Product Manager Fiction: Why Your PRDs Aren't the Source of Truth

Brian Sierakowski - Founder

A Product Operations professional recently introduced me to a phrase I can’t stop thinking about: “product manager fiction.”

PRDs, specs, initiative briefs — these are stories about a future world where the feature works exactly as planned. They’re forward-looking documents describing intent. And they’re almost always wrong by the time the code ships.

The Fiction Problem

Here’s what happens in most organizations:

  1. A PM writes a detailed spec describing how a feature should work
  2. Engineering starts building
  3. The team learns things — technical constraints, user feedback, shifting priorities
  4. The code evolves to reflect reality
  5. Nobody updates the original spec

A Director of Product at a workplace software company described their release process as “controlled chaos.” The week of launch, product is still iterating. The spec from three months ago? It’s a historical artifact, not a current description.

The underlying issue is a fundamental mismatch between how we document intent and how software actually gets built.

Why Specs Become Fiction

The problem isn’t that PMs are lazy about updating documents. It’s that updating documents provides almost no value in the moment.

When you’re in the middle of a sprint and you’ve learned that the original approach won’t work, your options are:

  1. Stop everything and update the PRD (which no one will read)
  2. Solve the actual problem and ship working code

Every rational person chooses option two. The PRD becomes fiction not through neglect but through entirely reasonable prioritization.

A VP of Product Marketing at an observability company put it bluntly: “There’s no relationship with what was actually put into a PR and documentation.” The spec exists in one world. The code exists in another. And the connection between them is a PM’s memory — which is already overloaded.

The Spec-Reality Gap

Here’s where it gets dangerous. Leadership still references those specs when making decisions. They assume the spec represents reality. They ask questions like “How far along are we on the Q3 initiative?” and expect the spec to be the answer.

Here’s the paradox: if the spec and code matched 100% it would actually be a bad sign — it would mean the team learned nothing during development — so the spec can never be an accurate measure of progress.

One Product Operations leader described it this way: if you expect specs and shipped code to match 100%, you probably have team dysfunction. Learning should change the plan. The code that shipped is your tether to reality. The spec captures what you believed when you wrote it.

What Actually Happened vs. What We Said Would Happen

The code tells a different story than the spec. Consider two teams that both shipped a Slack integration:

  • Team A built it for a CRM, giving sales reps faster visibility into lead activity
  • Team B built it for a project management tool, notifying teams about status changes

The code might look nearly identical — same Slack API endpoints, similar data structures. But the customer value differs entirely. The spec might have mentioned “Slack integration” in both cases, but the code combined with context reveals the actual intent.

This is why teams that try to measure progress against specs get frustrated. The spec says “build Slack integration.” The code says “give sales reps instant lead updates.” These are the same work but different stories.

The Source of Truth Problem

Most organizations have no single source of truth for what actually shipped and why. They have:

  • Specs and PRDs — forward-looking fiction
  • Jira tickets — task management without context
  • PR descriptions — technical, not customer-focused
  • Release notes — often written weeks later from memory
  • Team meetings — ephemeral, no record

A Head of Developer Relations at a startup told me their docs and tutorials “lag behind engineering velocity.” The team ships faster than anyone can document. The source of truth becomes whatever the most knowledgeable person remembers.

This is why so many organizations rely on meetings as their actual source of truth. If you want to know what shipped and why, you schedule a call with the PM. That’s not scalable, and it’s not searchable, but it’s often the only option.

Making Code the Record

The alternative is treating the code itself — the commits, the PRs, the diffs — as the authoritative record of what happened. Not what we planned to happen. What actually happened.

This requires a shift in thinking:

From: The spec defines the feature; code implements it To: Code defines the feature; specs are early hypotheses

When you make this shift, three things change:

  1. Progress tracking becomes about analyzing what shipped, not comparing against outdated specs
  2. Communication starts from reality and works outward, not from plans
  3. Documentation can come directly from what actually exists — no reliance on memory

The code doesn’t lie. It might be messy, it might have workarounds, but it represents real decisions made by people with real context. Those decisions are valuable data.

Living Documents That Actually Live

Some teams are experimenting with what one leader called “living documents” — artifacts that update automatically based on what’s actually happening, not what someone remembers to write down.

Imagine a strategy document that updates itself when meetings happen, when code ships, when the team makes decisions. Not a static artifact that becomes fiction the moment it’s written, but a dynamic record of reality.

This sounds futuristic, but the raw material already exists. Every PR contains context. Every commit tells a story. Every merge is a decision point. The question is whether you can extract that context and connect it to something meaningful.

The Path Forward

Product manager fiction isn’t going away. Teams will always write specs, and specs will always diverge from reality. The goal isn’t to kill specs — they serve a purpose in rallying teams around intent.

The goal is to stop treating fiction as fact.

This means:

  1. Accept that specs are hypotheses — early guesses that will evolve
  2. Build systems that capture what actually ships — the reality, regardless of the original plan
  3. Connect code-level changes to customer value after the fact — once you know what really happened
  4. Make the code searchable and meaningful to non-technical teams

The PM who wrote the spec three months ago had the best information available at the time. The engineer who shipped the code last week has better information now. Both are valuable. But only one is true.

If your team struggles to connect what you planned to what you shipped, let’s chat about how Changebot extracts reality from your codebase automatically.