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.
