There is a specific kind of panic that hits about three weeks after someone leaves a team. The product is fine. The roadmap is fine. But nobody can explain why a button rather than an automated workflow, or why a perfectly reasonable feature idea keeps getting quietly killed before it reaches the sprint. The reasoning walked out the door with the person who held it in their head.
This month is about that. Not documentation as a compliance exercise, not the twelve-page PRD nobody opens. The small, honest habit of writing down what you decided, why, and what would make it worth revisiting. Three lines that save the next person, very possibly future you, from re-litigating a problem that was already solved.
Future you will be grateful. Probably.
Article by Batool Fatima, Product Management Consultant at Product People.
Somewhere in your head lives an entire unpublished memoir titled Why We Actually Did That. Why the feature got scoped down to something embarrassingly small. Why a “quick win” was actually killed twice before. Why the pricing edge case gets handled the way it does. None of this is negligence on your part. It’s just faster to hold it in your head and explain it live than to write it down in the moment, and the moment always wins when there’s a sprint to get through.
The bill for that comes due later, usually on someone else, occasionally on you. You inherit a product from a PM who left eleven months ago, and every decision looks either brilliant or baffling with no way to tell which. Or a stakeholder asks an innocent question, “why does it work this way,” and the only person who knows is on a beach somewhere with no signal. The product is fine. The reasoning behind it walked out the door with someone.
Version one is the handover that felt clean and wasn’t. You do the walkthrough, share the roadmap, meet the stakeholders, feel genuinely good about yourself on the way out. Three months later you pitch a feature so obviously right you’re half convinced you invented it. Someone at the back of the room says, quietly, “we tried that in 2023.” It was killed for a reason nobody wrote down. You spend the next two weeks re-solving a problem that was already solved. Nothing was hidden on purpose. It just lived in a format that couldn’t survive the handover.
Version two is smaller and shows up more often. You go on leave for two weeks, and a moderately important question comes up that only you can answer: why does this workflow branch the way it does, what was promised to which customer, why is this edge case handled manually instead of built properly. Nobody is trying to create a crisis. But the answer lives in your head, and your head is unreachable, so a decision that should take ten minutes takes two weeks, or gets made again from scratch without the context you had.
Both stories share the same villain, and it isn’t a person. It’s the habit of treating documentation like a chore for compliance, something you do because a template says so, instead of a note left for whoever shows up next. Future you included.
The fix is a small mental shift with a big payoff: stop writing for an auditor, start writing for the next confused person standing exactly where you’re standing now. Quite possibly you, eight months from now, having forgotten all of this ever happened. That person doesn’t want your twelve-page PRD. They want three things: what got decided, why, and what would make it worth reopening.
If the reasoning only lives in your head, the product only lives as long as you do.
This isn’t an argument for documenting everything. Most of your decisions are cheap to redo if they turn out wrong, and don’t need a paper trail. The ones worth capturing are the ones that would be expensive for you, or whoever comes next, to re-litigate, or easy to reverse straight into a mistake you already ruled out.
The practical version of this doesn’t require a wiki overhaul or a new tool nobody will use. Keep a single running decision log, one entry per meaningful call: what you decided, the reasoning at the time, and the signal that would tell you to revisit it. A pricing exception gets three lines. A feature you killed gets three lines explaining why, so you don’t propose it again yourself in a year without remembering it already failed once. The test for whether something earns a log entry is simple: would rebuilding this decision from scratch cost more than the three lines it takes to write down. If yes, write it down. If no, let it go.
The same logic applies to your product’s edge cases that make total sense only if you already know the backstory. A short, living note covering the ten things people actually ask about again and again beats a beautifully formatted spec nobody has opened since the day it was written.
This dies the moment it becomes homework competing with real work. It survives when it rides along on something you’re already doing. End a decision meeting with one line, “what’s going in the log,” and it costs you thirty seconds while the decision is still warm, instead of forcing you to reconstruct it from memory and a graveyard of old Slack messages six months later.
It also helps to run a short, honest check on yourself periodically: if you left tomorrow, what would the next person struggle to figure out. Not everything needs an answer. But the two or three things that would genuinely stall someone are worth turning into a page before they become an emergency you’re not even around for.
None of this needs to be heavy. A short note you write in the moment beats a thorough one you write from memory a year later, because by then your own reasoning has usually faded into “I’m sure we had a good reason.”
This isn’t a pitch to become a compulsive documenter, color-coding a wiki at 11pm out of guilt. You don’t need to produce the most documentation, you need to capture the handful of decisions that would actually be expensive for you, or someone else, to lose. Done this way, documentation isn’t overhead sitting on top of your job. It’s the part of the job that lets the next person, including future you, pick up exactly where you left off.
Psst, Here is a bonus template we use regularly:
Date | Decision | Decision Detail | Stakeholders Involved | Link
Handovers rarely fail because the product was mismanaged. They fail because the reasoning behind it never left someone's head. A useful companion if you're building your own decision log this month is this session where Jonathan Epstein, Growth Product Manager at Free Now, walks through why documentation deserves more weight in a PM's toolkit, alongside prioritization and stakeholder management.
Andrea is Product People’s Growth Marketing Manager, and, somewhat unexpectedly, a trained food scientist.
She swapped laboratories and food formulations for content, campaigns, SEO, and growth experiments, but the scientific mindset never really left.
She likes understanding why things work, spotting patterns, and turning slightly chaotic ideas into something clear, useful, and engaging. She is especially interested in the point where creativity meets data: making things feel human while still asking whether they actually perform.
She brings curiosity, persistence, and a healthy amount of overthinking for almost everything she does. She cares deeply about words, visual storytelling, thoughtful communication, creating content people genuinely want to read, and making sure every tiny yellow onigiri looks appropriately cheerful.
In other words: part marketer, part scientist, part editor, and full-time investigator of why people click (or don’t).
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