This is a fantastic piece, Chris!

In my last role before retiring, as a Senior UX designer with a public media organization, I worked with two sets of developers and two teams of product managers and owners. For the first year or so, I too quickly moved to wireframes for updates and additions to two fairly "mature" websites. I also put together overly detailed slide decks of usability testing results. The wireframes were too much detail for developers to "kick the tires" on user flows, error states, and decision points. The decks were too much to read.

Then I decided to start with very simple user flows and branches, and simple boxes showing the logic of proposed interactions. SO MUCH more effective in generating productive discussions on how things would work before investing time in mocking up wireframes. Developers felt included at a stage where they could bring up issues or brainstorm solutions before a lot of visual design time was wasted.

I focused the decks on the decision points that the product owner needed to make: Here's the question posed, here's where the issue is, these are the possible solutions and a metric on how difficult it might be to implement. SO MUCH FASTER to get buy-in and prioritize changes. They could read the details if they wanted to, but could instantly see where decisions needed to be made.