Writing & Documentation

Writing as Thinking

Product people write constantly. PRDs. Specs. One-pagers. Strategy documents. Emails. Slack messages. Meeting notes. The written word is the primary medium through which product work gets done.

But writing isn't just communication. Writing is thinking made visible.

When you struggle to explain something clearly in writing, that struggle reveals fuzzy thinking. When your document rambles or contradicts itself, that reflects confusion in your own understanding. When readers misinterpret your intent, the fault usually lies with ambiguity you didn't notice.

The act of writing forces clarity. You can hold vague ideas in your head indefinitely. But the moment you try to write them down, you discover what you actually know and what remains unclear. Writing exposes the gaps.

Dan Koe, author of The Art of Focus and creator of the 2 Hour Writer course, captures this principle directly: "Clear writing stems from clear thinking." His broader philosophy positions writing as the meta-skill of the modern era, one that pairs with any other skill or interest. "Writing allows you to make a living from living," he argues. Whatever domain you work in, if you can write, you can share what you learn, influence how others think, and build on your own understanding.

Koe emphasizes another dimension: writing as a way to empty the mind and create clarity. When thoughts remain in your head, they swirl chaotically. When you write them down, you externalize them, freeing mental space and forcing structure. This is why he advocates for dedicated daily writing practice, not just for communication but for thinking itself.

This perspective matters for product work. Product management is fundamentally a thinking job. You're making sense of ambiguous situations, synthesizing competing inputs, and making decisions under uncertainty. Writing is how that thinking happens. The PRD isn't just a deliverable; it's a thinking tool. The strategy memo doesn't just communicate a decision; it's how you arrive at the decision.

This is why writing matters beyond mere communication. The Product Director who writes well thinks well. The discipline of putting thoughts into words sharpens those thoughts. The effort to make ideas clear to others makes them clear to yourself.

AI is transforming how product people write. Tools can generate first drafts, suggest improvements, and polish rough prose. But this transformation makes the thinking dimension of writing more important, not less. When anyone can produce fluent text, the quality of ideas becomes the differentiator.

This chapter explores writing as a core product skill: what product people write, how AI changes the writing process, and what endures regardless of tools.

What Product People Write

Product work generates an enormous variety of documents. Understanding the landscape helps you choose the right format for each purpose.

Requirements Documents

The Product Requirements Document, or PRD, is the classic product artifact. It describes what you're building, why it matters, who it's for, and how you'll know if it succeeds.

PRDs have evolved considerably. The heavyweight specifications of earlier eras, with their exhaustive detail and formal sign-offs, have given way to lighter documents that emphasize intent over prescription. Modern PRDs focus on problems and outcomes rather than solutions and features. They provide enough context for teams to make good decisions without dictating every detail.

A good PRD typically includes: the problem you're solving and why it matters now, the target users and their needs, success criteria and how you'll measure them, scope boundaries clarifying what's included and excluded, key constraints and dependencies, and open questions that need resolution.

The format matters less than the thinking. Whether you use a formal template or a simple narrative, the document should enable anyone reading it to understand what you're trying to accomplish and make intelligent decisions in pursuit of that goal.

Strategy Documents

Strategy documents articulate direction. They explain where you're headed, why that destination matters, and how you'll get there.

These range from brief one-pagers that capture a single strategic insight to comprehensive strategy memos that cover vision, positioning, competitive dynamics, and execution approach. The best strategy documents make choices explicit. They don't just describe possibilities; they commit to specific paths and explain why.

Strategy documents serve alignment purposes. They create shared understanding across teams about direction and priorities. They provide reference points for decisions: when questions arise, people can check whether options align with stated strategy.

Research and Analysis

Product work generates research that needs documentation. User research findings. Competitive analysis. Market assessments. Technical feasibility studies. Experiment results.

These documents capture knowledge so it can be shared and referenced. Good research documentation distinguishes observations from interpretations, data from conclusions. It makes methodology visible so readers can assess reliability. It highlights implications and recommended actions.

Communication Documents

Much product writing is purely communicative. Status updates. Launch announcements. Release notes. Internal newsletters. Executive summaries.

These documents inform and align. They translate complex product work into accessible summaries for different audiences. They keep stakeholders informed without requiring them to understand every detail.

Working Documents

Beyond formal deliverables, product people produce working documents that capture evolving thinking. Meeting notes. Brainstorming outputs. Decision logs. Project retrospectives.

These documents serve memory and coordination functions. They record what was discussed and decided so teams don't lose context. They enable asynchronous collaboration by creating shared artifacts that people can reference and build upon.

The Documentation Burden

Let's be honest: documentation has always been a burden.

Product managers spend enormous time writing. Surveys suggest 10 to 15 hours per week on documentation alone. That's time not spent with customers, not collaborating with engineers, not thinking strategically. The documentation burden often crowds out higher-value work.

Worse, much documentation goes unread. PRDs get filed and forgotten. Strategy documents gather dust. Meeting notes that took an hour to polish get skimmed for 30 seconds. The effort invested in documentation often exceeds the value extracted.

This creates a problematic dynamic. Writers resent spending time on documents nobody reads. Readers skim because documents are too long and detailed. Writers add more detail hoping to be comprehensive. Documents get longer. Reading rates decline further.

The solution isn't to stop writing. Documentation serves real purposes: alignment, memory, coordination, accountability. The solution is to write smarter: shorter documents, clearer prose, appropriate detail for the audience and purpose.

AI offers a path out of this trap. If AI can handle the mechanical aspects of documentation, humans can focus on the thinking that makes documentation valuable.

AI Transforms the Writing Process

AI is reshaping every stage of the writing process, from blank page to final polish.

Defeating the Blank Page

The blank page is writing's greatest obstacle. Starting is hard. The empty document intimidates. Perfectionism paralyzes.

AI eliminates this obstacle. Describe what you need and get a first draft in seconds. The draft won't be perfect. It might not even be good. But it's something on the page, something to react to, something to improve.

This shift from creation to curation changes the writing experience. Instead of struggling to generate content from nothing, you're editing and improving existing content. For many people, that's a much more comfortable mode of work.

The first draft isn't the goal. It's the starting point. You'll revise substantially, perhaps rewriting entirely. But you're never staring at emptiness.

Specialized PRD Tools

The market has developed specialized tools for product documentation. ChatPRD, built specifically for product managers, generates PRDs from high-level descriptions. ClickUp Brain integrates AI writing into project management workflows. Document360 and similar platforms embed AI into documentation systems.

These tools go beyond generic AI assistants. They understand product management conventions. They know what sections a PRD typically contains. They can suggest success metrics, identify missing elements, and format output appropriately.

The productivity gains are substantial. Teams report saving 6 to 9 hours per week on documentation. First drafts that took hours now take minutes. The mechanical work of structuring and formatting disappears.

From Documents to Conversations

AI enables a conversational approach to documentation. Instead of writing a complete PRD, you can have a dialogue with an AI assistant that progressively captures and structures your thinking.

"What problem are you solving?" "Who has this problem?" "What would success look like?" "What's the smallest version that would be valuable?"

Through this dialogue, a document emerges. The AI asks questions you might not have considered. It identifies gaps in your thinking. It structures the output while you focus on substance.

This conversational mode suits how many people think. Not everyone generates ideas best by writing linearly. Some people think better through dialogue, building ideas in response to questions and challenges.

Review and Improvement

Beyond generating drafts, AI excels at improving existing documents. Feed a rough draft to an AI and ask for feedback. It will identify unclear passages, suggest structural improvements, and flag logical gaps.

This creates a virtuous cycle. Write quickly without worrying about polish. Let AI identify issues. Address the substantive problems while letting AI handle prose refinement. The result is better documents in less time.

AI can also adapt documents for different audiences. Take a technical specification and ask for an executive summary. Transform a detailed PRD into a brief one-pager. Convert internal documentation into customer-facing content. The ability to rapidly reformat and reframe expands what's practical.

Automated Documentation

Some documentation can be largely automated. Release notes can be generated from commit messages and ticket descriptions. Meeting summaries can be produced from transcripts. Status updates can be compiled from project management tools.

Tools like FastDoc generate documentation directly from Jira activity. GitLab AI produces release notes from recent commits. Meeting transcription services like Otter or Collato turn conversations into structured notes.

This automation frees product people from mechanical documentation while ensuring important information gets captured. The meeting notes you never had time to write now write themselves. The release notes that always shipped late now generate automatically.

What AI Can't Do

Despite its capabilities, AI has real limitations for product writing.

It Can't Do Your Thinking

AI can generate fluent prose about anything. But fluency isn't insight. AI can describe a problem, but it can't understand your specific context, your users' nuanced needs, your organization's constraints. It can suggest success metrics, but it doesn't know which metrics actually matter for your situation.

The thinking remains yours. AI accelerates expression but doesn't substitute for understanding. A PRD generated entirely by AI, without substantive human input, will be generic at best and misleading at worst.

This is why writing as thinking matters more than ever. When AI handles the mechanical aspects of writing, the quality of underlying thought becomes the differentiator. Clear thinking produces good documents whether or not AI assists with drafting. Fuzzy thinking produces poor documents regardless of how polished the prose.

It Doesn't Know Your Context

AI lacks access to crucial context. It doesn't know your company's strategy, your team's history, your stakeholders' preferences. It doesn't understand the political dynamics that shape how documents will be received. It can't assess what level of detail is appropriate for a given audience.

You must provide this context or compensate for its absence. A generic PRD template won't fit your organization's needs. Boilerplate sections might be irrelevant. Crucial elements might be missing. Human judgment about context remains essential.

It Can Hallucinate

AI sometimes invents plausible-sounding content that isn't true. It might cite statistics that don't exist, describe features that weren't planned, or attribute positions to people who didn't hold them.

For product documentation, this is dangerous. A hallucinated requirement could send engineering down the wrong path. A fabricated metric could mislead stakeholders. Invented competitive information could drive bad decisions.

Human review remains essential. Every AI-generated document needs verification before it's shared. The efficiency gains from AI drafting are real, but they don't eliminate the need for careful human oversight.

It Produces Generic Content

AI trained on vast corpora tends toward the average. Its outputs reflect common patterns, conventional structures, typical phrasings. This produces competent but unremarkable writing.

For documentation that needs to stand out, to persuade, to inspire, AI-generated content often falls flat. It lacks the distinctive voice that makes writing memorable. It misses the specific details that make arguments compelling. It defaults to generalities when specifics would be more effective.

The most important documents often need human craft that AI can't replicate. Strategy memos that galvanize organizations. Product visions that inspire teams. Communications that navigate sensitive situations. For these, AI assists but doesn't replace human writing skill.

The Enduring Importance of Clarity

Regardless of tools, clarity remains the cardinal virtue of product writing.

Clear writing reflects clear thinking. If you can't explain something simply, you probably don't understand it well enough. The struggle to find clear expression is the struggle to achieve clear understanding.

Clarity requires effort. It's easy to write long, convoluted sentences that obscure meaning. It's hard to write short, direct sentences that illuminate it. As Blaise Pascal reportedly said, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

AI can help with clarity. It can simplify complex sentences, suggest clearer phrasings, and identify ambiguities. But you must know that clarity is the goal. You must recognize unclear writing when you see it. You must insist on revision until the writing is as clear as you can make it.

Principles of Clear Writing

Some principles apply regardless of what you're writing.

Lead with the point. Don't bury important information at the end. State your main message immediately, then provide supporting detail. Readers who skim (which is most readers) should get the essential message even if they read nothing else.

Use concrete language. Abstract concepts are hard to understand. Concrete examples make them tangible. Instead of "improve user experience," say "reduce checkout time from 3 minutes to 45 seconds." Specificity creates understanding.

Prefer short sentences. Long sentences are hard to follow. Break complex ideas into multiple sentences. Each sentence should carry one main thought.

Eliminate unnecessary words. Every word should earn its place. Cut filler phrases like "in order to" (just use "to") and "the fact that" (usually unnecessary). Tighten prose until it's as lean as possible.

Make structure visible. Use headings, bullet points, and formatting to help readers navigate. But don't over-format. Structure should clarify, not decorate.

Write for your audience. What do they already know? What do they need to know? What questions will they have? Adjust your content and style accordingly.

The Curse of Knowledge

The biggest obstacle to clear writing is the curse of knowledge. Once you understand something, you forget what it was like not to understand it. You use jargon without realizing others don't know it. You skip explanations that seem obvious to you but aren't obvious to readers.

Product people are particularly susceptible. You live with your product daily. You know its history, its technical details, its quirks. All of this knowledge is invisible to new readers but shapes how you write.

Fight the curse actively. Imagine readers who know nothing about your topic. Define terms. Provide context. Explain connections that seem obvious. What's clear to you is rarely as clear to others.

AI can help here too. Ask it to identify jargon, flag assumptions, and suggest explanations for concepts that might be unfamiliar. Use it as a proxy for the confused reader you're too expert to be.

Document Types in the AI Era

Let's revisit the major document types with AI acceleration in mind.

PRDs Reimagined

The PRD is evolving. In a world where AI can generate detailed specifications instantly, the human-authored portions must focus on what AI can't provide: genuine insight into the problem, specific understanding of users, and strategic context that shapes priorities.

A modern PRD might be shorter than its predecessors. AI can expand it on demand, generating user stories, acceptance criteria, or technical considerations as needed. The core human-authored document captures the essential thinking: what we're trying to accomplish and why it matters.

Some teams are moving toward problem briefs rather than requirements documents. The brief describes the problem, the users, and success criteria. AI assists in generating potential solutions. Engineers and designers contribute their expertise to solution development. The document becomes a starting point for collaboration rather than a specification to implement.

Living Documents

AI enables documents that evolve more readily. Instead of static PRDs that become outdated as understanding develops, documents can be continuously updated with AI assistance.

New research findings get incorporated. Changing priorities get reflected. Decision logs get integrated. The document remains current rather than becoming a historical artifact.

This requires different workflows. Version control becomes more important. Change tracking matters. The discipline of keeping documents current replaces the habit of creating documents once and forgetting them.

Documentation Systems

Beyond individual documents, organizations are building AI-powered documentation systems. These systems ingest raw inputs, including meeting transcripts, Slack conversations, email threads, and ticket descriptions, and produce structured documentation.

The vision is ambitious: product knowledge captured automatically, organized intelligently, and accessible through natural language queries. Instead of searching through documents, you ask questions and get answers synthesized from across your documentation.

We're early in this evolution. Current tools are promising but imperfect. But the direction is clear: documentation systems that require less human effort to maintain while providing more value to those who need information.

Building Writing Capability

As a Product Director, you're responsible for documentation culture across your organization.

Model Good Writing

Your writing sets the standard. If your documents are clear and concise, your teams will follow. If your communications are rambling and unclear, that becomes the norm.

Invest in your own writing quality. Get feedback on important documents. Take time to revise. When you distribute something you've written, make sure it represents the standard you want others to meet.

Establish Templates and Examples

Templates provide scaffolding. They ensure documents contain necessary elements. They save time by providing starting structures. They create consistency across teams.

But templates can also become constraints. Teams fill in sections mechanically without thinking about what's actually needed. Templates designed for one context get applied inappropriately elsewhere.

Balance standardization with flexibility. Provide templates as starting points, not rigid requirements. Show examples of good documents so people understand what quality looks like. Update templates as needs evolve.

Invest in AI Tools

Give your teams access to AI writing tools. The productivity gains are substantial. The reduction in documentation burden lets people focus on higher-value work.

But don't just provide tools. Provide training on using them effectively. Share prompts that produce good results. Establish norms for human review and verification. Help teams integrate AI into their workflows rather than treating it as a novelty.

Create Feedback Loops

Writing improves through feedback. Create opportunities for people to get constructive input on their writing. Document reviews shouldn't just catch errors; they should improve writing quality over time.

Peer review helps. Having someone else read a document before distribution catches issues the author missed. It also spreads knowledge about what good writing looks like.

AI-assisted review helps too. But human feedback remains valuable for developing judgment about what makes writing effective.

The Future of Product Writing

Looking ahead, several trends seem likely.

Documentation will become more automated. Routine documents will generate themselves from structured inputs. Human writing will focus on strategic and creative content that requires genuine insight.

Documents will become more conversational. Instead of static files, documentation will increasingly be accessed through question-and-answer interfaces. You'll ask what you need to know and get synthesized answers.

Writing skill will remain valuable. The ability to think clearly and express ideas effectively won't be automated away. If anything, it will become more distinctive as AI handles routine communication.

The Product Director who writes well will continue to have an advantage. Clear thinking made visible through clear writing influences decisions, aligns organizations, and moves work forward.

The Writing Imperative

Writing isn't just something product people do. It's central to how product work happens.

The PRD that clarifies what you're building. The strategy memo that aligns the organization. The research summary that shares user insights. The status update that keeps stakeholders informed. These documents shape outcomes. They determine whether teams understand what they're building and why. They influence whether stakeholders support or resist. They affect whether knowledge persists or evaporates.

AI makes writing easier. It removes the blank page problem, accelerates drafting, and assists with polish. These are genuine advances that reduce the documentation burden.

But AI doesn't make writing less important. If anything, it raises the stakes. When anyone can generate fluent prose, the quality of thinking becomes the differentiator. The Product Director who thinks clearly, who understands problems deeply, who articulates strategy compellingly will stand out from those who merely produce documents.

Write to think. Write to communicate. Write to influence. And use every tool available to do it better.