Step 1: Clarify the Problem
Before features, name the problem and the person who has it. Resist jumping to solutions. A clear problem statement keeps every later decision honest.
Ask yourself (or ask the AI to interview you):
- Who is this for? (Be specific — "me," "indie makers," "my running club.")
- What painful thing are they doing today without this?
- What does success look like in one sentence?
You can let the AI do the digging. Try this :
I have a rough idea: a web app to track books I'm reading.
Act as a product thinking partner. Ask me 5 sharp questions,
one at a time, to clarify the problem, the target user, and what
"done" looks like. Don't propose features yet — just interrogate
the idea until it's concrete.
Answering five good questions usually sharpens a vague idea into something real. The trick is to let the AI push back instead of agreeing with everything. If it asks "Do you need to sync across devices?" and your honest answer is "no, just my laptop," you've just deleted a , an auth system, and weeks of work — before writing a line of code. That's the whole point: the cheapest place to cut a feature is in a conversation, not in a codebase.
Watch for the moment your answers stop being "um, I guess so" and start being "yes, exactly that." That shift is the signal you've found the real problem and can move on.