Context engineering for product managers - Follow Up Story
A system of product knowledge that scales your product.
What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are exclusive to premium subscribers of Product Management IRL.
This week’s backstory is about context engineering for product managers:
What Prompted This Article?
This article started with a poll on LinkedIn about behind-the-scenes work, such as a product ordering guide, AI context, and product knowledge base upkeep. Over 80% of the respondents are seeing an increase.
The funny thing is, no one is talking about how they keep all this product context updated and usable. Many product people talk about the importance of product context for product work with AI.
The reality is that this product context goes out of date almost as soon as you save it. Plus, I always have something new coming: features, fixes, and enhancements.
An accurate and up-to-date product context is key to growth. But in today’s fast-paced products, I can’t ask for a timeout to pull together a product context system.
I wrote about the steps to ease into a starter product context that can grow over time:
Create a single source of truth in a shared space
add some structure such as release notes
review the structure periodically to keep it fresh
add AI assistance to begin automation
focus on what people use for maintenance
Here is a summary:
I figured no one in my product team would care about the product context. Which meant I didn’t need to get fancy about it. I expected to be the biggest user of the product context.
