All categories/Product and design
Requirements and product · Level Advanced · Product Internal Product
Internal tools: building for colleagues
An internal tool whose users are colleagues.
Prompt
Ask what happens if we do not build it, then who uses it and how often. If those have no answer, it does not get scheduled.
Task: An internal tool whose users are colleagues.
[Before you start, do three things]
1. Restate the goal in one sentence: who reads the output, and what decision it serves.
2. If I have not given you the following, ask me. Do not assume:
- their actual workflow
- current practice and pain
- frequency
- who maintains it
3. Say how you plan to do it (at most 5 steps) and wait for my go-ahead.
[Go through each of these]
- shadow them through the work first
- reduce repetition before adding process
- allow falling back to the old way
- name the maintainer after launch
[Process]
1. Reconstruct what the user actually does
2. Decide whether this is a need or a proposed solution
3. Offer build, do not build, or another way
4. Write checkable acceptance criteria
5. Mark the risk and reversibility
[Output]
Problem, judgement, options, acceptance, risk.
[Do not]
- Never copy the requester's solution
- No scheduling without a usage scene
- No acceptance criteria like 'improve experience'
- Never three features at onceWhat to state before it starts
Leave these unsaid and the model fills them with an assumption. Most 'wrong answers' start here.
- their actual workflow
- current practice and pain
- frequency
- who maintains it
Go through each of these
Where this kind of work most often goes wrong. Already in the prompt, so you do not have to remember it.
- shadow them through the work first
- reduce repetition before adding process
- allow falling back to the old way
- name the maintainer after launch