VP Product, Search @Google. Previously Nest, Meta, startups. Mom of 3 in SF. Currently: on mat leave + building for fun
San Francisco, CA
Joined December 2006
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I love this weird x community… was literally trying to do this on my frame today and ran out of time. Thank you Nathan!
Is the PRD dead?
I know it’s sacrilege to even say this.
For two decades, my deliverable as a PM was a PRD (product requirements doc). As an IC PM, I wrote hundreds of them, and as a manager, I read many more. Their goal was to lay out why we should build a product and what’s required for it to be successful with users.
They usually went out of date as soon as design or coding started, but they got everyone, especially on larger teams, on the same page.
When I started building consistently with AI, I wrote PRDs for my agents. I reviewed and iterated on them like I do with my team. One day I asked my agent if the PRDs were helpful.
The answer: “Not really, but if it helps you, great.”
So I stopped.
Now I start with an idea or a space and iterate with the agent through code and prototypes. Occasionally my conversations look like snippets of a PRD: “these are the 3 CUJs to get right,” or “latency needs to be <10 secs, otherwise we lose the kids.”
Building for yourself is of course different from building at scale, and there are things a prototype can’t answer. But I believe the traditional 10-page PRD with bullet points is dead. We were always translating words into the product each of us pictured in our heads. And it encouraged nitpicking: is requirement 7a a P1 or a P2?
What I’d want to now: a sharp 1–2 pager — a clear hypothesis and what success looks like, written by a real human (no slop, please) — plus a real prototype.
Children escalate… one minute you’re doing reasonable things like getting a Christmas tree… next minute you (the person who hate knick knacks) are arranging skeletons, ghosts, and a million plastic bats. 🦇 🎃 👻
Birthday party planning for 2 kids (my kids have birthdays 1 day apart) in the AI age:
- Family agent has a 5 min convo with me, asks me a bunch of questions
- Generates a list of todos divided between me and my husband
- Fills out forms for the bounce house and playground reservation
- Puts in a Costco order for me to approve
- Makes a cool website and hype video: familytools.roseyao.com/trea…
Sadly I still need a hands to do the rest (where's the robot butler?)
This week's build: Dragon world with God mode: games.roseyao.com/dragonmast…
So I made a fun physics game for my kids but I got tired of fulfilling feature requests. Can I have new worlds, more trees, baby foxes? So I build an agent into the world. Now you can interact with the world, ask it to build new things for you and as you do, a story emerges and the world keeps changing while you're gone.
What's interesting to me here is how my and my kids expectations are changing. 6 months ago,I would be ecstatic to add a feature on demand daily, but now particularly in the land of personal software, I don't want to be limited by time to code and push. I want an agent built into every piece of software working instantly on my feature requests and bug reports.
Wanted to play with blender and how far I can take 3D modeling like everyone else and made this "game" based on my actual living room.
games.roseyao.com/tidy-house…
The mess does come back based on random events ie kids back from school. So the game never ends. This one is for the parents who understand the never-ending chaos and joy of living with little kids.
Real use case for this would be furniture shopping/home decor. Tips to making the rendering better, dimensions/floorplans for your actual room if you have it and links to actual pieces of furniture to help it with details and texture as well as photos of the room from 3-4 different angles. Also had to tell the blender agent the quality bar was too low and it needed to look at the details of the photos more closely.
Remixing this for myself...my website also follows your cursor and reacts to the project you're interested in. This wasn't super useful but it was really fun.
Inspired by this episode with @pengzheng_ I redesigned clairevo.com this weekend to be a live feed of everything I'm personally using AI for
some fun things I built in 👇
Anyone else have too many ai agents right now doing the same job? Feel obligated to try all the new things…
This week's build(s): Family Helper and Eng Manager
Our night nurse/doula left Monday, and the kids started school and soccer season. Summer is officially over :(. Time to get everything out of my head — so I set up two helpers during naptime on Labor Day.
Iris runs the family — a shared whiteboard for me, Bryan, and our nanny: todos, meal prep steps, "pack a swim bag."
Milo runs my repos — open PRs, follow-ups, tech debt. He cleared my overdue backlog (23 resolved) and reviews hourly.
Biggest win: shared dashboard for the whole family published and updated daily. Also amazing what you can do during a naptime now...
