Title: Why product decisions need a paper trail Author: Stan Wilson Jr Published: 2026-06-19T10:59:50.000-04:00 Updated: 2026-06-19T10:59:50.000-04:00 Canonical: https://www.stanwilsonjr.com/blog/product-decisions-need-a-paper-trail Tags: productivity, product management, documentation Why product decisions need a paper trail We've all been there. You're looking at something in a product, a rule, a flow, a constraint and you ask: why is it this way? Sometimes someone in the room shrugs. Sometimes you dig through old Slack threads and find nothing. Sometimes the person who made the call left the company two years ago. Sometimes it's been two years and the person is you. The decision was made. The context didn't survive. This is a failure of documentation – specifically, the right kind of documentation. Product management is not short on docs Product managers create a lot of written artifacts. One-pagers, PRDs, roadmaps, research summaries. For most decisions, these do the job. But for the big ones – the ones with real ripple effects – a PRD doesn't fully capture what actually happened. It captures the what and the plan, not the why behind every fork in the road. There's a gap there, and I've felt it throughout my career. Engineering solved this already I was listening to a talk by my buddy Ben Hong where he talked about something called an Architectural Decision Record (ADR). When a hard technical decision gets made, the kind that affects everything downstream, an ADR documents it completely: The details that support the decision The alternatives that were considered The benefits and trade-offs The expected impact The key thing about an ADR is that it's a snapshot in time. It captures expectations honestly, at the moment of the decision, regardless of how things turn out. There's no revisionist history. No one gets to rewrite the record after the fact to take credit for a good outcome or quietly distance themselves from a bad one. That honesty is what makes it useful. Product management needs the same thing I've been thinking about this for a while. What would a Product Decision Record (PDR) look like? The structure would be similar to an ADR, but applied to product decisions: The decision: What approach was chosen and why Alternatives considered: What else was on the table Who was consulted: Stakeholders, teams, subject matter experts Trade-offs: What we're giving up by going this direction The north star: The outcome we're optimizing for Writing this out forces a level of rigor that most decisions don't get. When you have to articulate your alternatives, you take the decision more seriously. When you document who was consulted, you're more likely to actually consult the right people. It also gives the rest of the team something they rarely have: an honest understanding that alternatives exist. Most of the time, decisions get made and people just go along with them without knowing that other paths were considered. A PDR changes that. The real beneficiary is the future The immediate benefits are real – more intentional decisions, greater clarity for the current team. But the primary value is for whoever comes next. In big organizations, especially ones that have been around for decades, you inherit an enormous amount of context-free decisions. You don't know how things got this way. You're just here, working within a set of constraints and structures that nobody can fully explain. I can't go back and interview my predecessors. But I can make it better for the people who come after me. A body of PDRs, built up over time, gives future teams something honest to work with. They can weigh past decisions against their current context. They can see where the product has been, what was tried, what tradeoffs were made along the way. And if documented consistently, this kind of record could also become useful input for AI, a structured history that surfaces trends, flags recurring trade-offs, or helps inform future decisions with actual institutional memory. One more document worth making I'm not advocating for more documentation for its own sake. Nobody needs that. But this one is valuable. It doesn't replace the PRD or the one-pager. It sits alongside them for the decisions that actually need it, the ones with real consequences, real trade-offs, and real implications for whoever picks up this work years from now. I'm planning to start using this and, knowing myself, I'll probably try to make it as easy as possible, likely by building a Claude skill to streamline the process. We'll see how it goes. It'll be a trial and error exercise. Some things are worth figuring out. --- Original: https://www.stanwilsonjr.com/blog/product-decisions-need-a-paper-trail