Past Decisions Live in Someone's Head, Nowhere Else
Product and engineering teams are losing critical context around past decisions, leading to repeated discussions, wasted time, and a lack of shared understanding. This manifests as teams re-litigating settled issues, difficulty justifying decisions, and a reliance on fragmented information sources. A better system for capturing and accessing decision rationale is needed.
SOURCES (60)
“I am curious your workflow, is staging part of your linear pipeline or is it a side thing? Like we have dev -> test -> staging -> prod. In every job I've had this has been the way, but it sounds like for you staging…”
“The biggest thing for me is that its a good place for engineers to go "I'm blocked here. If this is not fixed by tomorrow, this is will slip." Instead of an engineer working on a problem for weeks and then not delivering and no one knowing why.”
I challenge any documentation, process, or process steps that don’t have a clear “why”. Sign offs are critical, especially for trouble project or stakeholders who are a pain in the a**. But…
“I think the problem lies in the inability to see what people are doing and not the scheduling issue. You have delegated the tasks, but all the decisions you made yourself in your mind. Just write down the 2-3 decisions which are really important for each position, so your associates could see them as well. That way, you will be able to evaluate their work instead of hovering over their shoulder.”
“Having good process is important. Having consistent process is more important. Having good, consistent process, with buy in from all stakeholders is key. Learning from mistakes and improving process is normal. If the new process isn't followed, then the risks still occur. Build the new process into requirements, teach about why its important. That is the hard part of post mortem follow up.”
“I present the scope from the SOW and a page of high level assumptions. I hit hard on readiness and include a change management slide to set expectations. Reiterating the signed scope should be enough.”
“I’m curious what this process actually looks like on teams running LLMs in production. Say a new model comes out and looks better or cheaper enough to be interesting. What happens between “maybe we should try this” and actually putting it in production? I’m less interested in benchmark numbers and more in the messy part in between. What usually ends up taking the most time or causing the most hesitation? Also curious whether teams have a fairly repeatable process for this by now, or if every mod”
“There we are and recognize the folks that automatically wants to close gaps to either build, maintain or advance a system. These folks brings the frame automatically.”
“Both companies I've been at in the past 3-4 years have fought about end user validation, who does it, how do they know what's correct, then mix in deadlines and suddenly the finger pointing begins. I've seen this story before, whenever there's a conflict like this surrounding a handoff it eventually becomes the developers/team responsibility. I'm sure AI will be the answer and likely speed it up but do you agree about the pattern I'm talking about? submitted by  ”
“The line I'd draw: keep the sensing distributed, keep the ordered list with one owner. Engineers spotting their own feature break for a real user is strictly better than a PM relaying it, don't undo that. What can't be shared is the sequencing and the refusals, because those only work if one person carries the whole context and can say no consistently over a quarter. One blind spot worth watching: in-app feedback and session flags only surface what exists and breaks. In deep-domain p”
“‘No capacity’ becomes a dead end when the tradeoffs are not visible. A shared view of dependencies, scope, technical risk, and the smallest releasable slice gives Product and Engineering more options than arguing over a single date. The decision process improves when constraints are treated as inputs to prioritization rather than a stop sign.”
“Our scheduling gets judged on machine utilisation. High number good, low number bad, idle time gets questioned in the meeting. Meanwhile the queues in front of those same machines keep growing and lead times keep slipping, and I'm fairly convinced the two are connected. Past a certain load every extra point of utilisation seems to buy a small amount of output and a lot of waiting. Problem is "we should run the machine less" sounds like nonsense out loud. Nobody wants to hear that i”
“A roadmap shouldn’t be measuring things in days, quarters maybe if you can’t convince people that roadmaps should be time based. What you have is a sprint/delivery plan. You still shouldn’t be counting days until you have a well defined solution you can accurately size. And then you exercise caution on how much you expose these estimates to stakeholders/execs - precisely because you get held to these initial estimates. Eg you can count days for your own rough estimates - then add a bunch of cont”
“the context carrying over is the key piece tbh. without that its just a glorified "open in new tab" button. the fact that it re-suggested for a different reason the second time shows theres actually some state awareness happening”
“Have you tried using a Claude engine acting as a PM? That's a good way for the teams to make progress. The human PM sets the north star, writes the big PRDs/spec docs, and controls big decision gates. Claude PM handles most of the details.”
“It sounds like your engineers weren't touching discovery either. It sounds like they were getting good at knowing what needs to be fixed and learning where to optimize. But do they have the business and market context and intelligence to figure out what your business needs? Should they be spending their time on that? Besides prioritizing, that's a big value of a PM, and I'd argue engineers shouldn't be spending their time on it if you can help it.”
“Good questions, and the honest answer is that it's less rigorous than it should be. On thresholds: there's no tuned number. Our engineer wrote heuristics for what "something went wrong" looks like. We haven't run evals on the categorization. We look at it, notice when it's off, and then adjust. Fine at our size, clearly not at 10x. Your last question — no one person was maintaining a decision log. We decided in those weekly sessions and it lived in Slack channels. Clear”
“Yeah, they are different jobs in a real way. Businesses customers do not like changes and they rely on the customer success and product teams to inform them before the changes come. Anything that disrupts either their usage patters, or the sales cycle is disruptive. This is where engineers need to think more like a PM who is the internal voice of the customer.”
“I have inherited several project schedules that looked extremely professional. Hundreds of activities, clean Gantt charts, progress percentages, color coding, dashboards, weekly updates. Then one activity moved by five days and the whole thing fell apart. Successor dates had to be adjusted manually. The project finish did not move consistently. The critical path could not really be explained. Baseline, actual and forecast dates had gradually been mixed together. That is when I started making a d”
“I’ll try to bring the perspective of an engineer who’s been on a team that was swamped and they always stayed closed to product. The first thing to be aware of is that they are fully swamped having another PM bring another priority is going to be received badly. It could be the case they are not good but unless you have data and can judge it I would asume they are competent and have too many conflicting priorities. Try to work out on what they are working on. Where are the other priorities comin”
“One thing missing here: on deep-domain, business-critical products, "this will take months" is sometimes just true. Data model changes, migrations and anything touching existing customer configuration don't slice down the way a greenfield feature does. If I treat every long estimate as bad scoping, I burn the credibility I need for the cases where it really is bad scoping. What helped me was moving the conversation earlier. I bring engineering into discovery while options are still”
“In healthy organization it works in the way that you prioritize tasks for developers and they do development. If you hear “it takes 2 months” - ask them to give you options what can be done to have a PoC in a week/days. If doesn’t work - vibecode it by yourself, then show to you manager, then CPO. eventually it will make pressure and it will raise questions about their competence and why you with AI can do more and faster.”
“It’s mental to me that people work in companies where the division between eng and product works like this. The idea of eng having ‘no control’ over the roadmap is crazy to me.”
“How do you factor maintenance and tech debt reduction into that? Have the eng team subtract that from their capacity estimate or have the PMs manage it with the roadmap?”
“Mainly because those conversations should be happening as part of your planning. If the team is occupied on things and you hand then a box labeled "A" but upon opening it's really A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H your delegating them to rescope and sequence things for you. Often it shows a lack of understanding in the process. Especially if its a reoccurring issue.”
“How does that generally go for situations like this where capacity is an issue? Do you feel like you have more pull to get things done or get more engineering headcount when capacity is an issue?”
“1 roadmaps have nothing to do with sprint scope, and ultimately delivery dates. You should be getting rough estimates and scoping before you decide to work on an initiative. Every initiative has a certain ideal ROI and you need to know how much you predict to invest. You should be pushing back. Scope is the easy lever to meet delivery dates. Some engineers are just the I got to check all the boxes and don't understand the scope hammer. Maybe make it clearer in tickets the priority versus oth”
“The signal was there, but it was basically invisible because it lived outside the workflow you actually watched. Once you moved it into one place, was an alert enough or did someone own the follow-up too?”
“I spent three years building logistics software, but my latest inventory tracking project stalled over the last two weeks because external consultants delivered broken warehouse API integrations. Now i need to make a fix solution for this, but i dont have time so i need outsource team which can help me. If you know who can fix similar inventory sync failures, tell me how pls, need fast as posible, txnx submitted by /u/RemoWilliams1111 [link] [comments]”
“When a stakeholder says their request is urgent, they’re almost always speaking from their own perspective. They don’t have visibility into what else is competing for the same capacity, what the cost of delaying other work would be, or what trade-off they’re asking the team to make. You can explain all of that to them, but it really works better when you just show them and start the discussion from there. Making the cost of everything visible beforehand goes a long way because you don’t have to”
“In my POV, PRDs are meant to communicate outcomes, not super specific feature functionality. What is the goal of the product or feature you're building? What problems are you solving? Map out the end to end journey of the different customer personas that have these problems, and then back them with data or evidence. What does the product or feature look like in an ideal world? Meaning what is the terminal state if implemented perfectly with no constraints attached? Its then in the engineerin”
“You are expecting your PRD to have perfect logic and assumptions? When you’ve been there 3 months? Yeah, there’s a reason UI/UX have jobs and you review your PRD with multiple stakeholders. This is the mechanism working as expected.”
“In my opinion it’s not healthy for every possible consideration to be thought of upfront. Design and engineering are collaborators to the problem, not homework graders. Of course, there’s nuance. If something majorly important to the goal was missed - okay, PM at fault. But if they are finding workflow gaps, or something that requires years of specific organization knowledge - fuck ‘em.”
“Completely normal. This the point of prototyping. Expect this to continue during development. And to require a lot of changes from User Testing.”
Not only is this normal, it's the point. Discovery is a long process
“Yes, everyone will bring up details that you're missing and things will constantly move when you're new. The more experience and senior you become, less items will get brought up because you would have thought through them. You're 3 months into your role. Why do you think Product gets paid so well? It takes many years to learn how to move forward as a team. Learn from Design and Engineering as much as you can with your "new to Product" free pass. I said learn not offload yo”
“If the job is mostly the same site FAQs, Intercom is overkill. What matters is whether it only answers from your pages (with a link) and shuts up when it doesn’t know. That’s the lane we built Rinhelp for ( https://rinhelp.com ). Indexes the site, cites the page, and the misses land in your inbox.”
“I started timing it as a joke. By hour two it was not funny anymore. VA finished their engagement on a Thursday. Good working relationship, no drama, clean ending. I sat down that evening to go through everything and just out of curiosity started a timer on my phone. Here is what actually broke. There is no master list. That is the thing nobody tells you. Every time you give someone access to something it lives in that platform and only that platform. Shopify knows about Shopify. Google Ads know”
“The split for me was not useful versus useless, it was numbers versus context. The numbers I track get looked at maybe quarterly and mostly confirm what I already suspected. The context is what I need urgently and never have. Concrete version. I can tell you what a job billed and when it was paid, because the tool collects that on its own. I cannot tell you what I promised in the message where the price got agreed, because that lived in a DM and the row in my sheet only had name, item, price, st”
“I don't think this needs to be specially engineered. More a "write important things down right away" discipline. Just put it on the relevant page.”
“I usually see in combination with that, the teams are too big and the sprints are too long. If your daily meeting takes half an hour or more and everyone is looking at their computer or phone after they've said their bit, the team is too big. No one there needs to know what the other guys are doing. Break them down to the two or three people who do. Sprints being too long is a natural side effect of that. It's a huge pain in the ass to get 30 people together, find out what everyone did a”
“Hi, In our environment, Autopilot deployment is currently working only when the device is connected to the corporate network. When the device is connected to a personal or external network, the deployment fails with an error.”
“Thank you for sharing all this! On #1, who were the advocates for this process to be implemented and followed? Asking because we do most of what you mentioned, it's just not adopted by all teams, especially not the ones that are eng-led. #2 also yes on agent guidance, we've come a long way from having 10 different variants for a segmented control with a lot of md files for everyone's agents. The issue is not really DS consistency, it's how you approach the solution and ux overall”
“Can use some advice with two different aspects of the same problem. How to strategically play dumb and disengage from pointless discussions in engineering discussions without coming across as disrespectful? How to maneuver when someone from a more experienced engineering team suggests a direction that seems obviously flawed? Instead of internally thinking, “What the fuck are you talking about?” or “How was this person even hired?” how do I challenge the idea constructively? submitted by &#”
“one thing i still find difficult is when every stakeholder says their request is urgent. the team obviously can’t treat everything as the highest priority, but simply asking people to choose what matters most doesn’t always work i’m curious how experienced pm’s handle this without turning every prioritisation discussion into an argument do you use a specific framework, ask for trade-offs, or let stakeholders decide between themselves? submitted by /u/Worried_Poetry4278 [link] [”
“Well, the stuff that kills us is the invisible hand off time, when a task is technically done by one team but just sitting there waiting for the next person to pick it up. Nobody tracks that gap. Would love to hear if anyone's cracked this.”
“Summary In the first full week of the general byline rollout (2026 08 21..27, external tenants only), byline create clicked fired 278 times and produced 35 diagrams — 12.6% completion . This is the sharpest drop off in any funnel we measure. The drop off is not in the byline UI . onAddDiagram opens a fullscreen macroMode: 'editor' modal ( src/components/Byline/BylineDiagrams.vue:899 ), so everything after the click is the standard diagram editor. Three distinct problems stack up, and one of them”
“I'm surprised this org still has BAs! But they should absolutely be doing that. Im in software and have always had to do discovery, but we are basically filling both the product owner and scrum master role at once.”
“We have a long ongoing project to upgrade one of our systems. The system/vendor's acronym is IBS. This leads to endless puerile comedy. "IBS alerts are me" "Waiting to hear back about IBS" "I've got a meeting about IBS today"”
“Not only did this just happen to me, but I was the lead on an ERP implementation and had to explain how/why my “correcting” JEs threw off the GL and plead my case why this time the revised JEs were definitely right for real. Definitely one of my low points”
“Second the idea of knowing what you want out of it. For me I include this in the agenda, and scaffold my action notes in advance, with spaces for new items”
“Do find that fathom does a good job of summarizing? We find that it often misstates things. In fact, just before I onboarded, it captured something as done that very much wasn’t and it created a big issue with our customer months later when it turned out we weren’t paying out on something. Sucks my coworkers were all to eager to shrug and say “oops, AI!” about it as I dealt with the angry customer.”
“IMHO a PM shouldn't be taking notes because they are leading the meeting. If notes are required then so is a BA or Tech Writer to take them in order for it to be done properly. Trying to lead a meeting while taking notes is incredibly distracting and your time (which equates to a lot more money than the other roles capable of note taking) is spent more on re-listening to the meeting or even writing down the notes. PMs should be focused and as we're taught in PMBok multi-tasking is rarely”
“Problem The workflow can only start work and finish it. Everything in between — giving up on a ticket, or picking one back up after a session ended — is prose in skills/dev task/SKILL.md §0 and nothing else. Two concrete gaps: Abandoning is manual. Removing the worktree, deleting the branch, saying why on the ticket and putting the ticket back where it came from is four commands nobody runs in the right order. The ticket is left claiming In Progress forever, and sync will not walk it back — it o”
“> If everyone is doing the job of hundreds, extremely productive and everything is so easily fixed, why everything feels so slow and broken, even so basic things?This doesn't make sense. There were slow and broken things before AI. This was true even when the things were made by hundreds or thousands of engineers.If an organization doesn't care about making their app or site fast or correct, then unless they have a truly ludicrous amount of free manpower (more than is available now with AI, beca”