or "discovery trie".
Once a discovery trie is composed, all the stickies in the trie need to be manually entered into a project managment tool (i.e. Github Issues/Roadmap, Gitlab Issues, Jira, etc...).
So engineering teams now have to spend time translating the trie stickies into their product management software canon. That time is arguably better deployed to starting to deliver the outcomes discovered.
To give a visual, a discovery trie:
needs to be translated into project managment software:
I purposely didn't port the decision trie to the board, because I didn't see it worth the time for the example.
All the context of the trie is lost. Especially as things start to get done:
Green is done. Gray is abandoned. Blue is to do. Small purple sticky is person working on a part of the trie.
What is more problematic is that as work is done/assigned, it is up to the team to manually keep the two separate contexts in sync.
Even though the trie view is great at showing current context (i.e scope, decisions made, branches considered, etc...), it doesn't show or keep a history. Usually the project management tool of choice does, and does so fairly well. The trie context is mutable, likely to change, and the means to determining how it has evolved over time is non-existant witouth a lot of copy/paste and discipline. Which is more busy work. Which isn't worth the time.
It's almost as if there is a ripe opportunity to get into this space with a different enough product that marries the two approaches...