ChatPRD

people who like to write long planning documents have been super vindicated

TIME TO RETIRE THE CLASSIC PRD The PRD is a relic. Time to retire it. The word "PRD" brings to mind a 10-page Word doc or spreadsheet with a Background section, a Goals section, a Customers section, and 7 pages of feature descriptions. Half of it is throat-clearing. The other half is so vague that engineering and design end up guessing what to build anyway. Nobody reads it twice. Most of the time nobody reads it once. Replace it with the Product Spec. A Product Spec is a different kind of artifact, designed for the people who actually consume it (engineers, designers, AI agents) The Product Spec has four mandatory pieces: • The problem: who is hurting, what they are doing today, why now • The bet: a falsifiable hypothesis (if we ship X, then [specific user] will [observable change] within [time], measured by [metric]) • The success criteria: what concrete behaviors we will see when this is working • The evaluation: how we will measure it, what the kill / scale / graduate thresholds are The shift from PRD to Product Spec is structural. It is what Coach is designed to enable. In the PRD era, the bottleneck was getting alignment from a room of humans. Long docs and exhaustive sections were the price of that alignment. In the agent era, the bottleneck is giving an agent or an engineer a tight enough specification that it can ship without 12 follow-up questions, ideally using the goal loop in your agent of choice (h/t Peter Yang) A 10-page PRD fails that test. A 1-page Product Spec with clear acceptance criteria and evals passes it. Founders and product leaders: stop calling your docs PRDs. Stop writing them like PRDs. The artifact you need is a Product Spec with a falsifiable bet, a specific problem statement, concrete acceptance criteria, and a measurement plan.

I’ve seen this floating around, most people ick-ing at this as Claude derangement syndrome. But guess what! This CEO probably just wants to get great outcomes fast, and I’d bet he’s thrilled to hear something other than “it’s not a priority” or “let me revise this and we’ll come back next week” or “thanks for the input but we have experts on the team.” Maybe your team isn’t producing work up to their standards. Maybe your company is slumping along at single digit or negative growth and the board has said it’s up or out. Maybe he’s trying to drive up AI adoption. Maybe the CEO job sucks and AI makes it more fun. Maybe AI raises the floor and the ceiling on everything. I will say I’d rather a CEO who cares about driving up quality of marketing copy than one that’s checked out. I’d rather be lead by a Claude Boi than an exec team that forms a “AI innovation committee” and is just starting their limited 2 quarter trial of copilot. I’d rather just have the answer handy “yep, we did deep research on this via ChatGPT and figured out how to automate brand assets consistently thought nano banana, do you have any feedback?” SLOP ENGINES BEWARE for sure, but I generally think folks don’t have enough insight into how corporate anxieties and power dynamics make the exec job a lonely one, and I’m not surprised CEOs are reaching for tools that shorten feedback cycles, openly brainstorm, and produces work (not more meetings.) Look. Do I think there are better styles of leadership? For sure. Do I think that means some teams don’t need a major wake-up call? No. Ok have fun. Tell Claude hi.