I’ve had basically the same mental template for writing PRDs since the mid-2010s, when my then boss tried to standardize specifications across his team.
Then Claude showed up.
A few months ago, I got into a pattern with my engineering lead that, in hindsight, was ridiculous.
I’d use Claude to help research and draft a PRD. I’d clean up the summary and send him something twice as long as what I’d normally write. My engineering lead would use Claude to summarize my too-long PRD. Then he’d use Claude to write a design document that was twice as long as my PRD. Then I’d use Claude to summarize his design.
We’d built a Claude-to-Claude compression algorithm with two humans supervising it. We stopped that.
When I write a spec, my job is to create clarity. When people only discuss requirements, or summarize them in a handful of slides, they tend to talk past each other. Everyone thinks they’re saying the same thing until the implementation shows up and all the ambiguities shine forth.
Claude is great at writing requirements. But it can’t write the “why,” and that’s the most important part of clarity. It buries my voice—the one that’s supposed to represent the customer—under pages of perfectly reasonable implementation details.
I’ve mentioned Claude at least eight times now.
I realized this morning I’ve been missing a real change GenAI could bring to product management.
I use Claude to write PRDs for humans.
My engineers use Claude to implement my specs.
That means I have a second audience now: Claude. It doesn’t need inspiration. It just needs context.
Tomorrow I’m trying a different PRD template. The first half is for humans, written by a human. The second half is for Claude, by Claude.
I’m not just trying to hand my engineers a well-defined problem. I want to see if I can hand their Claude a running start.
We’ll see how it goes!