Engineers build from a stale spec
The PRD still describes the solution the team moved away from two weeks ago.
Collaboration
Write it together, let agents write it too, and check what it claims.
Shorter Loop keeps your documents, PRDs and whiteboards next to the strategy they belong to. Strategy items appear as pages that stay in sync. People and AI agents write documents here, and the insights engine pulls out what each one claims and checks it against your evidence. The example below follows one team from a chosen solution to a committed PRD.
This page uses an anonymized example from a real customer use case you can open and inspect.
The problem
The reasoning behind a product lives in documents nobody can trust.
Strategy sits in a deck, research in a wiki, the spec in a doc and the sketch on a board. Each one was right on the day it was written. A month later nobody knows which parts still hold, and the PRD an engineer reads may rest on an assumption the team dropped weeks ago.
Where the reasoning usually lives
- A strategy deck from the last offsite
- Research notes in a wiki nobody updates
- A PRD copied from last quarter's template
- A whiteboard photo in a Slack thread
None of them knows about the others, so a change in one never reaches the rest.
A harder look
AI made documents cheap. Checking them got harder.
An assistant can write a PRD, a research summary or a strategy memo in under a minute. Each one reads as confidently as the last, whether its claims hold or not. Teams now produce more documents than anyone can review, and the polish hides which parts are evidence and which are guesses.
The useful questions about any document are what it claims, what backs each claim, and what has changed since it was written.
What a polished document shows
What the team needs to know
What the team needs to know
Which statements are claims
A list of requirements
The opportunity and evidence behind each one
The date it was written
Whether anything has contradicted it since
An author
Whether a person or an agent wrote it
What a polished document shows
What the team needs to know
Confident, well-structured prose
Which statements are claims
A list of requirements
The opportunity and evidence behind each one
The date it was written
Whether anything has contradicted it since
An author
Whether a person or an agent wrote it
What the research says
Polished documents with nothing behind them already cost teams hours.
Researchers at Stanford and BetterUp Labs gave it a name: workslop, AI-generated work that looks finished and leaves the thinking to whoever receives it.
What it costs the team
Every handoff turns into a rewrite.
In our experience, the cost lands on whoever reads the document next.
A better way
Attach every document to the decision it serves, and check what it claims.
Write wherever the thinking happens. Make the documents part of the product record.
01
Start from the strategy
Objectives, opportunities and solutions are already pages, so writing begins from the decision.
02
Let people and agents write
Notes, research and drafts arrive from the team and from AI assistants, marked by who wrote them.
03
Pull out the claims
Each document is broken into the statements it makes.
04
Check them against evidence
Each claim shows the evidence for it, the evidence against it, and what still needs support.
05
Hand over a spec that holds
The PRD engineers read comes from the linked opportunity, persona and solution.
How Shorter Loop does it
Documents, PRDs and boards, connected to the product record.
Collaboration in Shorter Loop happens in the same place as your strategy and delivery work, so every document knows what it belongs to.
Customer story Solveo · from solution to spec
From a chosen solution to a committed PRD.
After the Strategize cycle, Solveo's team had picked its solution: auto-send AI answers based on how complex a ticket is. Before engineering started, the team needed a spec it could defend. Every step below happened in Shorter Loop.
| Company | Opportunity | Solution | PRD |
| B2B customer-support platform | OPP-4 | Auto-send by complexity | Committed v1 |
STEP 01
Start from the strategy that's already written
The objective, OPP-4 and the auto-send solution already had pages under From strategy. The solution's page listed its epics as child pages, and edits made there flowed back to the artifacts.
STEP 02
Let an agent write up the research
The PM asked an AI assistant, connected to Shorter Loop over MCP, to summarise the quarter's accuracy review and exit interviews into one document. It appeared in Documentation, marked as written by an agent.
STEP 03
Check what the agent wrote
The insights engine indexed the new document and pulled out nine claims. Eight lined up with the evidence. One said most churned accounts had left over AI accuracy, and it came back with opposing evidence: the exit interviews put it at 6 of 21.
The team dismissed that claim and kept the rest, before anyone built on it.
STEP 04
Sketch the hand-off next to the work
On the Board tab of the hand-off epic, the team worked out what an agent sees when the AI passes a ticket over. The sketch stayed with the epic, where engineers would look for it.
STEP 05
Generate the PRD from what's linked
The PRD was generated from OPP-4, the Support Team Lead persona and the solution outline. The evidence panel showed which statements came from linked sources and which still needed support, so reviewers knew where to look.
The team committed v1, then split the solution into versions on the Deliver page.
FAQ
What people ask about collaboration
Does this replace Notion or Confluence?
For product work it can. Documents here stay attached to the objectives, opportunities and solutions they describe, and their claims are checked. You can upload .docx, .pdf and .md files or import from other sources, and keep a general company wiki where it is.
Can AI agents write into Shorter Loop?
Yes. An assistant connected over MCP can create documents. They're marked as written by an agent, and their claims go through the same checks as anything a person writes.
What happens to the claims in a document?
The insights engine pulls them out and shows supporting and opposing evidence for each one. You keep or dismiss each claim, or turn it into a reviewed objective, opportunity or solution.
How much of a generated PRD is backed by evidence?
The evidence panel tells you. Statements that come from the linked opportunity, persona and solution are marked corroborated. Everything else is marked as needing support, so reviewers know which parts to check.
Do whiteboards link to the work?
A board can stand on its own or sit on the Board tab of an epic, feature or story, next to the work it's about.
How long before this is worth anything?
It depends on how fast you can connect what you already have. For a ten-person team that has typically taken about five days.
Get Started
Put your next PRD next to the decision it serves.
Start from an opportunity you're already working on, generate the PRD from what's linked, and see which statements still need support.
This page uses an anonymized customer example. You can open the demo to inspect the documents, claims and PRD shown here.
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