Product 5w

Product 5W（产品五问）

A product that cannot answer five basic questions — who, what, when, how, why — is not underdocumented; it is undefined. This skill is the definition layer: it asks the questions a stranger with money would ask, refuses vague answers, and delivers a 5W brief where every claim wears a tag saying how it is known.

The object is a product or project at any stage — a paragraph of idea, a half-built repo, a shipped app. The stage does not change the questions; it changes what "verified" can mean. Establish the stage first, because it selects the mode:

• Before or during build — definition interrogation. The brief is the contract the build answers to, and the natural input for idea-probe's persona simulation afterwards.
• After build — definition audit. Answer the five questions from what the product is today, then compare against the founding answers (ask for them if they exist); if none exist, audit today's product alone and record the missing founding record as a finding. Divergence has exactly two readings — the product drifted from a right definition, or faithfully executed a wrong one — and the brief must say which it believes, with evidence.

Before the questions: what decision is this for?（先问决策）

Two gates, before any of the five questions runs:

• Decision mapping. What specific decision will this brief change — build or not, narrow to which audience, price at what, launch or wait? If no decision would move with the answers, say so and stop: research that informs nothing is a sideshow, however rigorous it looks. (Studying a market to decide what to build is itself a decision — name it.)
• Outcome verb rule. State the brief's objective with a verb whose completion is decidable — describe, evaluate, identify, compare. Reject "understand" and "explore": open-ended verbs never finish. "Understand my users" becomes "identify which claimed WHO has actually paid to solve this."

Sourcing rule

Drain what the user provided first — pitch, README, code, metrics, chat history — and draft answers from that. Then ask the user targeted questions ONLY where the answer could change the verdict. If the user cannot answer, that is a finding: write unknown and move on. Never fill a gap from model memory — a fact recalled from training data is at best inferred, never verified. And never invent market numbers: no TAM, market size, or conversion rate without a source. A professional-looking fake number is the worst artifact this skill can produce; "unknown" is the honest one.

Cold start with zero material: ask by W, in rounds of at most three questions — never pour the full sub-probe set at once.

The order stands — drain first, then ask — but the author's answers get no diplomatic immunity: a future-tense answer ("users would love this") or an adjective answer ("it's really fast") earns the behavioral counter-question before it earns a tag — has anyone? when, exactly? fast as in — how many minutes? An author's forecast about their own users is a hunch wearing a suit.

The meta-rule（元规则）

Every sub-probe below asks about past behavior, never future opinion. The two sharpest formulations in the field, quoted at their sources:

"Study Jobs by past expenditure of money, time, and energy — never by future intent." — zamesin/Next-Move-Theory

"Avoid 'would you use an app that…' — that question has never once produced reliable signal." — machinesoul11/anti-sycophant

People are poor forecasters of their own behavior and generous narrators of their own intentions; what they did — paid, switched, spent an evening on a workaround — is the only answer that can carry a verified tag. The rule governs both directions: the questions this skill asks the author now, and the field questions the brief hands back for verification later.

The five questions（五问）

Each question carries sub-probes whose job is to make the comfortable vague answer impossible.

WHO — 确切给谁

• Exactly who — and explicitly who it is NOT for. A WHO without an exclusion is a wish, not a definition; "for everyone" is not an answer, it is an alarm.
• Define WHO by behavior, not demographics: "people who switched PM tools in the last six months" is a WHO; "ages 25–40" finds people who resemble a user without ever having been one.
• The sharpest qualifying question, for the field list: "When did you last pay for X? What did you pay? What did you do as a result?" No past payment means willingness to pay remains unverified; it does not invalidate evidence of use. For a free tool, cite observed task completion, repeat use, switching effort, or a documented workaround to establish the specific behavior claimed. Keep user identity, use, and willingness to pay as separate claims; verify only what the source supports.
• Is the person who uses it the person who pays or decides? If not, both get an answer, because they need different WHYs.
• In B2B, the unit of WHO is the decision-maker — and behind every business job sits a personal one: not getting blamed, getting promoted, winning recognition. The brief names both layers or the WHY will later ring false.
• Who, concretely, are the first 10 users? Describable individuals — "my three ex-colleagues who still do this in spreadsheets" — not a demographic. "Developers" is not an answer; it is the absence of one.

WHAT — 替用户完成什么

• What job does the user hire it to complete — and what does it deliberately not do? A WHAT without a refusal list will grow until nobody can say what it is.
• Open field questions with the task, not the product: "tell me which tasks you solve with it", in the user's everyday words — the product's own vocabulary contaminates the answer.
• A generalized answer is not data. Pull it to the last concrete instance: "the last specific time — walk me through it, step by step."
• Adjectives get forced into numbers: "fast" is a mood; "it took 4 minutes" is a fact you can design, price, and measure against.
• The honest competitor set includes the boring options — a free tool, a spreadsheet, doing nothing. Do-nothing is the first row of every competitor list, because it usually wins.
• One sentence that defines it. If one-sentence is installed, use its discipline (one load-bearing idea, genus-differentia, every word earning its place); if not, still write one honest sentence — and if the product cannot be carried in one sentence, record that as a finding about the product.

WHEN — 情境与触发

WHEN here means context and trigger together — where, on what, and around whom the moment happens lives inside this question. There is deliberately no separate WHERE: a forced sixth question produces filler, and context divorced from its trigger describes a place, not a moment.

• The trigger, asked as an event: "what specific event or struggling moment made you look for a solution?" — the causation behind "today's the day I do something different." Name the event, not the mood.
• The context, asked separately from the trigger: where were they, on what device, under whose eyes, in the middle of what? A trigger that only fires in contexts the product can't reach is a definition problem, not a marketing one.
• How often does that moment occur? Daily-habit and yearly-emergency are different products wearing the same feature list.
• Match the tense to the frequency. A one-off job (rent an apartment, hire a lawyer) is asked in the past tense, anchored to the last concrete instance. A high-frequency job (order food, file a ticket) is asked in the habitual tense — "usually" — plus how often. One idiosyncratic instance misleads; one vague generality misleads worse.
• If the claimed WHO is happily locked into a good-enough habit at this moment, that is not a market this product can win, however large it looks — say so in the brief.
• Field-note for the verification list: recalled timing is systematically wrong. Temporal claims verify by diary or logs, not by asking people to remember; a remembered "when" is inferred at best.

HOW — 怎么被用 + 怎么被找到

• How is it used: first contact → first value → habit. Where in that path does the effort sit, and does it match WHO's patience?
• The incumbent, with teeth: "how are you currently solving this, and what specifically annoys you about that approach?" The annoyance is the wedge; no annoyance, no switch.
• The graveyard: "what have you already tried and abandoned?" Abandonment is past expenditure — stronger evidence than any amount of adoption talk, and it maps the failures this product must not repeat.
• The steps before and after must be anchored to the higher goal — unanchored, "what did you do before it?" invites "I had breakfast". Ask through the outcome: "before it, how did you get {the outcome} done?"
• The ultimate HOW test is a sale. The usage path ends at an offer — pre-order, deposit, invoice before the product exists — because willing-to-pay talk that never meets an offer stays assumed forever. For unpriced products the offer is any costly commitment — a deposit, a booked hour, a signed-up queue.
• How is it found? Distribution is the other half of HOW, and the half most authors leave blank. Name the channel by which WHO plausibly encounters it; if no channel exists, the honest HOW answer is "it isn't", and that outranks everything downstream.

WHY — 为什么重要

• Why does it matter to the user — stated as an outcome in their life, not a feature in the product.
• Climb the ladder: "why? in order to do what?" — at least one level above the stated outcome. The product competes at the level of the goal it serves, not the feature it ships.
• The do-nothing baseline: "what would happen if you did nothing and just continued as today?" If the honest answer is "not much", WHY has no floor and every other answer is decoration.
• Quantify the stakes: does failing cost time, money, or status — and roughly how much of which? An unquantified pain is a story; a quantified one is a price point.
• The sharpest single field question: "have you ever paid to solve this, or looked for something to pay for?"
• Boundary warning: unconscious drivers — status, identity, safety — do not interview. Asking "why" there returns a convincing, functional, false story. Write the hypothesis, tag it assumed, and note that it verifies through sales, A/B, or messaging tests — never through more direct questioning.
• Why now — what changed (technology, behavior, regulation, price) that makes this buildable or wanted today when it wasn't before?
• Why you — what does the author have that a competent stranger doesn't? "Nothing yet" is an acceptable, taggable answer; an invented moat is not.

The honesty ledger（诚实台账）

Every answer — every sub-answer — carries exactly one tag:

Where nothing is known, write unknown — it is a value, not a failure.

Cross-skill note: these tags correspond one-to-one to map-product-system's ledger (if installed) — verified ≈ Known, inferred ≈ Inferred, assumed ≈ Proposed, unknown ≈ Unknown — so a 5W brief and a system map read side by side without translation.

The ledger is the brief's instrument panel: report assumed+unknown density per question and overall. Assumed density IS risk density — a brief that is 80% assumed is not a bad brief, it is an accurate map of an unvalidated product, and saying so is the job.

For every question that is entirely assumed/unknown, generate the cheapest next verification action — cheapest, not most rigorous: ask 5 people from the claimed WHO, read one week of existing data, run one fake-door test, watch one person attempt the WHEN moment. Each action names which tag it would flip.

Desk vs field（桌面与田野）

Each of the five answers closes with two lines:

• Desk says — the best answer that reasoning over the provided material can produce.
• Only the field can prove — the part of that answer that stays hypothesis until a real user, a real payment, or a real log confirms it. This line may not be empty for any answer tagged assumed.

The split exists because desk work speeds up the thinking, not the proving — every untagged-as-verified claim is a hypothesis until checked in the field, and the brief's job is to make that boundary impossible to miss.

Consistency check（一致性核对）

The five answers must be able to co-exist. Cross-examine every pair and name contradictions explicitly, with both ends quoted: WHO says time-starved professionals, HOW demands a 20-minute onboarding. WHEN says rare emergency, WHY claims daily-habit value. WHO's buyer is a manager, HOW's channel only reaches interns. A brief whose answers contradict is describing two products — or none — and the contradiction list is often worth more than the answers.

The brief（简报）

Deliver in the user's language, in this order: verdict → the five answers with tags, sources, and their desk/field split → ledger census (assumed/unknown density per question) → contradictions → cheapest-verification list → handoff (pre-build: this brief is idea-probe's input; post-build: founding-vs-current divergence and its reading). Deliver in-chat; write to a file only when asked, at a path the user chooses.

The verdict is three-valued, and never bare:

• DEFINED — the five answers cohere; go build, or go validate the assumed ones. Name the single weakest answer even here.
• NARROW — the definition holds only for a subset of the claimed WHO or WHAT; name the subset that survives and what falls away.
• REDEFINE — the answers contradict or the load-bearing ones are absent; the set describes two products, or none. Name what must be re-answered first.

Whatever the value, it carries the validation debt line: "this verdict stands on N assumed or unknown answers, M of them load-bearing" — and the cheapest-verification list is where that debt gets paid. A verdict without its debt line reads like market evidence, which this brief never is.

Boundaries

• A research brief, never validation. Tagged answers are hypotheses with provenance. The brief must never read as market evidence, and the verified tag applies only to claims with citable sources.
• This skill defines; it does not simulate, map, or operate. The product line in build order: product-5w (definition) → idea-probe (persona simulation of first contact) → map-product-system (architecture) → product-experience-officer (hands-on experience audit). Hand off by name when the user's request has crossed the line; when the sibling is not installed, say what that seat would cover instead of doing its job badly here.
• Technical feasibility ("can this be built") is research, not one of the five questions — flag it as out of scope when it comes up.
• If every answer comes back verified and consistent, say so briefly and stop — do not manufacture doubt to look rigorous. The rarity of that outcome is its own signal.