Why We Stopped Writing PRDs (And What We Do Instead)

Product requirements documents are a relic.

There, I said it. After 15 years in product management—at companies ranging from scrappy startups to Fortune 500 enterprises—I’ve come to a conclusion that would have gotten me laughed out of any PM interview five years ago: the traditional PRD is dead, and we killed it on purpose.

Before you close this tab in disgust, hear me out. I’m not arguing against specifications. I’m not saying “just ship it and figure it out.” I’m saying that the form of how we specify products has fundamentally changed—and most teams haven’t caught up.

The PRD Was Built for a Different Era

The classic PRD emerged from waterfall development. When building a feature took 3-6 months, you needed to get everything right upfront. Changing course mid-stream was expensive. So we wrote 40-page documents specifying every user story, acceptance criteria, edge case, and technical constraint.

These documents served a real purpose: they were contracts between product and engineering. “Here’s exactly what we need. Build this, and only this. Don’t deviate.”

But that world doesn’t exist anymore.

Today, the cost of changing direction has collapsed. With modern tooling, we can ship a feature on Monday, get feedback on Tuesday, and ship a completely different approach on Wednesday. The iteration cycle that used to take months now takes hours.

When iteration is cheap, the PRD becomes a liability. You’re spending days writing a document that will be obsolete before the first line of code is committed.

What Actually Happens to PRDs

Let’s be honest about what happens to most PRDs in practice:

The PM spends a week writing a detailed spec. Engineering skims it. Design interprets it differently than intended. Development starts, and within three days, everyone realizes the spec missed something important. The PM updates the PRD, but nobody reads the updates. The document becomes a zombie—technically alive, functionally dead.

By launch, the shipped product bears little resemblance to the original spec. And that’s fine. That’s how it should be. The problem isn’t that teams deviate from specs—it’s that we pretend the specs were ever the source of truth.

We were writing 40-page documents that everyone agreed to ignore.

The Shift to Conversational Specifications

Six months ago, our team made a radical change. We stopped writing PRDs entirely. Instead, we moved to what I call “conversational specifications.”

Here’s how it works:

The PM has a conversation—with designers, engineers, and increasingly with AI agents—about what we’re trying to achieve. Not a meeting. A conversation. It might happen in Slack, in a shared doc, or face-to-face. The output isn’t a formal document. It’s shared understanding.

We capture decisions, not requirements. “We decided to prioritize mobile because 73% of our users are on phones” is more useful than “The system SHALL support responsive design across all breakpoints.” Decisions have context. Requirements are context-free assertions.

We build in public. Instead of specifying everything upfront, we build a rough version and share it immediately. Real feedback on real software beats theoretical feedback on abstract requirements every time.

AI Agents Changed Everything

The reason this works now—when it wouldn’t have worked five years ago—is AI.

At ProductOS, we’ve been working on systems where AI agents participate directly in the product development process. Not as code generators, but as collaborators who understand context and can translate high-level intent into working software.

When you can describe what you want in plain language and see a working prototype in minutes, the traditional spec becomes absurd. Why would you spend days writing detailed requirements when you can just… show what you mean?

This isn’t science fiction. Our Build platform already does this. Product managers describe features conversationally, AI agents generate implementations, and humans review and refine. The “spec” is the conversation itself, preserved as context for the AI to reference.

The New Specification Stack

So if we’re not writing PRDs, what are we actually producing?

1. Context documents. Short, evergreen documents that capture why we’re building something and what constraints we’re operating under. These rarely change. “Our target users are enterprise product teams with 10-50 people. They value speed over customization. They’re already using Figma and Linear.”

2. Decision logs. A running record of choices and their reasoning. Not requirements, just decisions. “We chose to use real-time sync instead of polling because latency matters for collaborative editing. Downside: more complex infrastructure. We accept this tradeoff.”

3. Working prototypes. The actual implementation becomes the spec. “Here’s what we built. Does this solve the problem?” The code is the truth. Everything else is commentary.

4. Conversation history. The back-and-forth between team members (human and AI) that led to the current state. This is searchable, quotable, and provides context that no static document ever could.

What We Lost (And It’s Okay)

I’m not going to pretend this approach has no downsides. There are things PRDs did well that we’ve had to replace.

Stakeholder alignment. PRDs gave executives something to sign off on. “Yes, I approve this spec.” Without them, we’ve had to find other ways to get buy-in. We do this through early prototypes and frequent demos. Showing beats telling.

Scope management. PRDs drew clear boundaries around what was in and out of scope. Now we manage scope through time-boxing. “We have two weeks. Whatever we can build and validate in two weeks, we ship.” The deadline becomes the scope, not the document.

Knowledge transfer. When a new team member joined, the PRD was their onboarding. Now we rely more on conversation history and working code. It’s messier, but it’s also more accurate.

When You Still Need Formal Specs

I’m not arguing that formal specifications should never exist. There are legitimate use cases:

Regulatory compliance. If you’re building medical devices or financial systems, you need documentation for auditors. Fine. Write it. But write it as documentation of what you built, not as a specification for what you plan to build.

External vendors. If you’re contracting development to an external team, you need a contract. The traditional PRD evolved for this exact use case. But if you’re working with internal teams or trusted partners, the contract overhead isn’t worth it.

Very large teams. When you have hundreds of engineers across dozens of teams, informal coordination breaks down. You need more structure. But most teams aren’t that big, and the ones that are should probably be smaller.

How to Make the Transition

If you’re convinced that traditional PRDs are holding your team back, here’s how to start moving away from them:

Start with one project. Don’t overhaul your entire process overnight. Pick a small feature and try building it without a formal spec. Document what works and what doesn’t.

Invest in tools that preserve context. The conversational approach only works if conversations are searchable and shareable. Linear, Notion, and Slack threads are your spec now. Treat them accordingly.

Build prototyping capabilities. If your team can’t quickly build rough versions of ideas, you’ll fall back to documents by default. Speed of prototyping determines whether conversational specs are viable.

Embrace discomfort. The first few weeks without PRDs will feel chaotic. That’s normal. You’re unlearning habits built over years. Give it time.

The Future Is Already Here

AI agents are going to accelerate this transition dramatically. When you can have a conversation with an AI system that understands your product context, generates working code, and iterates in real-time, the PRD becomes not just unnecessary but actively counterproductive.

The teams that figure this out first will have a massive advantage. They’ll ship faster, learn faster, and build better products—while their competitors are still arguing about acceptance criteria in 40-page documents nobody reads.

We’re building the tools to make this future accessible to every product team. If you want to see what AI-native product development looks like in practice, try ProductOS. We’re not just theorizing about the death of the PRD—we’re living it.

The document is dead. Long live the conversation.