Andrew Ambrosino: prediction

Transcript context

…Here's what we're going to build, here's the feature, here's the strategies, PRD. Today, what you're describing, which makes all the sense, is people just create a prototype. And what you're saying is people across the company have kind of similar ideas. And now instead of a doc, they create their little prototype. And that leads to kind of 90 different things people can look at and maybe pick here's a direction we want to go down. Is that the idea? Yeah. There's a lot of this. And it's not just happening here. You've seen many product leaders say PRDs are dead and prototypes are in. And I actually don't believe this at all. I think that one of the interesting things that is happening right now is that because implementation has gotten so cheap across every medium, it's very tempting to jump straight to a prototype. Especially if you're not an engineer. Especially if you've never been able to write code or never been interested or never had the time, it's really tempting to say like, "PRDs are dead. Let me just show you what I mean." What I've also noticed though is that for engineers, it's really tempting to write a lot of documents, a lot of documents that are not worth reading. This is no shade on people writing documents. It's that if implementation is abundant, then it's really important to pick the right format for the point you're trying to make. If that point is product clarity around a vague area, then it might actually be a document. If what you're trying to do is get something in people's hands to try out and to stress test an interaction pattern, it's a prototype. But I think this is kind of the funny thing now, which is that it's really important to pick the medium. There's this term that a podcast guest shared that I think about when you say this, which is it's called the primal mark. When a designer or a painter or an artist just creates the first mark on a painting or a piece of art, that mark is what you start to respond to. And so everything kind of trickles down from that first mark you make. And what I'm hearing you saying is sometimes the prototype is the wrong first thing to do because then you're just responding to this prototype versus a different idea versus a bigger idea. So I love hearing this. So everyone's just like, "Okay, forget it. No more writing, no more docs, no more PRDs." You're saying, "They're actually still useful for specific use cases."…

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