The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) is a geographically distributed scientific programme involving hundreds of scientists, systems engineers, software developers, operators, and stakeholders across multiple countries and organisations. Developing software at this scale presents not only technical challenges, but also challenges in building and maintaining a shared understanding of systems, priorities, risks, and responsibilities across diverse communities.

Over multiple Planning Increments (PIs), we found that conventional artefacts such as requirements documents, Jira tickets, planning boards, architectural diagrams, and status reports were often insufficient to communicate the relationships and dependencies inherent in a complex observatory software ecosystem. Different stakeholders frequently possessed different mental models of the same problem, leading to misalignment despite access to the same information.

These visual artefacts were applied throughout the software lifecycle -from onboarding new team members and communicating software architecture to Programme Increment planning, capacity allocation, dependency management, release coordination, subsystem interaction modelling, operational architecture, non-functional requirements, and clarifying roles and responsibilities. Each visual was created to simplify a specific communication challenge by making complex relationships easier to understand and discuss.

The work presented is not intended as an alternative to existing software engineering practices or tools, but rather as a complementary collaboration technique for large scientific software projects. As astronomy software ecosystems continue to grow in complexity and scale, visual thinking offers a lightweight yet effective way to help distributed communities answer a fundamental question:
Are we all looking at the same sky?