product-strategy — the Discovery Brief

First link of the discovery pipeline. It interviews socratically —never agreeing too early— to separate the symptom from the cause, and closes by writing the Discovery Brief: the problem, the evidence behind it, and up to three prioritized hypotheses.

When it is invoked

When	From / to
Discovery starts on a new opportunity or a problem with no prior research	Invocable on its own, over the loaded product node
The Discovery Brief is written	Exit toward `market-research` ( `.claude/skills/market-research/SKILL.md` ) — next station of the pipeline
The metric gate does not pass	Handoff toward `product-metrics` ( `.claude/skills/product-metrics/SKILL.md` ) — builds the North Star and the hypothesis metric before going on

product-metrics

is already installed in this pack: the handoff is real, not the dangling reference to a metrics coach that the old pipeline used to name.

The interview

It is run with the pressure method of

.claude/skills/grill/SKILL.md#method

— cited by path, never copied.

Socratic: it does not agree

Faced with a proposal that already arrives shaped as a solution ("we need a tracking dashboard", "we have to add notifications"), the answer is neither accepted nor elaborated: the counter-question that separates the solution from the problem is returned.

Bad: "good idea, what would that dashboard have?"

Good: "that is a solution. What problem does it solve, and whose problem is it?"

It repeats until the answer names a concrete person's problem — never a feature.

Evidence hierarchy

All evidence backing the problem is graded with the same hierarchy

grill

uses:

behavior > data > claim > assumption

. "Several clients asked for it" (claim) does not weigh the same as "3 out of 5 abandon checkout at the shipping step" (data), nor as a recorded session where someone tries it and gets stuck (behavior). The lowest-grade evidence available is recorded anyway, with its level next to it — it is not discarded, it is labeled.

The metric gate

With no metric, the problem is not clear. Before accepting the problem as well posed, the question is asked: which number would move if this were solved? If there is no answer, or the one that shows up is a vanity metric (it changes no decision), the gate does not pass: it is said explicitly and the work is handed off to

product-metrics

to build it before going on. Nothing proceeds as if the gate had passed.

Hypotheses, with a fixed format

Every hypothesis is written in this shape, without exception:

We believe that [segment] [does X] at [moment] because of [cause]; if that is true, we will see [evidence].

Generic example (e-commerce): "We believe that buyers who abandon the cart at the shipping step do so because the cost only appears there; if that is true, we will see that showing the cost earlier reduces abandonment at that step." A hypothesis without the "if that is true, we will see..." clause is not a hypothesis: it is an opinion shaped like one, and it is returned with a counter-question.

At most 3, prioritized by risk × impact — never by order of appearance in the conversation. Risk: how little is known about whether it is true. Impact: how much it moves the gate metric if confirmed. A fourth hypothesis that shows up is recorded as a gap in the backlog; it does not enter the list.

The Discovery Brief

It closes by writing the deliverable as dated research of the loaded product node, in:

context/<YYYY-MM-DD>-discovery-brief.md

Dated, never overwritten — the same criterion the research folder of this repo already uses. The path falls inside

content: orgs/*/products/*/context/*.md

tree.md

: no new glob and no resolver row are needed.

The Brief carries these four sections, in this order, each with its literal heading:

## Problem
## Evidence
## Metric gate
## Prioritized hypotheses

Problem: the symptom separated from the cause, whose it is and why now.
Evidence: each piece with its hierarchy level (
```
behavior
```
,
```
data
```
,
```
claim
```
or
```
assumption
```
) next to it.
Metric gate: passed or not, and if it did not, the handoff to
```
product-metrics
```
left explicit.
Prioritized hypotheses: up to 3, in the fixed format, ordered by risk × impact with the reason for the order.

What this deliverable does not claim

The Discovery Brief does not replace the strategic layer that

prd

writes: it is dated research, input for the next stations of the pipeline, never the living canon of the product.

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

.claude/skills/

first and offer only the ones that are not there — inside AI First OS they are all installed already, so nothing here gets offered:

grill

—

npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill grill

market-research

—

npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill market-research

prd

—

npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill prd

product-metrics

—

npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill product-metrics

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.

product-strategy

NPX Install

Tags

SKILL.md Content