Use when the message is aimed at "everyone," when one product serves multiple distinct buyers, or when you need to pick the beachhead segment to lead with.
Use whenever designing any surface or component — design the full set of states, not just the happy path.
Use in a crowded/competitive space, when prospects keep comparing you to a rival, when "why you over X?" has no crisp answer, or to build battlecards.
Use when a vulnerability is reported from OUTSIDE the team (a security researcher, a user, a bug bounty, an embargoed upstream CVE) — triage it without shooting the messenger,…
Use to maintain the living body of knowledge — one findable source of truth, deduplicated, tagged to a stable schema, with each belief carrying its evidence, confidence, and any…
Use when starting an initiative or when the request names a vague quality ("make it scalable / fast / secure / robust") with no bar — derive and RANK the architecture…
Use when running a founder meeting or generating the questions you'd ask — the texture of the conversation, not a diligence checklist.
Use when cloud spend is rising, unexplained, or unattributed, or before provisioning expensive resources — treat cost as an engineering metric: make it visible, attribute it, find…
Use when the pipeline is thin or you need to open NEW conversations — proactively build a target list, sequence multi-touch outreach (call/email/social), open a cold conversation,…
Use when a build is proposed with no path to reach users — force distribution (channel + activation + retention loop) into the product decision.
Use on a discovery or first real sales call — diagnose the buyer's problem with SPIN + Gap Selling (current → future → quantify the gap) before pitching anything; problem → impact…
Use for the pitch, the launch story, the homepage hero, the keynote, the fundraising or vision story — any artifact that must move someone emotionally, not just inform.
Use for any consequential design or technology choice — surface ≥2 viable options, score them against the ranked drivers, name the sensitivity and trade-off points, and recommend…
Use when forecasting, reviewing pipeline, or reporting deal status — enforce stage exit criteria, honest forecast categories, and kill zombie deals.
Use when reviewing a change, a design, or a system's readiness — ask "if this gets attacked or exploited in prod, would we even know?" Review the audit trail, the…
Use whenever something is broken, flaky, or behaving unexpectedly — find the root cause systematically (reproduce, isolate, hypothesize, verify) and fix the cause, not the…
Use when surfacing findings — lead with the unmet need and what to do about it, ranked by confidence; never dump a transcript or a deck. The output is a decision, not data.
Use at the ship gate for any release — enforce one sanctioned scripted door to prod, a rollback you have actually tested, no leaked secrets, no regressed control, and the…
Use when designing any interface where AI acts, generates, or decides on the user's behalf (agents, generative UI, AI suggestions, automation).
Use to sequence your work on a change — make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, in that order; keep one concern per change; don't tangle a feature with a refactor.
Use when gauging how urgent the pain is, what the value is worth, or how to price/package — probe willingness-to-pay directly and quantify the cost of doing nothing.
Use when the long-term vision is big but the entry point is fuzzy — find the credible first wedge that expands.
Use when naming a product, feature, category, or pricing tier — or when an existing name confuses, over-promises, or fights the positioning.
Use to close the audit — render an honest ship / don't-ship verdict with the blocker list, what you tested and didn't, the residual risk, and the routing of every finding to the…
Use before scaling any message, after a launch underperforms, or whenever positioning is still a hypothesis (pre-users).
Use when the question is "how do we reach buyers at all?" — distribution / go-to-market strategy. Run the Bullseye (brainstorm → cheap-test a few → focus the ONE that works) and…
Use mid-cycle on any multi-stakeholder deal — map the buying committee, multi-thread across it, develop a real champion (power + self-interest), TEST them, and reach the economic…
Use whenever sources disagree — record the contradicting evidence as its own signal against the belief, never average a real disagreement into false consensus.
Use when structuring content, navigation, or labels — when users can't find things, the nav is growing organically, a new section needs a home, or you're naming/grouping concepts.
Use when filing a finding — write the bug report as a persuasive document that gets it fixed (Kaner's bug advocacy): exact repro, expected vs actual, severity, and the expectation…
Use when you actually draft or edit the artifact — a landing page, hero, email, ad, onboarding screen, empty state, changelog, CTA — and need it to be clear, scannable, and…
Use when reviewing config, env handling, CI/CD, logging, or anything that touches credentials — secrets never in repo or logs, short-lived and least-scope, with insecure defaults…
Use when reporting status or accepting work — keep the board honest (in-progress only if truly in progress, done only if verified done) and CHECK the definition of done against…
Use whenever a load-bearing call is made (or asked again) — record problem, options, what was chosen, why, and what was rejected, so settled questions aren't re-litigated and "why…
Use during the runtime adversarial pass — attack the build the way real users (and bad actors) actually behave: malformed input, concurrency, network failure, refresh/back,…
Use when reliability/recoverability is being assumed rather than proven — deliberately inject the failure (dependency down, AZ/region loss, restore from backup, failover, on-call…
Use to scan everything an outsider can read — README, marketing copy, docs, public config, AND error messages, stack traces, debug pages, response headers, and logs — for leaked…
Use when defining modules, services, interfaces, or data ownership — or when "let's go microservices" comes up — design for cohesion/coupling and Conway's Law; refuse the…
Use when generating or accepting AI/LLM-written code — treat the model as a fast junior, not an oracle: give it context, then verify every line; never ship plausible-but-wrong…
Use when laying out any screen or composing a set of elements — make the eye go where it should. Establish visual hierarchy (one focal point, deliberate scan path), group with…
Evidence group skill. Runs direct end-user interviews to saturation. Gates on access — halts if discovery-context says user_access is none or proxy-only.
Use throughout gathering and synthesis — name the biases that distort findings (sampling, leading, sponsor, social-desirability, confirmation, your own priors) and design and…
Use before any account, call, or outreach — research the buyer from THEIR side (their world, what they use today + what it costs, the trigger event, who pays vs.
Use before calling any design done, and for anything with concurrency, persistence, or external dependencies — risk-storm the design: attack it, then decide resilient vs fail-fast…
Use before attacking a build that has any lifecycle, phases, or persisted progress — enumerate the states, transitions, and guards, then probe every transition under crash / kill…
Use when asked "what should we build (next / at all)?", when the roadmap is turning into a stakeholder wishlist, or for a build-vs-buy call — set the strategic bet first and…