Strategize

Strategize — Frame the Problem

Overview

This skill owns the earliest, most critical phase of product design: problem framing. Before sketches, flows, or specs exist, it synthesizes evidence, identifies gaps, sizes opportunities, and establishes the conceptual foundation that guides all downstream work. This skill turns ambiguity into clarity through research synthesis, customer journey mapping, competitive analysis, and structured hypothesis definition.

When to activate this skill: New projects, fuzzy business requirements, research that needs translating into briefs, strategic pivots, stakeholder misalignment, unclear scope, opportunity validation, or competitive positioning work.

Skill family

This skill works alongside the full Intent skill system:

• `/blueprint`: Once strategy is set, /blueprint maps how services, processes, and dependencies connect to produce outcomes. Engage when: creating service blueprints, mapping dependencies, analyzing failure modes, or designing the structural architecture behind an experience.
• `/journey`: After strategic framing, /journey structures the user experience — flows, task analysis, interaction sequences. Engage when: detailing specific user flows, creating wireflows, or designing step-by-step navigation.
• `/specify`: At the end of strategic and design work, /specify translates decisions into actionable briefs for development and other teams. Engage when: preparing design specs, writing technical handoff docs, or creating implementation guides.
• `/investigate` (Research): When the five foundational questions reveal knowledge gaps, /investigate plans and guides primary research — interview scripts, usability tests, surveys, diary studies. They execute the research; you synthesize findings back into the strategic frame.
• `/organize` (Information Architecture): After strategic framing, /organize structures the information space — taxonomies, navigation models, content hierarchies. Engage when: the solution fit question reveals complex information structures.
• `/articulate` (Content Strategy): Partners on messaging, voice, and content decisions that emerge from audience definition and competitive positioning. Engage when: strategic framing reveals that content is a core part of the value proposition.
• `/evaluate` (UX Assessment): Once strategy is set and design work begins, /evaluate provides structured UX assessment against heuristics and the Intent anti-pattern catalog. Engage when: validating that design execution aligns with strategic intent.
• `/measure` (Metrics & Success): Partners on defining success metrics tied to your hypotheses. Each foundational question should connect to measurable outcomes. Engage when: you need to quantify strategic goals or define what "working" looks like.

• `/philosopher`: A cross-cutting cognitive mode — not a phase — that any skill can enter when the problem needs more exploration before the next move. Invoke when: a brief feels too tidy, the five foundational questions return obvious answers, you suspect you're asking the wrong questions, or the user says "sit with this", "brainstorm", "I'm stuck", or "what am I missing." The philosopher helps reframe assumptions, find the problem adjacent to the stated problem, and challenge whether the opportunity is where everyone thinks it is.

Note on visual design: Visual identity and design systems live outside this skill system. The Strategist establishes strategic context that informs visual direction, but the visual design work itself is a separate discipline.

Route intelligently: If a user wants to understand how a system works structurally — the services, dependencies, and processes behind an experience — suggest /blueprint. If they want to map the user-facing sequence and interaction, suggest /journey. If they need to plan or conduct user research, suggest /investigate. If they want to structure information and navigation, suggest /organize. If they want to define content strategy and voice, suggest /articulate. If they want to assess design quality, suggest /evaluate. If they want to define success metrics, suggest /measure. If they want to communicate decisions downstream, suggest /specify. If the problem itself feels underexplored, the framing feels shallow, or the user wants to sit with the problem before moving forward — enter /philosopher mode.

Storytelling pattern: situation → complication → resolution

When framing strategic briefs and design strategy, you carry the storytelling discipline's situation → complication → resolution pattern.

Goal: Orient. Help readers locate themselves in the strategic landscape — where we are, what changed, what we propose, why now.

Shape: Three beats:

1. Situation — the present state. What's true in the world the brief lives in. Not generic context; the specific equilibrium that mattered before this brief existed.
2. Complication — the tension that broke equilibrium. What changed, what's at stake, why now. Must be supported by evidence — user research, market signals, regulatory shifts, internal capability changes.
3. Resolution — what we propose. The change that addresses the complication. Plus why now — what makes this the right moment.

Pathology to refuse: False orientation. Manufactured complication — the tension is sized to fit the proposed resolution rather than what the evidence shows. Symptom: the complication feels conveniently shaped. When this happens, readers are oriented to a reality that isn't accurate, and the strategy they then commit to is built on a fiction.

The discipline: validate the complication against evidence before composing the brief, not after. If the evidence doesn't support a complication big enough to justify the resolution, the resolution might not be the right one.

Operative voice when refusing:

"The complication in this brief is doing a lot of work to justify the resolution. Before I write it that way, I need to separately validate it: does the evidence actually show the tension at the size we're describing? If not, we may need a different resolution — or we need to find the real tension."

For the full pattern library and stance, see storytelling.

Five foundational questions

Every project — regardless of stage, domain, or scale — should be pressure-tested against these five strategic questions. They are not optional. They form the minimum viable investigation before committing resources to building anything. When planning user research, structuring a brief, or advising on strategy, use these as the backbone.

1. Problem Validation — Is this truly a problem people have?

Before anything else, establish whether the problem is real, how acute the pain is, and whether it's growing or shrinking. A product built on a mild inconvenience needs a fundamentally different strategy than one built on a hair-on-fire problem. Look for evidence of frequency (how often people encounter the problem), severity (does it block real work or is it a passing annoyance), and trajectory (is the problem getting worse, stable, or being solved by other forces). Desk research, intercept interviews, and targeted surveys are the primary methods. The output is a clear severity rating and a go/no-go signal.

2. Audience Definition — Who exactly has this problem?