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The Drizzle - ep 01 - Spec-Driven Development (SSD), PRDs, and Product Engineering

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The Drizzle: ep 01 - Trials of SDD, PRDs, and Product Engineering

🗓️ Short Forecast

A light drizzle of spec-driven development (SDD) with spec-kit, GitHub's Specify project, and how my most recent project has me seeing SDD, and PRDs as a product leader and builder.

GitLab Project: AI Fluency for Teams

💦 Previous 14-day Forecast

  • Digital Inspo: They say that imitation is the greatest form of flattery, and as my first Drizzle series post this couldn't be more true. Professionally and personally, I've found that emulating success works and there's no better shortcuts than ones you've seen work and learn to admire. For a long time, I've read the below blogs and I've found a lot of inspiration from them. I greatly admire people that speak/write with authenticity and I've always wanted to be more practiced in my writing so that's when I started building v1 of this blog back in March as I ended my paternity leave and finished v2 earlier this September.
  • Spec Driven Dev vs PRDs: Personally, I understand the struggle of writing long PRDs and not having a prototype to show for it or writing them and people just breezing through them. So, building specs first and then developing is somewhat natural as a product manager/engineer. After building my AI Fluency Assessment project, I can say it was a much better experience than purely vibe coding but it also needed a lot of guidance along the way, e.g. constantly switching ports for deployment and it eventually clogged my machine and got stuck. Can we expect it to be perfect though? Nah. But, I love rapid development and this is a great way of keeping things on rails so I'll be trying it with a couple of new projects. Here's all of the specify files if you want to take a look. Microsoft's CPO has even talked about MSFT product managers using prompt sets as a method to replace Product Requirement Docs (PRDs).
  • Building your teams AI Fluency: I joined a CISO/leadership dinner at the beginning of the year, during my paternity leave, and something I walked away with was how other leaders are thinking about AI literacy and fluency. One of the leaders from talked about how Zapier rolled out AI to their teams and their mission to hire with AI fluency in mind. And while it caused a hot debate, I took away something I thought was critical; I need to find ways of challenging my team to think about AI as a tool. Just like any other tool, you need to use it and get reps. This also led me to think about how I could create a self-service tool/product that would let people assess themselves. Watch the video below, or check out my code for it.
  • Delete all of your meetings - start over: My team recently had a retrospective and one of the pieces of feedback was about changing our rhythm and it led us to removing meetings, like sprint planning and backlog refinement. It made me think about this talk on Lenny's Podcast about how Shopify removes recurring meetings with 2+ people. With the new year upcoming, I like the idea of starting fresh, trying something different, and not blindly trusting "the process". As a manager, I think responding to feedback like this and encouraging experimentation to lighten the load is one great way to support your team and let them figure out the how.

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🖇️ Digital Drizzle: Interesting Links/Stories

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