Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework by Clayton Christensen. Analyzes requirements through the lens of what 'job' customers hire products to do. Covers functional, emotional, and social jobs. Use when understanding underlying customer motivations or reframing features as outcomes.
4-step framework for system design interviews. Use when preparing for technical interviews, practicing whiteboard design, or structuring architectural discussions. Covers requirements gathering, high-level design, deep dives, and wrap-up.
Map value chains from user needs to underlying components
Analyze requirements for completeness, missing areas, and gaps. Uses domain checklists, NFR categories, and INVEST criteria to identify what's missing from elicited requirements.
Use Case 2.0 methodology for capturing functional requirements and actor interactions
Use when designing visual interfaces, data visualizations, educational content, or presentations and need to ensure they align with how humans naturally perceive, process, and remember information. Invoke when user mentions cognitive load, visual hierarchy, dashboard design, form design, e-learning, infographics, or wants to improve clarity and reduce user confusion. Also applies when evaluating existing designs for cognitive alignment or choosing between design alternatives.
Use when validating product assumptions before building, discovering unmet user needs, understanding customer problems and workflows, testing concepts or positioning, researching target markets, identifying jobs-to-be-done and hiring triggers, uncovering pain points and workarounds, or when users mention user research, customer interviews, surveys, discovery interviews, validation studies, or voice of customer.
Use when optimizing multi-factor systems with limited experimental budget, screening many variables to find the vital few, discovering interactions between parameters, mapping response surfaces for peak performance, validating robustness to noise factors, or when users mention factorial designs, A/B/n testing, parameter tuning, process optimization, or experimental efficiency.
Use when stakeholders have conflicting priorities and need alignment, suspect decision blind spots from single perspective, need to pressure-test proposals before presenting, want empathy for different viewpoints (eng vs PM vs legal vs user), building consensus across functions, evaluating tradeoffs with multi-dimensional impact, or when user mentions "what would X think", "stakeholder alignment", "see from their perspective", "blind spots", or "conflicting interests".
Business rules elicitation and analysis techniques. Covers rule types (constraints, derivations, inferences), decision tables, rule templates, and policy documentation. Use when identifying business policies, constraints, calculations, and decision logic during requirements elicitation.
Create Wardley Maps from value chains and user needs
Decision validation and thinking frameworks for startup founders. Use when you need to pressure-test a decision, validate your next steps, think through strategic options, or sanity-check your approach. Triggers on phrases like "should I", "help me think through", "is this the right move", "validate my thinking", "what am I missing". Covers fundraising, customer development, runway management, prioritization, and crypto/web3 founder challenges.
Apply interaction design principles to create intuitive, responsive interfaces. Use when designing component behaviors, micro-interactions, loading states, transitions, user flows, accessibility patterns, or when the user asks about UX, animation timing, keyboard navigation, or progressive disclosure.
Critique UI/UX designs for clarity, hierarchy, interaction, accessibility, and craft. Use for design reviews, PR feedback on UI changes, evaluating mockups, checking if a component is ship-ready, or when honest feedback is needed on whether something meets a high bar.
Skill for maintaining clear, DRY, and easy-to-navigate design documents for architect agents.
Systematic framework for analyzing product documents (PRDs, feature specs, user stories, roadmaps, one-pagers) to identify gaps, generate clarifying questions for PMs and engineers, and assess technical risks. This skill should be used when engineers or technical leads need to bridge PM documents and implementation by eliciting missing technical details rather than making assumptions. Use when asked to extract technical requirements, review specs, identify what's missing, or prepare clarifying questions from product documents.
Define what the Story Control Panel shows, how to compute signals, and how the author should act on alerts.
Apply cognitive science and HCI research to design decisions. Use when you need the scientific 'why' behind usability, explaining user behavior, understanding perception/memory/attention limits, evaluating cognitive load, assessing mental model alignment, predicting performance with Fitts's/Hick's Law, or grounding interface decisions in research rather than opinion.
Use when creating or developing, before writing code or implementation plans - refines rough ideas into fully-formed designs through collaborative questioning, alternative exploration, and incremental validation. Don't use during clear 'mechanical' processes
Read user profile from workspace and calculate content relevance. Use to personalize output based on user interests.
Apply professional typography principles to create readable, hierarchical, and aesthetically refined interfaces. Use when setting type scales, choosing fonts, adjusting spacing, designing text-heavy layouts, or when the user asks about readability, font pairing, line height, measure, or typographic hierarchy.
Framework for structured product decision-making. Use when facing complex tradeoffs, aligning stakeholders, documenting decisions, or choosing between multiple valid approaches.
Design and analyze business models using the Business Model Canvas framework. Use when evaluating startups, planning new products, pivoting existing businesses, or understanding how companies create and capture value.
