Product managers have been living in a world where they have to create a lot of documents from various sources of information that they get. Usually, the information is living in multiple places, not in a consistent place. It lives in our inbox. It lives in SharePoint, Google Docs, Confluence, and any ticketing system like Jira, Notion, or Linear. It may live in our notes app, handwritten notebooks, Slack messages, meeting transcripts, or even in our heads. For most teams, this information is scattered in multiple places, and we bring it together through our own custom process. Tools like Copilot can look for connected sources and surface and summarize the latest information.
What doesn’t exist today is a consistent place for a product manager’s context to live, where multiple product managers on the same team can share that context. AI is very effective as a single-player system for collecting and maintaining context. But not so much as a team or multiplayer system.
So I’ve been thinking about how to build such a system and which tools can aid that. Looking at how other roles on the team manage this shared space, I have found GitHub to be a really good way for teams to collaborate (note: this is not a paid or affiliate post).
GitHub is traditionally not for product managers. The more I have used GitHub over the last ten months, the more I have realized it is a great place for product managers to collaborate and share context of product requirements and documentation transparently. The tools available to product managers don’t act as a source of truth to manage information and knowledge as GitHub does. GitHub is really great for sharing context among different roles on the team. All the information can live as lightweight Markdown files perfect for an AI and a human to read.
As a PM who doesn’t live in GitHub every day, I was unfamiliar with all things GitHub, and I’m confident I still have learning to do. Admittedly, connecting my Claude Code setup to GitHub was low effort; Claude did most of the work. I realized I still needed a basic understanding of GitHub.
Product managers can create a place to collaborate and share context that works with other roles on the team with some basic understanding. There is a minimum amount of GitHub understanding a PM needs:
Checkout the main branch
Git fetch
Git pull
Create branches
Make changes
Do a diff (review changes)
Undo a change (when mistakes inevitably happen)
Git commit and push
Pull request
Review and merge
GitHub can become that low-cost shared space. I really think PMs should give that a try. This way, AI as a single-player system can become a multiplayer system (more on that later). Just be cautious to not put any customer data, private files, or sensitive information in there. Read every change, especially if AI is writing to your repo. If your company has an AI policy, make sure to follow that, and work with engineers on your team to ensure that the product codebase is not affected by your changes.
So if you’d like to get started, create a GitHub account, find your bearings around it, then push one file to the private repo and see if you can make edits.
Great share 👏