What does "AI-native" actually mean?

Working from a model of your product instead of from prompts. You stop re-explaining context every session and start from what your team already decided. The tool carries the memory; you keep the judgement.

Why not just use ChatGPT?

Because it only knows what you paste in. Anchor reads your sources first, keeps a model of the product between sessions, and tells you what's missing instead of smoothing over it.

Will AI replace Product Managers?

No. It doesn't decide what to build or which trade-off is acceptable — those need someone accountable. It removes the archaeology, not the judgement.

How long does setup take?

Connect one source and you'll have something useful the same day. Most teams start with interviews and existing PRDs, then add Jira and Slack.

Encrypted in transit and at rest. Access follows the permissions of the systems you connect. Disconnect or delete a brain at any time. Your data doesn't train foundation models.

What if my sources contradict each other?

That's the useful case. You see both statements, where each came from, and a question asking you to decide.

What if we barely document anything?

Then gap detection is what you'll use most. Anchor works with call recordings and Slack threads, and is explicit about what it doesn't know.

All posts

Running discovery when the last PM left no notes

A first-fortnight sequence for inheriting a product whose reasoning walked out the door.

Noa Bergman21 July 20269 min read

Inheriting a product is not the same as starting one. The decisions are already made; what is missing is why. Reconstructing that in order matters, because starting from the roadmap gives you the least reliable artefact first.

Start with the disagreements

Search the archive for conflict, not for summaries. Threads with many replies, tickets reopened more than once, documents with several revisions in a short window. Conflict is where reasoning gets written down.

Then the incidents

Post-mortems are the highest-density product documents most teams own. They describe what the system actually does under pressure, which is frequently not what the specification says.

Then the customers who left

Churned accounts hold sharper information than active ones, and nobody is protecting the relationship any more. The reason they gave for leaving is usually a requirement in disguise.

Only then the roadmap

Read it last, and read it as evidence rather than instruction. A roadmap tells you what a previous person believed under conditions you cannot see. Treated as a source it is useful; treated as a plan it is inherited debt.

Write the contradictions down first

Your first deliverable should not be a strategy. It should be a list of the places the archive disagrees with itself, with each side attributed. That document buys you more credibility in week two than any plan, because it is checkable.

PlaybookDiscoveryOnboarding