Lessons from Building a First-Pass AI PRD Reviewer at Uber
May 12, 2026
May 12, 2026
Lakshmi Ashok
Lakshmi Ashok
Product Lead
Product Lead
Introduction
Introduction
Most product organizations have some version of a review process. Typically, once PMs have an early draft of a PRD (Product Requirement Document) ready, it’s circulated across design, engineering, legal, operations, science, and product leadership. That process is designed to improve quality and reduce risk. In practice, it often reveals a harder reality: PMs might be making decisions in systems where the relevant context extends far beyond what any one person can easily assemble on their own.
Most product organizations have some version of a review process. Typically, once PMs have an early draft of a PRD (Product Requirement Document) ready, it’s circulated across design, engineering, legal, operations, science, and product leadership. That process is designed to improve quality and reduce risk. In practice, it often reveals a harder reality: PMs might be making decisions in systems where the relevant context extends far beyond what any one person can easily assemble on their own.
A PRD could reach the review stage with an unsupported headroom assumption, a blind spot in how the feature could affect adjacent systems, an unexamined second-order effect, or a policy-sensitive change without the guardrails reviewers expect. In other cases, the team may be unknowingly revisiting a hypothesis that was already explored in a smaller experiment or adjacent effort, but the relevant context is scattered across docs, decks, dashboards, and institutional memory.
A PRD could reach the review stage with an unsupported headroom assumption, a blind spot in how the feature could affect adjacent systems, an unexamined second-order effect, or a policy-sensitive change without the guardrails reviewers expect. In other cases, the team may be unknowingly revisiting a hypothesis that was already explored in a smaller experiment or adjacent effort, but the relevant context is scattered across docs, decks, dashboards, and institutio...