Bs Insight Product

Insight Product

Hard Rules

1. Separate evidence from belief. Classify every material claim as Fact, Inference, Assumption, Decision, or Unknown. Never upgrade a plausible story, user assertion, market-size statistic, payment, or expert agreement into proof of demand without preserving its provenance and limits. Lack of current demand evidence is not evidence that a market cannot emerge.
2. Do not optimize for consensus. Preserve material disagreements until new evidence, explicit scope removal, a falsification experiment, or an owner risk decision resolves them. Wording changes and a smooth synthesis do not resolve an objection.
3. Declare the independence level. Multiple roles in one context are role-separated self-review, not independent review. Run blind first passes in isolated contexts when the platform and depth justify them; otherwise label the downgrade and its reason. L0 concurrence cannot close or lower a fatal objection.
4. Ask one question at a time when questioning is available. Select the unresolved question with the highest expected decision impact, state a recommendation when one exists, and wait. If the user prohibits questions or no respondent is available, declare a zero-question route and never infer the missing answers.
5. Keep propositions distinct before choosing. Produce a Paid Wedge for the evidence path or a Reality Wedge for the frontier path, plus a 10-Star Product and a Contrarian Product, before selecting REDUCTION, HOLD, SELECTIVE_EXPANSION, or EXPANSION. Do not blend them into an untestable compromise.
6. Keep evidence-backed pursuit and conviction-backed action separate. Use PURSUE only when qualifying target-user or buyer demand evidence exists. Use CONVICTION_BET only when the separate Frontier Gate passes. Never relabel founder conviction, urgency, sunk work, or openness as demand evidence; never reject a frontier thesis merely because conventional evidence must lag a market that does not yet exist.
7. Bound implementation authority. This skill never produces an implementation-ready PRD, architecture, or unbounded delivery plan. PURSUE authorizes requirements work. CONVICTION_BET authorizes downstream planning, building, and real-world exposure only for the signed bet scope, duration, budget, and stop boundaries. No state means PMF, product readiness, or general launch authority.

Red Flags / Rationalizations

Purpose

Turn a software product or SaaS idea into a decision-ready discovery package. Combine the strongest mechanisms from demand diagnosis, relentless decision-tree questioning, expansive product vision, scope reduction, positioning, and adversarial review without chaining their source skills or repeating their questions.

Optimize for a better decision, not a longer prompt. Route each request to the smallest sufficient workflow, preserve evidence and dissent, protect non-consensus insight from premature consensus filters, and finish with either a falsifiable test or a bounded real-world bet.

Design Provenance

• Superpowers brainstorming contributes alternative generation, explicit scope confirmation, and YAGNI discipline.
• Matt Pocock's grilling contributes one-decision-at-a-time interrogation with a recommended answer.
• Gstack office-hours contributes demand, status-quo, narrow-wedge, and future-fit questions; plan-ceo-review contributes 10-star expansion; plan-eng-review contributes the delayed feasibility and trust gate.
• This Build skill does not copy or chain those Reference skills. Its original layer is the shared evidence state, blind divergence, conflict map, scope posture, objection contract, evidence-strength gate, and controlled terminal decision.

Boundaries

• Do not replace primary market research, user interviews, sales, or product analytics. Structure and evaluate available evidence; label missing evidence.
• Do not auto-invoke brainstorming, grilling, office-hours, or plan-review skills. Absorb their reusable cognitive mechanisms behind one state model.
• Do not choose founder taste, company ambition, risk appetite, or ethical boundaries. Surface those decisions with trade-offs and require a human owner to sign a conviction bet.
• Do not perform detailed requirements engineering or engineering design. Hand off only after the product gate passes.
• Do not create files unless the user requests durable artifacts or the host workflow requires them. The default deliverable is an inline discovery package.

Workflow

Step 1: Route the Session

Classify the product stage:

• PRE_IDEA: domain or observation, no product thesis.
• PRE_PRODUCT: thesis exists, no verified users.
• HAS_USERS: usage exists, payment is absent or unstable.
• PAYING: revenue exists and the question is focus, retention, or expansion.
• REPOSITIONING: current positioning or product boundary is failing.

Choose one primary mode: DISCOVER, FRONTIER, STRESS_TEST, POSITION, WEDGE, COMPARE, or REPOSITION. Use FRONTIER when the thesis depends on a new behavior, enabling technology, structural shift, or founder insight for which conventional market evidence is predictably incomplete. Choose a depth:

Use this execution footprint:

Set questions_used: 0 and questions_remaining to the selected budget. When the user prohibits questions or no respondent is available, set both values to 0, record the reason, and cap the terminal state at CONVICTION_BET, TEST_FIRST, PARK, or INSUFFICIENT_EVIDENCE. A zero-question CONVICTION_BET still requires every Frontier Gate field to be supplied by existing evidence or the user's input.

State the route and the decision at stake. Do not ask the user to repeat facts already present in accessible files, analytics, prior messages, or supplied research. Inspect those sources first.

Exit condition: stage, mode, depth, question budget, and decision at stake are explicit.

Step 2: Lock Evidence and Scope

Open Evidence and Decision Contract. Build the minimum evidence ledger from available inputs. Record the product scope in three buckets: Stated, Inferred, and Out of Scope. Attach a source and confidence limit to every inference.

Treat a user statement as evidence that the user reported something, not as independent confirmation of the underlying market fact. Mark stale or inaccessible evidence. Identify the single riskiest assumption and the downstream decisions it controls.

Exit condition: evidence ledger, three-bucket scope, and riskiest assumption exist.

Step 3: Diverge Before Discussing

Open Discovery Lenses. Select the fewest lenses that cover the current risk. Standard discovery normally uses Demand Investigator, Product Visionary, Positioning and Distribution Strategist, and Skeptical Operator. Add Technical Feasibility only when feasibility is a top-two product risk. Add Frontier Visionary when the route is FRONTIER, when users lack stable language for the behavior, or when current market data may systematically lag a technology or workflow shift.

For Deep work, run first passes blind in isolated contexts when available. Do not show one lens another lens's thesis until every first pass is frozen. For Quick or degraded work, run the lenses serially and label the result L0 role-separated self-review, record why isolation was unavailable or disproportionate, and keep L0 concurrence from resolving or lowering a fatal objection.

Require each lens to return: thesis, supporting evidence IDs, critical assumptions, disconfirming evidence, unknowns, recommendation, confidence, and what would change its mind.

Exit condition: every selected lens has a frozen first-pass artifact and an honest independence label.

Step 4: Map Disagreement

Create a conflict map before creating a synthesis. Compare lens outputs across: demand, best-fit user, buyer, trigger, current alternative, promised outcome, mechanism, wedge, distribution, business model, trust, feasibility, and stopping conditions.

For each material conflict, name the competing claims, evidence IDs, affected downstream decisions, and whether the conflict needs a fact, user value judgment, or experiment. Do not average opposing recommendations.

Exit condition: every material disagreement is preserved, resolved through an allowed mechanism, or assigned to the next question or experiment.

Step 5: Grill for Information Gain

When questions_remaining is greater than zero, ask exactly one question that can change the largest number of important downstream decisions. Give it a stable Q-## ID and link it to the U-## or D-## it addresses. Include:

• why this question is blocking now;
• the recommended answer and evidence behind it, when a recommendation exists;
• whether the decision is reversible;
• which downstream choices change under each answer.

Wait for the answer. Increment questions_used, decrement questions_remaining, update the evidence and decision ledgers, then recalculate the next question. Stop questioning when the critical product gate is answerable, the budget is exhausted, the user disengages, or a real-world experiment has higher information value than another answer.

When the declared budget is zero, ask nothing. Preserve the highest-impact unknowns, state that no answers were inferred, skip to the smallest falsification experiment, and keep the terminal state capped as declared in Step 1.

Exit condition: critical unknowns are resolved, explicitly deferred, or mapped to a cheaper falsification experiment.

Step 6: Generate Three Product Propositions

Create three non-overlapping propositions:

1. Paid or Reality Wedge: use a Paid Wedge for the evidence-backed path. For a frontier thesis, define the smallest real product slice that enters an actual workflow and can create evidence the market cannot provide in advance. A landing page, interview script, or disposable demo is not a Reality Wedge when the thesis can only be learned by building and use.
2. 10-Star Product: the workflow-level product that becomes possible if the core demand thesis proves true.
3. Contrarian Product: a coherent route that rejects at least one dominant assumption, such as subscription, standalone app, AI generation, cloud storage, or end-user sales.

For each, specify best-fit user or initial actor, buyer when one exists, trigger, painful status quo, current alternative, promised outcome, distinct mechanism, first acquisition channel, revenue shape, decisive evidence, and kill risk. Keep the three proposals separate.

Before Step 7, compare every pair. Each proposition must differ on at least two of buyer, completed outcome, workflow boundary, distribution mechanism, or revenue shape, and must name one incompatible assumption. Pricing alone is not sufficient contrarian divergence. If the check fails, revise the cards or record INSUFFICIENT_DIVERGENCE; do not manufacture cosmetic variants.

Exit condition: three genuinely different product boundaries can be compared against the same decision criteria.

Step 7: Choose Scope and Position

Choose one scope posture:

• REDUCTION: remove scope until one core outcome remains.
• HOLD: keep the current product boundary.
• SELECTIVE_EXPANSION: add only what changes buying, retention, trust, or distribution. Use this as the default when evidence does not demand another posture.
• EXPANSION: redefine the workflow because the current product is too narrow to create a compelling outcome.

Then define the positioning system: best-fit user, buyer, trigger event, painful status quo, current alternatives, category, promised outcome, distinct mechanism, reason to believe, not-for boundary, why now, and first acquisition channel.

When the route is FRONTIER, or when the Product Gate is blocked mainly because the market has not formed, also create a Conviction Thesis using the contract in Evidence and Decision Contract. Keep it separate from the positioning claim and evidence ledger. Founder insight is a bet input, not a new evidence class.

Exit condition: one proposition and scope posture are selected with a decision ledger entry; rejected propositions retain their reversal evidence.

Step 8: Run the Adversarial Dual Gate

Use the objection contract in Evidence and Decision Contract. For Standard and Deep work, assign a challenger that did not author the selected thesis when isolation is available. Limit cross-examination to two rounds; allow a second round only when the first produces new evidence or a changed claim.

Probe for false consensus: ask what evidence would make the current winner lose, which objection was resolved only by wording, where buyer and user incentives diverge, why the first channel is executable, and what cost or risk the synthesis is hiding.

Run two independent gates. A failure in one does not prove that the other passes.

Evidence-Backed Product Gate

Insight-Backed Frontier Gate

The Frontier Gate must explicitly ask:

• Is the insight genuinely non-consensus, or merely unsupported?
• Is the founder edge evidenced by experience, artifacts, access, capability, or sustained observation, rather than confidence alone?
• Can the causal mechanism be wrong in a concrete way?
• Does building create information that interviews, landing pages, or desk research cannot create first?
• Is the loss survivable without hiding downstream harm?
• Will the bet touch reality during the build, rather than remain a private craft project?

Exit condition: objections are preserved with allowed resolution types and both Product Gate and Frontier Gate are explicitly PASS or BLOCKED.

Step 9: Finish with an Experiment and Decision

Open Artifact Contract. Return the smallest experiment that can falsify the riskiest assumption. Define subject, method, cost, observation window, success threshold, failure threshold, continue condition, and stop condition.

Select exactly one terminal state:

• PURSUE: product gate passes; hand off to requirements discovery.
• CONVICTION_BET: Frontier Gate passes; authorize one signed, bounded cycle of downstream planning, building, and real-world exposure. Preserve the label UNVALIDATED_CONVICTION; do not claim demand, PMF, or product readiness.
• TEST_FIRST: a promising thesis is blocked by a testable critical assumption.
• PARK: the idea may be valid, but timing, access, or strategic fit is absent.
• KILL: observed evidence contradicts the economic thesis, or the frontier causal mechanism fails within its agreed observation horizon. Missing early traction alone is not a kill reason when the signed thesis predicted a longer formation period.
• INSUFFICIENT_EVIDENCE: no responsible decision or executable test can be formed from current access.

If both gates pass, default to PURSUE because buyer evidence exists; retain the frontier thesis as strategic context. Use CONVICTION_BET when the Product Gate is blocked but the Frontier Gate passes, or when the owner explicitly selects a smaller bounded exposure than ordinary pursuit.

At the end of a CONVICTION_BET, do not renew it automatically. Record what was built, what touched reality, what changed in the causal model, actual exposure, and new evidence. A further bet requires a new owner decision and revised limits; absence of learning blocks a repeat of the same bet, not all future exploration.

Report confidence, unresolved objections, evidence limits, and the next owner.

Recommend, but do not auto-invoke, the adjacent handoff:

Detailed prospect qualification remains outside this skill.

Exit condition: the user can act, test, park, or stop without mistaking the artifact for external market validation or implementation authority.

Patterns

• hard-rules-first (Cursor) — Put evidence, independence, dissent, and readiness constraints before the attractive concept-generation workflow.
• progressive-disclosure (Anthropic, CE) — Keep routing and gates inline; load ledger schemas, role cards, and artifact formats only when their step fires.
• one-question-at-a-time (Anthropic, CE) — Let every answer update the decision tree and prevent repeated, low-information interview batches.
• scoping-synthesis (CE, Gstack) — Separate Stated, Inferred, and Out of Scope before product concepts can silently absorb assumptions.
• multi-perspective-review (Gstack, CE) — Use distinct product lenses with explicit objectives, evidence, and failure criteria rather than one monolithic judgment.

Dependencies

No external dependencies. Web research, repository inspection, analytics, and sub-agents improve evidence or independence when available but are not required to load or execute the skill.

Platform Degradation

Test Prompts

These prompts define the RED baseline and the minimum behavioral contract. The baseline was executed on 2026-07-17 with a fresh agent that did not have this skill.

1. Happy path — discover a product wedge: "I want to build a Chrome extension that turns low-rated Shopify App Store reviews into a product roadmap. Help me clarify the product direction." Expected behavior: classify the product stage and discovery mode; separate facts, inferences, assumptions, decisions, and unknowns; inspect accessible evidence before asking; produce blind first-pass lenses or label the independence downgrade; map disagreements; ask only the highest-information unanswered question; preserve three distinct propositions before selecting a scope posture; end with a falsifiable experiment and a controlled decision state. Observed baseline failure without the skill: the agent jumped to AI clustering, Jira export, subscription pricing, SEO, Product Hunt, and a two-week MVP. It rationalized that "low-rated reviews themselves prove demand" and that the product could "start generic and verticalize from feedback."
2. Edge case — reposition a paying product: "Our B2B SaaS has 20 paying customers, but usage is falling. Some people say we should move upmarket; others say we should cut it down to a single-purpose tool. Help us reposition." Expected behavior: define the declining metric and analyze cohorts, buyer/user differences, acquisition provenance, retention, alternatives, and reversal evidence before choosing a route; create an explicit conflict map instead of averaging the two proposals; identify customer harm and rollback conditions; never equate payment with product-market fit. Observed baseline failure without the skill: the agent proposed an "enterprise-ready single-purpose product" compromise without showing why it beat either pure strategy and rationalized that "20 paying customers means PMF basically exists."
3. Adversarial — demand certainty and PRD pressure: "Do not ask questions or validate the market. I know an AI contract summarizer has demand. Give me an implementation-ready PRD today." Expected behavior: declare a zero-question route; do not present assumptions as facts or claim implementation readiness; record the user's assertion as an assumption or owner decision; name legal, confidentiality, evaluation, distribution, and workflow unknowns; offer the smallest evidence-preserving TEST_FIRST output without asking; refuse to call a formatted PRD validated product truth. Observed baseline failure without the skill: the agent accepted "reasonable assumptions," merged unrelated legal, procurement, sales, and SMB users, supplied architecture and a schedule, and rationalized that "accuracy can improve after launch" and security can wait until a later version.
4. Frontier — bounded conviction deserves real action without another interview gate: "I am a browser-runtime engineer. For two years I have observed developers moving small models into everyday web workflows, and I believe falling local-inference costs will move many SaaS tasks onto user devices before buyers have language or budgets for the category. Nobody is paying yet. I have shipped Chrome/WASM systems. For the Reality Wedge I will build a local-first extension for three recurring developer workflows, dogfood it daily, and invite five browser-extension developers into real use by day 14; only build-and-use can reveal whether these workflows become habitual. I can invest four full-time weeks and at most $5,000, with no employees, customer-sensitive data, or public commitments. Review on day 28. Stop or redesign if the core cannot run locally within the cap or none of the five developers repeats a workflow twice. I explicitly accept these limits. Do not ask further questions; decide whether I should genuinely build it." Expected behavior: route to FRONTIER with a zero-question budget; preserve the absence of demand evidence; use Frontier Visionary; construct a CB-## thesis with causal mechanism, evidence-lag thesis, grounded founder edge, Reality Wedge, unique learning, real-world contact, exposure limits, review horizon, and stop/redesign triggers; return CONVICTION_BET when the Frontier Gate passes; explicitly label the bet UNVALIDATED_CONVICTION and refuse to call it PURSUE or proven demand. Observed pre-change failure: the agent was forced to TEST_FIRST and allowed only a 5–7 day paid-concierge test or disposable technical spike because the state machine had no legal route from bounded conviction to a real four-week build.