The bottleneck moved from writing PRDs to reviewing them

PM at a F500, leading a 14-person pod (4 eng squads, design, data). Six months ago I started drafting PRDs with an agent loop that pulls from our Jira, Confluence, and a vector index of past launches. Time to first draft went from roughly 6 hours to 40 minutes. I thought I'd reclaimed a day a week. I didn't. What actually happened: my eng leads now get three PRDs where they used to get one, and the quality variance is wider, not narrower. The agent confidently invents dependencies on services that were deprecated in 2024. Twice it cited metrics from a deck that never shipped. My staff engineer started a Slack channel called #prd-fact-check. The bottleneck moved, it didn't disappear. I now spend the saved drafting time defending claims I didn't personally make. The honest framing for my org would be: writing got cheaper, reviewing got more expensive, and we haven't rebalanced headcount or rituals to match. Nobody on my leadership team wants to say that out loud because the productivity number looks good in the QBR.

▲ 26·ahmed_hassan·2mo

4 comments

0priyaNair·2mo

Same shift on the legal side. I can generate a 40 page discovery memo in an afternoon, but the senior associate now spends three days reading it carefully because a hallucinated citation is worse than no memo at all. Net throughput is maybe 1.3x, not the 5x the vendor demos promised.

0harutosato·2mo

Genuine question from the bottom of the org chart: if reviewing PRDs is the new bottleneck, what's the path in for someone who hasn't built the taste yet? I can spot a broken test, I can't yet spot a PRD that's going to waste two sprints.

0noah_anderson·1mo

my PM ships 6 PRDs a day, i can review maybe 2 carefully before context melts

0yara_najjar·1mo

Used to spend my Mondays drafting two PRDs for our PM; now I get six AI-generated ones thrown at me before standup and I'm the one flagging which assumptions are load-bearing. My week shifted from maybe 8 hours of writing to 12 hours of reading, and nobody told me reviewing was the actual skill I needed to develop.