Documents — Overview & Concepts
What they are, why they matter, and how they fit into Lodestone
What Is a Document?
A Document in Lodestone is a written artifact created to provide context, clarity, and narrative support for a Feature. Documents reflect the real-world artifacts product managers are expected to produce — justifications, requirements, communication drafts, go-to-market assets — without requiring you to start from a blank page.
Every Document in Lodestone is tied to a Feature. Documents don't exist independently; they exist to explain and support the Feature they belong to.
Why Documents Exist
Across a single Feature, a PM might be expected to produce a business justification, a set of requirements, acceptance criteria, a customer-facing announcement, and enablement materials for the sales team. Individually, each feels manageable. Collectively, they consume days or weeks of effort — most of it formatting and structuring rather than thinking.
Lodestone uses AI to generate a strong first draft instantly, so you can spend your time iterating on ideas rather than assembling documents. The goal is to shift effort from blank-page anxiety to meaningful refinement.
Key idea: AI-generated Documents are starting points, not finished products. All content is fully editable, and you retain full authorship. Lodestone deliberately avoids black-box generation — you always see and control what gets produced.
Documents as First-Class Objects
Documents are first-class objects in Lodestone, meaning they can be exported, shared, and used independently of the rest of the platform. This matters because:
- Different teams use different subsets of documents — a team focused on execution needs user stories and UAT plans; a team focused on alignment needs opportunity canvases and PRDs
- Documents are reused across different contexts and audiences
- Each artifact has standalone value outside of Lodestone
This design means you're never forced into producing all document types for every Feature — you use what's useful for your context.
Available Document Types
Lodestone currently supports eleven document types, organized by their primary job:
Thinking aids
These help you clarify reasoning, articulate tradeoffs, and build a shared understanding of what you're building and why.
| Document | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Opportunity Canvas | A structured one-pager capturing the problem, solution, value, and risks for a Feature |
| Product Requirements Document (PRD) | A detailed description of what needs to be built and why |
Delivery artifacts
These support execution and handoff to engineering, QA, and other teams.
| Document | Purpose |
|---|---|
| User Stories | Bite-sized descriptions of functionality from the user's perspective |
| UAT Test Plan | Acceptance criteria and test scenarios for validating the Feature |
| User Guide Documentation | End-user documentation explaining how to use the Feature |
| Prototype Prompt | A prompt designed to be pasted directly into an AI prototyping tool |
Communication assets
These support go-to-market, stakeholder communication, and external announcements.
| Document | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Customer Email | A direct communication to customers about the Feature |
| Company Blog Post | A long-form external post announcing or explaining the Feature |
| Twitter Posts | Short-form social content for X/Twitter |
| Instagram Posts | Visual-first social content for Instagram |
| LinkedIn Posts | Professional social content for LinkedIn |
Where Documents Live
Documents live on the Feature Detail page, which you access by clicking a Feature name in the backlog. From there you can generate, edit, export, and revisit any Document associated with that Feature.
Documents are living artifacts — they're meant to be updated as a Feature evolves, not written once and forgotten. That said, if you choose to regenerate a Document with AI, be aware that regeneration immediately overwrites the existing content with no warning and no recovery path. If you've made edits worth keeping, copy them before regenerating.
The Rich Text Editor
All Document types use a rich text editor with a formatting toolbar. You can apply formatting directly to document content:
- Bold, italic, and other inline styles
- Headings and subheadings
- Bullet and numbered lists
- And more
This means Documents are not just plain text — they can be structured and formatted for direct sharing without additional cleanup. Formatting is preserved when exporting to PDF.
How Documents Relate to Features
- A Document cannot exist without a Feature
- A Feature can have one Document per type — one Opportunity Canvas, one PRD, one Customer Email, and so on
- Deleting a Feature also deletes all of its associated Documents
Exporting Documents
All Documents can be exported as PDFs or Markdown files (.md). The Markdown export is useful for pasting document content into Notion, Confluence, GitHub, or any other Markdown-friendly tool.
The Opportunity Canvas has an additional export option — it can be exported as a single PowerPoint slide. Opportunity Canvases also appear automatically as an appendix when you export a Roadmap as a PPT presentation.
Exports are designed to be immediately shareable and presentation-ready, without requiring any additional formatting work.
Next: How-tos & Workflows — step-by-step guides for creating, editing, and exporting Documents.