← All articles

What would be the system of recording

Tools · · 3 min read

Linear or Jira, Notion or Confluence, a roadmap tool if leadership wants one. The tools didn’t change; what changed is who reads them.

The old job of these tools: a place where humans wrote down state so other humans could find it. The PM was the person who kept them accurate and relayed their contents — which is where the twelve hours a week of Part 6 went.

The new job: a place where state lives so that agents can read it. Your status drafter, metric watcher, and living roadmap all depend on the tracker being accurate and machine-readable. If the truth is in Slack threads and people’s heads, none of the tools in Parts 2–6 work.

That reframes the choice. You’re not picking the tool with the nicest board; you’re picking the one that’s easiest for an AI to read from and write to.

The test:

  1. Does it have a real API and an MCP server or equivalent? This is now the first question, not the last. Linear, Jira, Notion, GitHub all do. If your agentic coding tool can’t ask the tracker “what shipped this week,” you’ll be copying and pasting forever.

  2. Is the data structured enough to mean something? Status, owner, target date, linked bet, linked metric. A tool that’s just a list of titles gives an agent nothing to work with.

  3. Can it hold the bet, not just the ticket? Somewhere the “why” and the success metric need to live next to the work. Most trackers only hold the “what.” If yours can’t link a ticket to a hypothesis and a number, you’ll keep those in a doc, and the doc will drift.

  4. Does it stay accurate without you? Engineers update Linear because it’s in their flow. They don’t update a roadmap tool. Pick tools that are updated by the people doing the work, not by the PM after the fact.

  5. Can leadership read it directly? If they need a slide made from it, you’re still the relay.

Practical guidance:

  • Fewer tools, deliberately. Tracker plus docs is enough. Every additional system is another place the truth can be out of date.

  • Don’t fight the company’s choice of tracker. Fight for the API access and the fields.

  • Document decisions in the tracker or docs, dated, with the reason. This is the single most useful thing you can do for your future agents and your future self. “We chose X because Y, on date Z” is what the living roadmap is built from.

  • Roadmap tools: only if leadership insists, and then treat the tool as a view generated from the tracker, not a separate source of truth. Parts 5 and 6 depend on this.

One caution: the temptation is to let AI write into the tracker. Start read-only. An agent updating tickets on its own is how you get a confidently wrong status in front of the CEO. Draft, review, then write — the same rule as the status drafter.

For you: this is the least glamorous item and the one that decides whether the other five tools work at all. The question to ask at any company you join: “can I get an API token for the tracker in week one?” The answer tells you a lot about the company.