All articles on Documentation.
Someone asks you to commit to a plan. You ask what the requirements are. They tell you. Verbally. No document, no email, no written brief. Words in a meeting room that will evaporate the moment something goes wrong. You’re now expected to deliver against inputs that no one will remember the same way twice. This is how accountability gets manufactured from nothing and assigned to whoever builds first.
People don’t fail to document because they’re busy or undisciplined. They fail to document because institutional knowledge is leverage, and documentation surrenders it. This is the third time I’ve written about incentive structures hiding behind individual behavior. The pattern keeps showing up because organizations keep misdiagnosing it.
Most product teams I’ve worked with believe they have a strategy. They can talk about it in meetings, reference it in planning sessions, and nod along when leadership mentions it. But when I ask a simple question, “Can you show it to me?”, the room gets quiet. That silence tells me more about the state of a product organization than any roadmap ever could.
I regularly observe in product teams that product specifications are either never updated after v1 or don’t exist in the first place. The product backlog isn’t a spec, but rather a collection of intentions. But these intentions don’t have any formal foundation. There is something that changes everything: once you see user stories as product spec patches, you can begin managing your product properly.