ideation-engine — the ideation kit and the Value Map
Sixth station of the pipeline, and the first one that works the solution space. It runs in two
modes around a workshop of humans: DIVERGE prepares everything so that a team ideates well, and
CONVERGE turns what that team produced and decided into the Value Map and the prototype brief.
Generic domain example: a B2B appointment-management app for small clinics, whose customer profile
came out of twelve real interviews.
If it is not obvious which mode applies, it asks before anything else: are we preparing the
workshop, or processing its results?
When it is invoked
| When | From / to |
|---|
| The customer profile is validated | Entry from (.claude/skills/insight-engine/SKILL.md
|
| The workshop happened | Entry from the workshop itself: the humans ideated and voted, outside any agent |
| The Value Map and the prototype brief are written | Exit toward (.claude/skills/prd/SKILL.md
.claude/skills/visual-designer/SKILL.md
|
| With no prior Insight Brief | Invocable on its own, with a customer profile pasted in as the minimum input: with no profile there is no ideation — ideating with no evidence of the problem is decorating assumptions |
Rule number one
It prepares, it seeds and it synthesizes — it never picks the winning idea. Creative convergence
belongs to the humans in the room: this station orders and writes down what they voted. Asked to
choose, it explains why the decision is the team's and hands back the tie unbroken.
The tool is not assumed
The board is written as a specification, zone by zone, in the deliverable — an ordered list of
zones with what goes in each one. Whoever builds the board builds it from there: the team on a wall
with sticky notes, a spreadsheet, a whiteboard tool, or an executor agent connected to whatever
design tool the team already uses. No tool ships with this pack and none is assumed to be
connected; a board specification that only works with one particular integration is a workshop
that does not happen when the integration is missing.
The same holds coming back in CONVERGE: the results are read from whatever the team can hand over —
pasted text, an export, a photo of the wall transcribed by the operator. What is required is not a
format: it is that the vote was registered.
MODE DIVERGE — prepare the workshop
The inputs are the customer profile (required), the business outcome (the visible north of the
board), and the participants with their role and their table if they come grouped. With no
participant list, five generic ones are assumed and that assumption is written down.
1. Ingest and validate. Summarize the profile received: segment, top jobs by dimension, pains,
gains, opportunities. Missing jobs or missing evidence are pointed at, never completed.
2. How Might We. Each prioritized opportunity, pain or gain becomes a question. Three rules, all
hard:
traceability —every question cites the job, pain or gain it comes from, with its verbatim
when there is one—;
altitude —a good question admits five or more different solutions: too wide
does not orient, too narrow is a solution in disguise—; and
between 3 and 5 of them: more does
not converge, fewer does not diverge. Each question is pressured with the method of
.claude/skills/grill/SKILL.md#method
—cited by path, never copied— against its origin: a question that
traces to nothing does not enter the board.
3. Seed ideas, sealed. Three or four ideas per question, each labeled by the technique that
produced it: [ANALOGY] from another industry, [INVERSION] turning the assumption around,
[EXAGGERATION] taken to the extreme, [COMBINATION] crossing two elements, [PERSPECTIVE]
ideating as a radically different actor. The techniques are varied on purpose: ideas generated by an
agent tend to come out of the same conceptual neighborhood, and forcing the angle is the antidote.
The sealed zone is not negotiable: the seed ideas go into their own zone, marked as sealed, and
are revealed after the human silent brainstorm. Seeing them first anchors the group into a
narrower space and shrinks the exploration. The agent is one more participant — never the first one.
4. The facilitation kit. A timeboxed agenda against the real duration and the real number of
people: opening with outcome and profile → warm-up → walking the questions → silent brainstorm
per lane, which is what kills anchoring, groupthink and the loudest voice → sharing with judgment
deferred → revealing the sealed zone → affinity clustering → dot voting with a stated number of
votes per person → impact × effort matrix → populating the value map → close with next steps and
owners. Roles named (facilitator, timekeeper) and the rule stated: quantity while diverging,
judgment only while converging.
5. The board specification, zones in order: header with outcome and participants · profile
summary with short verbatims · the questions with their traceability · warm-up · one silent
brainstorm lane per participant, grouped by table if there are tables · the sealed seed-idea zone
with its "do not open" sign · a free clustering area · dot voting with the rule of how a vote is
recorded · a podium zone where the facilitator writes the three to five most voted ideas with
their count · the impact × effort matrix · the empty value map · parking lot.
The podium is the cheapest insurance in the whole workshop: thirty seconds of human work that make
the synthesis unambiguous. Without it, the vote has to be reconstructed, and a reconstructed vote is
an invented one.
MODE CONVERGE — process the results
1. Faithful inventory. List what the team produced: ideas by lane and author, clusters if they
built them, votes if they registered them, matrix winners if they used it. The podium is the source
of truth; any count made from the raw board is a cross-check, and when the two disagree the
difference is shown and confirmation is asked for. Votes, clusters and consensus are never
invented: with no legible record of the vote, that is said and the list of winners is requested
before going on.
2. Cluster and deduplicate. Merge duplicates and variants of the same solution, saying which
ones were merged. Ideas orphaned from every question are flagged as such.
3. The Value Map. Each winning idea is classified as product or service, pain reliever
or gain creator, with double traceability: which job, pain or gain of the profile it attacks,
and which workshop idea originates it, author included — credit is part of the record. An item that
relieves no pain and creates no gain is an orphan feature: it is marked as one and the team is
told to justify it or drop it.
4. The prototype brief, self-contained, ready to hand to whoever builds the prototype: product
and segment in one line · the profile summarized in top three jobs, pains and gains · the value
proposition just built · the key flow to prototype (the one covering the most voted idea; a tie is
asked about, never broken) · the minimum screens with the essential content of each · and what the
prototype has to test, written as we believe [segment] will [behavior] because [evidence from the
research]. The brief never starts from zero: all of its context comes from the research and the
workshop, and that is the whole point.
The two deliverables
Both are written as dated research of the loaded product node, never overwritten:
context/<YYYY-MM-DD>-ideation-kit.md
context/<YYYY-MM-DD>-value-map.md
The paths fall inside
content: orgs/*/products/*/context/*.md
of
: no new
glob and no resolver row are needed.
DIVERGE writes the kit, with these four sections, each with its literal heading:
## How Might We
## Seed ideas (sealed)
## Facilitation agenda
## Board specification
CONVERGE writes the map, with these four:
## Faithful inventory
## Value map
## Prototype brief
## What was left out
What was left out is written every time: voted ideas that did not make it into the map and why,
hypotheses with not enough evidence behind them, and the warning signs of the workshop if there were
any — one participant dominating, or every winner attacking functional jobs while nobody touched the
emotional or social ones.
What this deliverable does not claim
The Value Map is a draft of the solution space built on evidence, not a validated proposition:
what the team chose still has to be put in front of real people. Deciding the scope of the product
and writing its strategic layer is the job of
.
Standalone use
Without a brain, the deliverable is written to a file in the current folder: the process is the
same, but nothing is filed into a node, a backlog or a resolver, and no session scan brings it back
later. Inside AI First OS the destinations named above are the real ones and this section does not
apply.
The rest of the pack installs one skill at a time. Look at
first and offer only
the ones that are not there — inside AI First OS they are all installed already, so nothing here
gets offered:
- —
npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill grill
- —
npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill insight-engine
- —
npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill prd
- —
npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill visual-designer
The whole pack at once:
npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills
.
The system these skills come from is AI First OS —
github.com/pedroromeroluna/ai-first-os
— where they run over a brain instead of over the current
folder.