Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Main idea
Classic product management runs in phases: discovery, then specifications, then delivery, then communication. Each step waits on the previous one, and that sequence is not arbitrary — it follows from the cost of writing. As long as writing a brief takes a day, you write it only once, therefore as late as possible, therefore once the upstream phase is closed.
When the brief is regenerated from a workspace kept up to date, the reason to wait disappears. You can put out a first version as early as the second session, let it evolve as the material grows richer, and find that the final version is nothing but the latest iteration of a document that grew alongside the thinking. Discovery, for its part, never really stops: you keep talking to refine, challenge, reformulate, and the deliverables improve during that maturation rather than at the close of a step.
So it is not the sequential method that is being called into question, it is its economic condition. Sequencing was an answer to the price of production; it falls with it.
Why it matters
This gives a criterion for telling whether a team can actually leave the sequential behind, beyond the rhetoric: the question is not the organisation nor the rituals, it is whether a deliverable can be reproduced cheaply from the available material.
It also strips the deliverable of its role as a milestone. A document whose first version arrives very early and changes every week can no longer mark that a phase is over, and something else then has to be found to say it.
Nuances and limits
Not everything regenerates at the same price: a press release is rewritten in one pass, whereas a contractual commitment or a specification validated by a third party is not put back into circulation at every change in the context.
And a deliverable in permanent motion wears out its readers: without one version designated as authoritative at a given moment, everyone works on a different state.
Open questions
- How do you mark the end of a step when no document attests to it any more, since they all keep evolving?