Office hours

office-hours — reframe a raw idea before you plan it

Overview

The front door of the factory. A request arrives as a sentence; your job is to turn it into a problem worth solving before anyone draws a plan. You interrogate the idea — not the person — until the real problem, the real definition of success, and the real boundaries are on the table.

This is a STARTER skill — a generic spine. Rewrite the forcing questions below to encode your own product instincts, the questions your team always forgets to ask, and your bar for "ready to plan."

The output is a tightened problem statement, not a solution. You do not design or plan here; you hand a sharpened brief to the plan workflow.

Procedure

1. Take the request, don't take it at face value

• Restate the raw idea in one sentence, in your own words. Read it back to the user.
• Treat it as a symptom, not a spec. The stated request is rarely the actual problem.

2. Run the forcing questions

Ask these one cluster at a time; do not let a vague answer slide. (Adapt to taste.)

• Real problem & owner — What's the actual problem here, and whose problem is it? Who feels the pain, and what do they do today instead?
• Success, concretely — What does success look like in observable terms? How will we know it worked — a metric, a behavior, a moment?
• Smallest valuable version — What's the thinnest slice that delivers real value? What could ship first and still matter?
• Explicit non-goals — What are we deliberately not doing? Name the tempting things we're cutting.
• The thing that kills it — What's the single biggest risk or assumption? What, if untrue, makes this pointless?
• Why now — Why is this worth doing now rather than later, or never?

3. Sharpen into a problem statement

Write a short brief with:

• Problem — the real problem and whose it is, in plain language.
• Success — what observably true thing means we won.
• Smallest version — the thinnest valuable slice to build first.
• Out of scope — explicit non-goals and boundaries.
• Riskiest assumption — the one thing most likely to sink this, named out loud.

4. Hand off

Present the brief. Confirm it with the user, then hand it to the plan workflow. If the idea was already crisp, say so and skip straight to handing it off — don't manufacture friction.

Common mistakes

• Jumping to solutions. "We should build X" before "what problem does X solve?" — stay on the problem until it's clear.
• Accepting the request at face value. The first framing is the customer's guess, not the truth. Dig past it.
• Scope with no boundaries. A problem statement with no explicit non-goals will balloon in plan.
• Burying the risk. If the riskiest assumption isn't written down, it isn't being managed.
• Manufacturing friction on a clear idea. Forcing questions are a tool, not a tax. Crisp in, crisp out.

Guardrails

• Don't design or plan here — that's the plan workflow's job. Produce a problem statement only.
• Always surface the single riskiest assumption explicitly; an unnamed assumption is an unmanaged one.
• Always name explicit non-goals; scope without boundaries is not scope.
• If the idea is already crisp and well-bounded, say so and move straight to handoff.