A PM told me the most valuable thing about our AI spec tool wasn’t writing docs - it was finding the “unknowns”

I’m building a small tool called Rico that turns messy product context into structured logic blueprints before development starts.

Recently one of the PMs using it shared something interesting about why it ended up helping his workflow.

When we first spoke, his project was getting delayed repeatedly. The issues weren’t unusual:

• Documents kept changing
• Developers weren’t really reading long specs
• Tasks weren’t aligned across people
• And the biggest issue — clarity at the task level

In his words, the hardest part wasn’t writing the document. It was breaking features down technically enough that developers could actually implement them without coming back with questions mid-sprint.

After running some of his specs through Rico, he said a few things improved:

1. Faster iteration on docs

Instead of rewriting documents multiple times, he was able to restructure them faster and get to something usable more quickly.

2. More technical clarity

One thing he mentioned was that the tool created structured sections like base JSON structures and technical logic, which helped his developers understand the implementation expectations.

3. Fewer iterations compared to using generic LLMs

He said when he used ChatGPT or Gemini before, he usually had to keep breaking the problem down and iterating many times to get something useful.

With Rico the iterations were much fewer because the output structure was already closer to how the dev team needed to read it.

4. The most interesting part: discovering unknowns

His exact words were that the “deal breaker” was discovering things he hadn’t thought about yet.

While working through the generated logic, he realized he had missed 2–3 important pieces in the spec that would have caused rework later.

That part surprised me.

Not the document generation - but the idea that the real value might be identifying the unknowns in a feature before development starts.

Curious if other PMs here run into this:

Do you feel like the real bottleneck is writing specs, or is it making sure you haven’t missed something critical in the logic before dev starts?

Would love to hear how people here handle that today.