Product lens

Skill S3YED/appie-kit/skills/ecc/product-lens

Use this skill to validate the "why" before building, run product diagnostics, and pressure-test product direction before the request becomes an implementation contract.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add S3YED/appie-kit --skill product-lens

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

6 stars6 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

SKILL.md

3.0 KB, 697 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Product Lens — Think Before You Build

This lane owns product diagnosis, not implementation-ready specification writing.

If the user needs a durable PRD-to-SRS or capability-contract artifact, hand off to product-capability.

When to Use

Before starting any feature — validate the "why"
Weekly product review — are we building the right thing?
When stuck choosing between features
Before a launch — sanity check the user journey
When converting a vague idea into a product brief before engineering planning starts

How It Works

Mode 1: Product Diagnostic

Like YC office hours but automated. Asks the hard questions:

1. Who is this for? (specific person, not "developers")
2. What's the pain? (quantify: how often, how bad, what do they do today?)
3. Why now? (what changed that makes this possible/necessary?)
4. What's the 10-star version? (if money/time were unlimited)
5. What's the MVP? (smallest thing that proves the thesis)
6. What's the anti-goal? (what are you explicitly NOT building?)
7. How do you know it's working? (metric, not vibes)

Output: a PRODUCT-BRIEF.md with answers, risks, and a go/no-go recommendation.

If the result is "yes, build this," the next lane is product-capability, not more founder-theater.

Mode 2: Founder Review

Reviews your current project through a founder lens:

1. Read README, CLAUDE.md, package.json, recent commits
2. Infer: what is this trying to be?
3. Score: product-market fit signals (0-10)
   - Usage growth trajectory
   - Retention indicators (repeat contributors, return users)
   - Revenue signals (pricing page, billing code, Stripe integration)
   - Competitive moat (what's hard to copy?)
4. Identify: the one thing that would 10x this
5. Flag: things you're building that don't matter

Mode 3: User Journey Audit

Maps the actual user experience:

1. Clone/install the product as a new user
2. Document every friction point (confusing steps, errors, missing docs)
3. Time each step
4. Compare to competitor onboarding
5. Score: time-to-value (how long until the user gets their first win?)
6. Recommend: top 3 fixes for onboarding

Mode 4: Feature Prioritization

When you have 10 ideas and need to pick 2:

1. List all candidate features
2. Score each on: impact (1-5) × confidence (1-5) ÷ effort (1-5)
3. Rank by ICE score
4. Apply constraints: runway, team size, dependencies
5. Output: prioritized roadmap with rationale

Output

All modes output actionable docs, not essays. Every recommendation has a specific next step.

Integration

Pair with:

/browser-qa to verify the user journey audit findings
/design-system audit for visual polish assessment
/canary-watch for post-launch monitoring
product-capability when the product brief needs to become an implementation-ready capability plan

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.

Gives 3 of the 12 instructions most product growth skills give in 697 tokens

Counted across 694 of the 879 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-09-06

Check for product marketing context firstin 49 of 694, across 20 files
Validate the why before building featureshere, and in 18 of 694, across 4 files
Respond to every comment in real-timein 17 of 694, across 6 files
Structure launch marketing across three channel typesin 16 of 694, across 4 files
Recruit early users one-on-onein 13 of 694, across 2 files
Ask one question at a timein 13 of 694
Rank features using ICE scoringhere, and in 12 of 694, across 3 files
Identify primary conversion goalin 11 of 694, across 3 files
Identify traffic contextin 11 of 694, across 3 files
Evaluate headline effectivenessin 11 of 694, across 3 files
Check visual hierarchy and scannabilityin 11 of 694, across 3 files
Run product diagnosticshere, and in 11 of 694, across 3 files

Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.