The Methodology Gap: Why Modern Frameworks Know Themselves but Not Each Other

Modern product and design teams have more methodologies available than any previous generation of practitioners. Yet a specific class of decisions remains persistently difficult: those where the choice of method is itself the problem. This note introduces the concept of the Methodology Gap — the structural absence of a topology that shows where methods work, where they fail, and what lies in the territory they do not cover. We argue that this gap is not accidental but structural, and that addressing it requires not another method but a different kind of instrument: a map of the methodology landscape itself. We outline the structure of such a topology and introduce StratoAtlas, an experimental map of the methodology landscape built on empirical case analysis. First note in the StratoAtlas Research Notes series.