AI Hypetrain - PRD/documentation is dead, everything is prototype?
Hi everyone,
Recently I can't help but notice all the posts by PM influencers on "PRDs/user stories/designs/anything documented is dead. You can now prototype everything". I was unbothered by this until recently. However, now our CTPO is also putting this in writing as "the future of our company".
In my org everyone is cranking out Prototypes left and right and everything seems possible with AI. But as soon as we talk about pushing something to production, all those prototypes are immediately forgotten.
In my view, prototypes are great for fast validation, they are there to learn about the customers. Those learnings eventually get translated into documentation that is required to create production ready products. If the prototype immediately is production ready, cool. I can believe it for simple features. But anything more complex?
In my experience, documentation such as PRDs can be great because they prove and showcase that someone has thought things through, worked through a proven framework, maybe wrote down assumptions that needed to be validated with data or experiments. They considered it against other options. Ideally, they represent deep thinking.
Of course, PRDs are not the goal in itself, and for smaller issues you would not want to inflate them and spend too much time on them. For many minor features and use cases just jumping to prototypes is amazing. But I get TIRED from the idea that anything can be solved through prototypes.
Perhaps someone can enlighten me what the people shouting "Prototypes are the future" mean with this? What am I missing?