Streamlining Product Development with AI-Generated PRDs

The article discusses the author's experience with writing product requirement documents (PRDs) in Notion, which was time-consuming and led to decision fatigue. It introduces Specd, an AI-powered tool that generates concise PRDs with a focus on constraints, helping the author start coding faster.

Details

The author shares their experience of timing how long it took them to go from an idea to being ready to write code. They found that the process of writing a PRD in Notion, which involved tasks like finding a template, defining the problem statement, listing features, and adding acceptance criteria, took around 90 minutes. This led to decision fatigue, where the author was mentally exhausted before even starting to code. The article explains that the issue is not with Notion, but with the blank-canvas problem, where having infinite flexibility leads to making many small decisions. The author then discusses how constraints can actually direct creativity, using examples like Pomodoro timers and Twitter's character limit. They tried using ChatGPT to generate a PRD, but found that the AI tool produced a comprehensive document that was not useful for a solo developer. The article then introduces Specd, an AI-powered tool that generates PRDs with a hard limit of 5 features, forcing the author to prioritize. With Specd, the author's new workflow takes under 2 minutes, minimizing decision fatigue. The article concludes by emphasizing that most side projects fail not because of bad developers, but because they start building before finishing the thinking process, and that the 15 seconds of constraint imposed by Specd is more valuable than 90 minutes of freeform planning.