Honest question: do your engineers actually read your PRDs?

I've been asking this to PMs across Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune lately and the answers are... humbling.

The pattern I keep hearing:

"My engineers skim the PRD, then ask me the same questions the PRD already answers. So I explain it verbally. Which means the PRD was basically just a compliance document."

We write specs that nobody reads, then wonder why engineering keeps building the wrong thing.

I've been thinking about why this happens specifically in Indian startup teams and I think there are a few structural reasons:

1. Our PRDs are too long and too Western We copy Atlassian/Google templates designed for teams with dedicated tech writers. A 5-person eng team in HSR Layout does not need a 15-section spec document.

2. PRDs and tickets are always out of sync By the time the engineer opens the ticket in Linear, the PRD it references has been edited 4 times and the ticket still says the old thing. So engineers learn to ignore the PRD and just ask.

3. We don't write for engineers, we write for our managers PRDs are often approval documents, not engineering guides. The audience is wrong from the start.

I've been experimenting with shorter, more linked specs using scriptonia.dev to auto-generate and keep tickets in sync when I update a story and it's meaningfully different. But curious whether this is a tooling problem or a culture problem.

What's your experience? Do your engineers actually read your PRDs?

And if yes what made the difference?