Question 1

What is Stoa?

Accepted Answer

Stoa is a collaborative workspace for software product teams. It combines video calling, an AI agent, and decision capture in one room — so meetings don't just happen, they produce things. Instead of scrambling to write notes after the fact, Stoa's AI listens to your conversation and automatically extracts decisions, drafts specs, generates user stories, and flags open questions.

Question 2

Who is it for?

Accepted Answer

Primarily software product managers and their cross-functional teams — engineers, designers, and stakeholders. If your work involves aligning people, making decisions, and turning conversations into artifacts (PRDs, user stories, kickoff docs), Stoa is for you.

Question 3

What’s a “Space”?

Accepted Answer

A Space is your meeting room. You create one for a specific project or recurring meeting type. Add your PRD, mockups, or research docs. Invite your team. Everyone joins in seconds with shared context from the start. Your Space Agent runs throughout, listening and helping. Spaces persist between sessions, so your decision log and artifacts accumulate over time.

Question 4

Is Stoa free to use?

Accepted Answer

Yes — you can create your first Space and run your first meetings for free. No credit card required. Paid plans unlock unlimited Spaces and more agent time for larger teams.

Question 5

What does the Space Agent actually do during a meeting?

Accepted Answer

The Space Agent listens to your conversation and handles the mechanical work so you can focus on the thinking: decision capture, artifact generation (PRDs, user stories, acceptance criteria), open question tracking, context retrieval from previous sessions, and prototype building from descriptions in the conversation.

Question 6

How is this different from a transcription or meeting bot?

Accepted Answer

Transcription is table stakes. The real value is in what happens to the transcript: structure, extraction, and connection to your existing artifacts. A transcription tool gives you a wall of text. Stoa identifies which sentences are decisions, which are open questions, which describe scope changes — and acts on them. The output isn't a transcript; it's a decision log, a PRD draft, and a set of ready-to-import user stories.

Question 7

Can it build actual working prototypes?

Accepted Answer

Yes. During a meeting, the Space Agent can write and run code from a description in your conversation. Stakeholders can interact with a working prototype before engineering starts — no separate prototyping tool required.

Question 8

What happens to open questions that don’t get answered in the meeting?

Accepted Answer

Stoa tracks them. Unresolved questions raised during a meeting are captured with their context and surfaced at the start of the next relevant session. This directly solves the 'last 10% problem' — the edge cases and deferred decisions that evaporate when the call ends but accumulate as rework later.

Question 9

What kinds of meetings work best in Stoa?

Accepted Answer

Any meeting where a product team needs to make decisions and produce artifacts. The most common are: engineering kickoffs, PRD reviews, scoping sessions, design handoffs and reviews, user research readouts, retrospectives, roadmap and stakeholder reviews, and prospect meetings and demos.

Question 10

Does it work for user research interviews and usability sessions?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Stoa can summarize interviews, extract user pain points, and surface Jobs-to-be-Done insights from your conversations. For usability sessions, it identifies friction points and generates findings — so your research produces artifacts, not just recordings.

Question 11

What about pricing and business model conversations?

Accepted Answer

Absolutely. Competitor pricing analysis, willingness-to-pay signals from customer conversations, and packaging discussions all produce structured outputs. Stoa can summarize a pricing research discussion, extract key signals, and draft packaging options.

Question 12

How does decision capture work?

Accepted Answer

As your team talks, the Space Agent identifies when a decision is made and captures it in a structured format: what was decided, the context that prompted it, the options that were considered, the rationale for the choice, and who was in the room. Decisions appear in the Decisions tab in real time and are shared with your team after the meeting.

Question 13

What artifacts does Stoa generate?

Accepted Answer

Decision logs (what was decided, by whom, and why), PRD drafts, user stories and acceptance criteria formatted for Linear or Jira, edge case documentation, open questions with owners and due dates, meeting summaries and follow-up docs, engineering kickoff and design handoff notes, action items with named owners, and retrospective lessons and sprint health notes.

Question 14

Do the artifacts need a lot of cleanup before they’re usable?

Accepted Answer

They're starting points, not final deliverables — but good starting points. A PM who walks out of a scoping session with a first draft of user stories already generated is reviewing and refining rather than creating from scratch. The blank page problem is solved; the judgment call is still yours.

Question 15

Does it integrate with Linear or Jira?

Accepted Answer

User stories and tasks generated in Stoa are formatted for import into Linear and Jira. You can copy them directly into your sprint planning workflow without reformatting.

Question 16

Does Stoa replace my video conferencing tool?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Stoa includes built-in video calling. When you join a Space, your video and audio connect automatically. You don't need Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams running alongside it. The call and the AI are in the same room, so the agent hears everything without a separate bot joining the meeting.

Question 17

Can multiple people work in the same Space?

Accepted Answer

Yes — that's the point. Invite your engineer, designer, stakeholder, or anyone else who needs to be in the decision. Everyone sees the same agent output, transcript, and decision log in real time.

Question 18

Can I use Stoa for async collaboration, not just live meetings?

Accepted Answer

The primary experience is live — a real-time meeting with video and AI. But Spaces persist, so everything captured in a session is available to review, share, and build on between meetings. Teammates who weren't in the room can read the decision log and catch up on what was decided without a follow-up meeting.

Question 19

What’s Stoa’s take on AI and product management?

Accepted Answer

AI's job is to handle the mechanical work so humans can focus on the work only humans can do. Listening, empathizing, synthesizing, deciding — these require presence and judgment. Transcription, documentation, artifact generation, decision formatting — these are mechanical and should be automated. The goal isn't to replace PMs. It's to free them from the rote work that masquerades as product management.

Question 20

What design framework does Stoa use to think about product meetings?

Accepted Answer

Stoa is built around IDEO's design thinking framework — specifically the DVF lens: Desirable (does anyone want this?), Viable (can we sustain a business on it?), and Feasible (can we build it?). Every product meeting is fundamentally a question about one or more of these.

Question 21

Does my context stay mine? Can I take it with me?

Accepted Answer

Yes — completely. Stoa is built on a local-first ethos: the context you build belongs to you, not to the vendor. Every decision, open question, and accumulated context is stored in a structured, queryable format you own. It doesn't disappear if you cancel. It doesn't become a training set. It doesn't require an enterprise plan to export.

Frequently asked questions

The fastest way to understand Stoa is to use it.