Shelf for product managers
Remember why the product is the way it is.
A product is a long argument with itself. Feedback, screenshots, competitor behaviour, specs, half-decisions, things you tried and dropped.
Six months later, the question is never what did we ship. It's why did we choose that.
- FeedbackSeven users abandoned at the workspace stepMarch interviews
- EvidenceScreenshots of where they stoppedSame week
- CompetitorA one-step flow that asks for the same data laterApril
- Trade-offFaster start, worse first sessionYour note
- DecisionKeep three steps, cut the copyMay, shipped June
Everything above led here
Onboarding stays three steps, not one.
The problem
Decisions are documented. The reasoning usually isn't.
Tickets record what was built. Docs record what was agreed. Neither reliably keeps the feedback, the screenshot and the trade-off that made the agreement obvious at the time.
So the same debate reopens every two quarters, with nobody able to produce the evidence.
Old context, new argument.
When a settled question comes back, Shelf surfaces what you kept the last time it was live.
- Asked by a new team member
- No evidence attached to the question
- Screenshots of where each person stopped
- Your trade-off note from April
Search the way you actually remember it.
You rarely remember the doc title. You remember the shape of the problem, or the screen it happened on.
What you remember
Someone said the first screen made them think it was broken.
Clues Shelf can use
- Meaning: an empty state read as an error
- Text inside what you saved: “thought it was broken”
- Context: kept during onboarding research
- Semantic meaning
- Understood as empty-state confusion.
- Text inside the source
- The phrase appears in your notes.
- Related project
- Kept alongside the abandonment screenshots.
Kept nearby
- Step 2 drop-off screenshot · Same week
- Decision: keep three steps · Same thread
What makes this work.
Roadmaps and customer feedback stay on your Mac.
Your memory contains unreleased plans, named customer complaints, and pricing you haven't announced.
Shelf indexes and searches it locally. Nothing is uploaded to make search work, and nothing trains a model. Optional external-model features are clearly marked and off by default.
Good product decisions remember their reasons.
Keep the reasoning.
So the next time the question returns, you can answer it with what you saw.
Next thought
A decision without its evidence is just an opinion with a date.
How decisions stay connectedKeep exploring
Shelf V3 is out now
Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.
This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.
Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.