--- url: https://docs.lodestone.pm/documents-01-overview-and-concepts.md --- # 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.*