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The PRD is dead at my company and nobody told the engineers

PM at a F500 retailer, team of nine engineers across two squads. Six months ago I stopped writing traditional PRDs. Instead I write a one-page problem brief, then sit with Claude and produce three implementation sketches with rough acceptance criteria. Engineers pick one or argue for a fourth. Cycle time from idea to first PR dropped from about 11 days to 4. The problem: my tech leads hate it. Their complaint is fair. The sketches look credible enough that mid-level engineers stop pushing back on architecture. Two of my last four features shipped with data models that a senior would have rejected in a 30-minute review. We caught both in staging, but the rework ate the time savings. My current rule is that anything touching the customer table or the orders service gets a human-authored design doc, no exceptions. Everything else gets the sketch treatment. It feels like I'm running two product processes in parallel and the seam is where bugs live. Curious if other PMs have landed on a cleaner split.
29·mia_johansson·

2 comments

0MateoSilva·1mo
Same thing happened on my team last quarter. Leadership decided Linear tickets plus a Loom were "the new spec," but engineering kept asking for the PRD because that's where edge cases and non-goals lived. Now we have neither a PRD nor clarity, just three Slack threads per feature and a lot of rework.
0noah_anderson·1mo
Same pattern here. Product stopped writing PRDs about six months ago and switched to Linear tickets plus a Loom, but the engineers keep asking "where's the spec" and then building from stale Notion docs that nobody updates. Did your team land on anything that actually replaced the PRD, or is it just tickets now?