Answers
The questions teams actually ask about decisions, drift, and keeping people and AI agents in step, answered directly.
For product leaders
Keeping the PRD true after you ship it.
- What's a single source of truth for product decisions?One trusted place where every product decision lives with its reason and owner, and stays current because capture doesn't depend on filing.
- How do we keep product and engineering aligned on decisions?Alignment is a property of the record, not the meeting. Keep one shared decision log both sides write to, and review work against it.
- How do we stop product decisions getting lost in Slack?Decide in the thread, record outside it: a fixed four-field format, a named owner, and capture at the moment of decision, not a weekly cleanup.
- How do I know engineering built what the PRD said?Mostly you don't, unless the PRD becomes checkable constraints. Extract testable requirements and review the build against them, not the tickets.
For engineering leaders
Briefing every engineer and agent, and catching drift at the PR.
- How do I stop AI agents from violating our architecture decisions?Put decisions in the agent's context before it generates, and check the output after: context files, MCP tools, and automated checks at PR time.
- How do we onboard engineers faster with decision context?New engineers rebuild the why by hand. A decision log with reasons and rejected alternatives, linked from the code it governs, cuts that rebuild.
- How do I give AI coding agents my team's context?Three layers: AGENTS.md for stable conventions, retrieval for code and docs, MCP for live constraints like your team's approved decisions.
For founders
One memory for what the company decided.
- Why do startups forget their own decisions?Early-stage memory is people, not records. Teams run on knowing who knows what, until someone leaves, the team doubles, or six months pass.
- How do small teams stay aligned as they grow?Alignment that came free at five people breaks near twenty. Switch from repeating context to recording decisions where they happen, with reasons.
For ops & chiefs of staff
Decision follow-through across a distributed team.
- How do you track decisions made in meetings?Name the decider up front, state the verdict as one sentence, record it before the meeting ends, and send it to everyone affected the same day.
- How does async decision-making work in distributed teams?A written proposal, a named decider, a real deadline, and silence-means-consent. Synchronous calls are reserved for irreversible decisions.