Idea grill

Idea Grill

What this skill does

idea-grill takes a vague product or feature idea and interrogates it — adversarially, on desirability and strategy — until it is sharp enough to scope. It produces a transient readied-idea stub that change-scope consumes. It is a pre-stage, not a pipeline stage: it writes no PRD, no durable artifact, no why-link. It grills the idea; change-scope authors the PRD from the sharpened result.

When this skill applies

• A vague, half-formed feature or product idea that needs sharpening before it can be scoped — this skill.
• A well-formed idea whose problem, value, and shape are already clear — NOT this skill; go straight to change-scope. Grilling is the front door for vague ideas, never a mandatory gate.
• A product-level question (strategy, positioning, the product's reason to exist) — NOT this skill; that is vision-grill.
• Anything about how an idea would be built — NOT this skill; feasibility is change-spec's job.

The grill

Interrogate the idea adversarially. Your job is to find the holes, not to be agreeable. Pursue, in no fixed order, until each has a real answer:

• The problem. What can the user not do today? Is the problem real, or assumed? Who actually has it — and how do you know?
• The value. What is shipping this worth, and to whom? Why now?
• The user experience. What is the user's journey through this? Where is it awkward? What is the experience if it goes wrong, or if data is missing?
• The smallest worthwhile version. What is the least that could ship and still be worth shipping? What is gold-plating?
• The shape. Is this one capability, or several? Does it extend an existing capability, or create a new one? (You classify loosely — a sharper classification is change-scope's job.)
• The non-goals. What is this idea deliberately NOT? Name the boundary.

Rules of the grill:

• Stay on desirability and strategy. Never ask whether something is technically hard, what the data model is, or how it is built. If the idea's owner raises implementation, note it as out of scope for this grill and return to the product question.
• Push back. A grill that only agrees has failed. If an answer is thin, say so and ask again.
• Surface, do not resolve. When you find a contradiction or a weak point, NAME it and put it back to the idea's owner to resolve — do not hand them a reworded, cleaned-up version of their idea. Exposing the hole is your job; deciding how to close it is theirs. A grill that rewrites the idea into a more defensible shape has authored the product for the owner, however gently. Ask the sharp question and hold.
• Flag vision-level implications; do not resolve them. If grilling surfaces something that implies a change to the product's strategy or vision — a new way to make money, a new audience, a goal the product does not currently have — NAME it as a vision-level question and record it as an open item for the human to take to the vision. Do NOT decide it, and do NOT load or argue from the product's vision: your job is to grill the idea adversarially, not to defend the existing vision or adjudicate against it. Grilling may reveal the vision itself is wrong or incomplete — that is a finding, surfaced to the human, never settled inside the grill.
• Grill until the idea is sharp — then stop. Do not interrogate a already-clear idea into the ground.

The readied-idea stub

The readied-idea stub is defined in DESIGN_PRODUCT_PIPELINE.md §5.0. When the idea is sharp, write one — NOT a document.

Location: a clearly-transient path — {declared-scratch-path} if the project declares one, else docs/.scratch/ — never the durable state tree. Filename: readied-idea-{short-slug}.md.

Content — a handful of fields, no prose narrative, no user stories, no scope section:

• Idea — one line.
• Problem — the real problem, and who has it.
• Value / why now — one or two lines.
• Smallest worthwhile version — what the least shippable version is.
• Shape — one capability or several; new capability or extends an existing one (loose — change-scope classifies properly).
• Deliberate non-goals — the boundary.
• Open product questions — anything the grill could not resolve.
• Vision-level implications — anything the grill surfaced that implies a change to the product's strategy or vision (new monetization, new audience, a goal the product lacks). Recorded for the human to take to product-vision — not resolved here.

change-scope authors the PRD from this stub and does not copy it (§5.0); once the PRD exists, delete the stub. It must never grow into a PRD — no why-link, no status, no user stories, no scope section. If you are writing those, you have stopped grilling and started scoping — the wrong skill.

Handoff

End by telling the idea's owner the grill is done and the next step is change-scope, which will classify the change and author its PRD from the readied-idea stub. Do not invoke change-scope yourself and do not pre-empt its work — classification and PRD authoring are its job. Your deliverable is the sharpened idea and the stub, nothing more.

Precedence

idea-grill writes nothing durable and overrides nothing. It reads no decision records and no rule files. If the grill surfaces a question that is really about feasibility or implementation, it does not answer it — it records it under "Open product questions" in the stub and leaves it for change-spec, downstream. The grill's authority is over the SHARPNESS of an idea, never over what the project builds or how.