Post by Melissa Milloway

A lot of people skip straight to prompting AI without a plan and hope it builds the right product. These four steps help make sure it does. Before we open Claude Code or another AI dev tool, we do four things. Here's what they are and what they look like in practice. 1️⃣ Identify the right problem. Not every recurring problem should be solved with AI. In my communications example, one person had to write code every time the team needed to send a communication. It kept happening, it affected more than one person, and it had a cost. That's how we knew it was a good candidate for a proof of concept built with AI. There was no system to do it. One person did it manually, and everyone else waited. 2️⃣ Map the user journey. We go back to the people experiencing the problem and ask neutral questions. In the communications example, we asked people to walk us through what happens from the moment they need a new layout. We asked how each step compares to the others. We asked what they'd change. Those answers told us where people were getting stuck and gave us the pain points we needed to write user stories. 3️⃣ Write user stories. We turned those pain points into user stories. In the communications example: as a user, I need to create new layouts without waiting weeks. As a user, I need to edit copy without relying on someone else. One story per pain point. Those stories became the input for the PRD so that everything we asked AI to build traced back to a problem a user told us they had. 4️⃣ Write the PRD. We took those user stories and built a product requirements document that tells AI who the product is for, what it needs to do, and what's out of scope. In the communications example, that meant defining who would use the template tool, what creating and editing a layout needed to look like, and what we weren't going to build yet. Without it, AI doesn't have enough information to build the right thing. By the time we open Claude Code in video 5, we have everything we need to build a product that solves the recurring problem we identified. The first four videos are on my featured page. The final three drop Monday through Wednesday. #AI #FutureOfWork #BusinessStrategy