Ask an engineer why a feature exists and watch what happens. They open the ticket. The ticket links to a doc. The doc references a Slack thread. The thread mentions a research call nobody recorded. Four tabs later, the answer is a guess.
We have spent a decade buying better tools for each step of product work. The specs got better. The tickets got better. The design files got better. And yet the work did not get easier, because the hard part was never any single step. The hard part is the space between them.
The tax nobody budgets for
Moving context by hand is invisible on every roadmap and present in every week. It is the status meeting that exists only to sync state. It is the PRD rewritten from scratch because last quarter's is unfindable. It is the same decision relitigated because the reasoning was never captured.
- Engineers lose mornings reconstructing why, not building what.
- Designers defend patterns whose research is six months gone.
- PMs spend the majority of the week coordinating, not thinking.
- Leaders get status in five formats and still cannot answer are we on track.
The tools were never the bottleneck. The connective tissue between them was, and humans were it.
What changes when context connects
When specs, designs, decisions, tickets, and metrics share one graph, the question why are we building this stops being an archaeology project. The answer is one hop away, because the work itself maintains the link.
That is the bet behind PROM: connect everything to one graph, give an agent the ability to read it, and the work nobody enjoys gets drafted automatically so people can do the work that matters.