AI Toolkit · Orientation Brief
Get your team oriented before anyone builds.
The Orientation Brief is a free AI skill. Give it what you know about a problem, and it gives you back one page: the real problem, what you stand for and where to go next.
How it works
Your context in. One clear page out.
You give it whatever you have
Anything you know about the problem or opportunity. Messy and partial is fine.
- Interview transcripts or summaries
- Research findings
- Project or design briefs
- Feature requests
- Market data
- Support tickets and feedback
You get one page back
- A structured point of view, sifted from everything you gave it
- What was seen, separated from what’s inferred
- What you stand for, and the tradeoffs you’ll make
- A concrete strategy to make it real and testable
- Plain language to forward, with an invitation to correct it
EXAMPLE · GROUP PASS MANAGEMENT
Helping group owners take care of people who aren’t in the room
The pain isn’t the number of clicks. Owners are responsible for experiences that belong to someone else, and they can’t easily tell whether anyone’s been missed.
“Every pass accounted for, and nobody left in the dark.”
Get the skill
Three ways to use it
Same brief and same five sections, whatever tools your team uses. Free to use, change and share.
Claude skill
The full version. Add it to Claude once, then ask for an orientation brief any time you’re handed a request, notes or research.
- Download the skill file.
- Add it to Claude as a skill.
- Ask: “Write an orientation brief for this,” and paste in your context.
- Correct what it got wrong. It updates the brief and tells you what changed.
Using it with a team
The brief starts the conversation. It doesn’t replace it.
Here’s how I keep everyone’s own view in the room.
Everyone writes first
Before anyone sees the brief, each person writes a sentence or two: what’s the real problem, and how should people feel when this product is at its best?
Share the brief, then compare
Put the brief next to what people wrote. Where they disagree with it, or with each other, is the most useful thing you’ll learn.
Agree on the tripwire
Treat “We’re wrong if” as a shared tripwire. Decide up front who checks it and when, so the team changes course instead of defending the plan.
How I work with AI
Thinking comes first. Then AI helps me build.
A thinking partner
I think out loud by dictating, then use AI to get to clarity: reframing the problem, making sense of research and interview data, and pressure-testing my reasoning until it holds together.
A craft tool
Once we know what we’re building and why, I use AI to build, code, prototype and iterate quickly. Working prototypes go in front of people in days, not weeks.
See it on a real project
Group Pass Management
The case study behind the example brief: how the reframe from fewer clicks to every pass accounted for shaped the product on web and mobile.