Frame Opportunity

/frame-opportunity

Help the user understand a problem space before deciding what to build, following the opportunity-framing skill. The agent interrogates; the user decides. This skill never asks what the solution looks like — that question belongs to /clarify-idea, later.

Input: $ARGUMENTS

Workflow

1. Capture the opportunity as it arrived. From the arguments, or ask for it in one line if empty. Restate it in one sentence to anchor the starting point. If what arrived is a solution ("a better whiteboard"), say so, park it as a candidate idea for the bottom of the brief, and work on the problem underneath it: "what would have to be true about these people for a better whiteboard to matter?" If what arrived is an outcome ("increase retention"), say so too — the outcome lives in the overview; the question here is which problem, for whom, would move it.

2. Load the evidence first. Read product/overview.md (mode, sponsor, the belief registry — note which registered beliefs, product-wide or from other opportunities, touch this one), product/personas/, product/research/, recent product/insights/, and existing product/opportunities/ (an opportunity already framed for the same problem is reused, not duplicated). Facts that live in these artifacts are looked up, never asked.

3. Question loop. Same rules as /clarify-idea — one question at a time; every question carries a recommended answer grounded in the evidence, cited; ask decisions, not facts (what only real users could answer is a belief, not a question for the user); "I don't know" is a finding; stop at shared understanding, typically 5–8 decisions — walking this tree in order, never asking downstream while upstream is unresolved:

   • What problem, stated as a behavior or a cost ("team leads re-decide the same thing twice a week"), never as a missing feature.
   • For whom: list every existing persona by name with its type (primary | secondary | tertiary | negative) and one mark — suffers this problem, does not suffer it — and say whether a persona that suffers it is missing. The mark is about the problem, not the type: a tertiary who does not suffer it may still be the one who answers the viability belief, and a primary of the product may have nothing to do with this opportunity. The type never rules a persona out. A persona without a type: line gets one proposed from its content (written only with the user's approval, never blocking the loop). A missing persona is noted in the brief and /generate-personas is suggested for the gap in one line — not run.
   • What signals support it, each with its provenance label (real / survey / secondary / synthetic / unverified). Numbers quoted in a brief or a deck are unverified signals until the source is named.
   • What business outcome it serves — commercial: revenue, retention, upgrade; internal: the sponsor's metric or a cost avoided. Read the mode from the overview.
   • What would have to be true for this to be worth pursuing: the value belief and the viability belief of the opportunity, stated so an instrument could prove them wrong.
   • Constraints that bound any future solution — budget, dates, compliance — recorded as facts, not as decisions about the solution.

   If the user drifts into solutions, park the idea under candidate ideas and return to the problem. Never ask "what would it look like?", "which features?", or "how would it work?".

4. Synthesize into an opportunity brief per the opportunity-framing skill's format: statement (problem + segment + why now), segment and personas — each by name, with its type and whether it suffers the problem — with the missing persona if any, signals table with provenance, business outcome, constraints, beliefs referenced from the registry, the research agenda (per belief: the cheapest instrument that resolves it, the decision it unlocks, by when — this section is the skill's real payoff), and candidate ideas parked along the way, explicitly marked not evaluated. Show the full brief in the conversation before asking to save it.

5. Register the beliefs in the overview — the brief keeps no list of its own. product/overview.md is the single belief registry. For each belief: if it matches one already registered (product-wide or from another opportunity), the brief references that line; if new, propose appending it to the unverified beliefs as [opportunity: {slug}] [value|viability] {belief} — slug = the brief's slug; [usability]/[feasibility] only when one bounds the whole opportunity, per the knowledge skill — ranked among the existing beliefs by impact × uncertainty. Write nothing to the overview without the user's approval. No product/overview.md yet → suggest /start-product in one line and keep the beliefs in the brief, marked as pending registration.

6. Save to product/opportunities/{YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM}-{slug}.md (timestamp = creation date) once the user has seen the brief and agreed. Discarded opportunities are worth saving too, with status: discarded and why — the next person who brings the same problem finds the reasoning.

7. Close with the next step in one line, following the research agenda: /research-market on this opportunity first (secondary is cheap and narrows the agenda); then /design-survey and /design-interview for what the market can't answer — interviews recruited among the survey's opt-ins; /clarify-idea only once the problem holds, pointing at this opportunity so the idea inherits its beliefs.

Language

Conversation and the saved brief in the language of the conversation. The belief tags and provenance labels are fixed English tokens in every language, like source: values.