Dear PM handed the AI mandate at a denomination that still runs on paper calendars and Sunday volunteers,
You walked in thinking your job was to pick the model and set the guardrails. Instead you now decide what counts as acceptable output for the children’s ministry volunteer who has seven minutes between the end of the service and the moment the first kid walks through the door.
That decision sits heavier than any prompt you will write this quarter.
Charlie Munger’s latticework of mental models forces you to run the same choice through second-order effects, inversion, and redundancy before you call it taste. Most PMs stop after the first model. They judge output by how clean it reads on their own screen. The latticework requires you to add the model of the actual handoff: what breaks when the output reaches someone who never chose to be a prompt engineer.
The spec step that collapsed first
The first spec you inherited assumed the AI would handle the full lesson flow. It listed tone, length, and scripture references, then stopped. No one wrote down what happens when the volunteer prints page three and discovers the activity needs scissors the supply closet does not have.
Munger would call this a missing mental model. You cannot judge taste until you invert the flow and ask what the volunteer must now do by hand because the model omitted it. In one rollout the missing model was “print margins for a 1998 copier.” The taste looked polished until the first Sunday the margins cut off the prayer.
Taste without Sunday validation loops
Taste becomes expensive when it never meets the person who will use it. You can iterate prompts for weeks and still ship something that adds friction at 9:15 on Saturday night. The latticework exposes the gap: you are optimizing inside one discipline (model behavior) while ignoring the adjacent discipline (physical volunteer workflow).
The curriculum product I worked on learned this the hard way. Early AI drafts scored high on internal review for warmth and clarity. They failed the moment a volunteer tried to cut the craft in half to fit the table size. The second-order cost was not bad content. It was lost trust the next time leadership asked that same volunteer to try anything new.
The routing decision that actually protects presence
The real product decision is not which model to call. It is which outputs you route to a human before they reach the volunteer. Munger’s redundancy model applies here. You build a quick human checkpoint only on the elements that touch physical handoff: supply lists, timing, and anything that must survive a printer jam.
One team set the rule that any activity requiring more than two physical objects had to pass through a former volunteer before the AI version was approved. The checkpoint added four hours to the cycle. It removed an average of eleven minutes of volunteer rework on Sunday. The math favored the checkpoint once you measured against actual handoff friction instead of token spend.
Your Turn: Apply This Today
- Pull the last three AI-generated specs that went to volunteers and list every physical object or timing assumption each one made.
- Time one volunteer completing the print-and-prep step for each of those three outputs; note the actual minutes against what the spec claimed.
- Mark which of the three outputs required an extra supply run or format fix that the model did not flag.
- Write the missing mental model for each failure in one sentence, using the exact handoff moment as the subject.
- Route the next spec through a single former volunteer before it reaches the model, limiting their review to physical objects and timing only.
- Log the delta in volunteer completion time for the next three Sundays and keep the log in the same place you track token costs.
The PM Role That Stopped Shipping and Started Choosing showed what happens when selection replaces production as the core skill. The Morning the Print Step Broke traced the same friction back to one overlooked handoff.
I consult with product leaders at faith-based organizations on AI mandates, volunteer handoff friction, and taste decisions that survive real Sunday workflows. Let’s talk.