Putting on the Product Owner Hat

I had the idea for Second-Memory.

But at that point, it was still just an idea. It was too vague to start thinking about architecture or implementation.

I wanted to develop the idea further before I started building it.

So I put on the Product Owner hat.

I followed the kind of process I had experienced in my professional work.

I started by defining the initiative. I wrote down what I was trying to achieve and what I wanted the product to be.

Then I wrote a PRD.

Writing it made me think through the product in more detail: the problem, the user, the main use cases, the scope, and what I wanted to achieve with the first version.

From there, I created user stories.

This helped me look at the product from the user's perspective rather than thinking about how I was going to implement it.

I then organised the stories into an initial backlog and broke the work down into tasks that I could eventually implement.

There was another reason I wanted to document all of this.

I knew I would be using AI tools to help me build the project.

Instead of explaining the project from scratch every time I asked an AI coding tool for help, I could give it the product documents as context.

The PRD and user stories became a shared reference point — for me as the developer, and for the AI tools I was working with.

The idea started in my head as something fairly vague.

By the end of this process, I had something much more concrete:

an idea → a product definition → user stories → work I could build.