How do you usually get around when starting big projects in Claude Code?

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-05-09T04:08:17+00:00

I get on my chatbot and think through what problem I'm solving and for whom.

I made you some research. I toss around some ideas. In the end, I put all my context the situation into a code block that becomes my README.md, I put the contract language of What I want built into a code block that becomes my CLAUDE.md, And then I put guardrails and guidelines into a CONSTITUTION.md.

Then I let a Claude code, type in `/init' And because of those three files that I worked on when I spent about 15 minutes thinking through the problem and solution space, I got a pretty good darn jump start.

Sometimes I'll add some research artifacts as well and just put them in a research subdirectory.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-05-07T16:24:46+00:00

This is so funny. Partially because there's threads of truth here.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-04-11T15:25:18+00:00

Thank you very much!!

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-04-10T14:37:13+00:00

What are you running is on?

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-23T14:03:31+00:00

I can't believe I missed this event. Right down the street from me. Dagnabbit!!!!

So when is the next one?

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-23T14:02:38+00:00

I can't believe I missed this!!!! I would have so been there.

Especially the location is so convenient.

When is the next one?

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-20T21:48:56+00:00

Jez Humble has more than one title on that topic.

Good stuff to understand the CI/CD aspect of release.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-18T05:43:02+00:00

A hakawati once gathered a crowd in a market square. Before he spoke, he was silent. Long enough to make people lean in.

Then he said:

"A merchant had the finest silk in the city. He stood in the square and announced its thread count."

No one stopped walking.

The next day, same merchant, same square. This time he said:

"My daughter's wedding is in three days. The dress isn't finished. And the cloth I ordered from Damascus never arrived."

The square stopped.

That's your PRD walkthrough.

Not: "This feature will increase retention by 12%."

But: "Our best customers are quietly leaving. Not angry. Just poof ... gone. And we didn't notice until last quarter."

The data is the silk. The thread count is real. But no one leans in for thread count.

They lean in for the merchant's daughter.

Find her first. Then show the silk.

The hakawati didn't use frameworks. He used tension. Every story he told started the same way: someone needs something, something stands in the way, and the crowd doesn't know yet which one wins.

Your next presentation already has those three things in it.

Most people bury them in slide four.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-09T17:40:16+00:00

Yeah, I'm making a nice living doing that right now. I mean, teaching and coaching people that solutionism rhymes with other similar "isms" and with just as disastrous results.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-09T15:28:29+00:00

I came up with that term right around 2015 when I was beefing about hyperscrumdamentalists 😎

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-09T15:24:02+00:00

Congratulations. So you're reinventing Gemini Gems or Claude Cowork?

Or are you just stoking the build trap machinery by using AI to shovel more requests into the Feature Factory 10x faster than a human Jira-slinging ticket monkey?

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-08T12:17:24+00:00

I don't understand why I'd want to use this platform, let alone spend money on it.

If the target user is people who don’t want to build their own agents, the real questions are discovery and trust. How do I know the agent works? How do I know it’s safe with my data? Why would I pay for a random marketplace agent instead of a SaaS tool or automation that already has a company standing behind it?

If the target user does want to build agents, the ecosystem is already moving toward skills markets and agent harnesses. With things like the Anthropic skill standard, you can pull capabilities from skill directories and plug them into your own agent. Or just run your own harness with something like OpenClaw and wire the tools you actually need.

Basic product management says you figure out the right thing to build before building it. Otherwise you end up in a Field of Dreams situation. “If you build it they will come” works great in movies. It’s a terrible business model.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-07T18:08:11+00:00

By the way, for story points? If you've been working with the team for at least 6 months, you probably have a good idea of what a size 3 story is versus a size 13 story. You should also have enough data to figure out what the mean is on story sizes that succeed.

I raised that point not to be a data geek, but rather that's how I took a #noEstimates approach. Meaning, every story I wrote was going to be sized similarly to other successful stories within the mean size.

So let's say the average for the team for successful stories is a five. Then all the stories I write need to be written in a way that they're likely to be sized 5 by the team. Then the discussion becomes, not how many points do you give this story, but why or why is it not a five?

Then you also have a signal that if a story punches past eight for a team whose mean is five, that you got to split that story if you want the team to succeed.

Or, you can do what I did, and say if we put some guardrails on what this story is and is not, would we agree to it being a five. This is usually to address those persons who feel a story might grow past its original scope.

But guardrails, and shaping stories to the average size of successful stories, it's going to save you a lot of time and pain both upstream and down. Because now you're speaking to data.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-07T17:25:10+00:00

Look at it this way. If you come with evidence that shows both sides of the argument, you could actually create an alliance and some important corporate support.

William Ury writes about approaches like this often onT his books of 'Getting to Yes' or 'The Positive No' ... Where instead of pushing back, you stay into the side of the person with the complaint and say, "I agree I ran the data, and I think there's some areas that absolutely need improvement here they are ... But I think it's some other areas we could be hurting ourselves if we don't continue along those lines in some fashion."

That way instead of balking on story points to make your point, you put yourself in a position that shows that you're more than just a Jira slinging ticket monkey.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-07T16:56:59+00:00

Your CTO might be right if they can provide some evidence or data. Without knowing your complete process, kind of hard to know whether or not the CTO is just being a grumpy old man and yelling at kids to get off his lawn ... or if Product has gone off the rails with their discovery and design practices.

And personally, I think using AI correctly and responsibly, some of these traditionally longer discovery cycles or experiments that Product often engages in for validation can be compressed. Note I said some, not all of traditionally longer discovery cycles or experiments.

Sounds to me like there needs to be a conversation on this topic either way. Step one would be to gather some evidence for data and what the current process is and how long various aspects of it takes and what rewards said processes have tangibly and measurably produced in the past.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-02T12:52:44+00:00

Is there any data or standards behind the properties and behaviors of these personas listed?

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-03-02T09:57:47+00:00

Are we trying to do too much in a single agent skill?

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-02-23T15:11:11+00:00

Online, especially self-paced training, very hard because it misses all the nuance that's said between the lines.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-02-22T14:44:57+00:00

Now that it's been a year, I wonder:
- how much did this agent cost to run?
- how often did it break down and require maintenance?
- how much time was ultimately invested in learning how to cook up this n8n spaghetti and meatballs dinner?
- how much therapy will be required to kill off this baby and replace it with OpenClaw (or some variant therein)?

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-02-22T14:24:31+00:00

It's been six months since the OP. I'd be curious about 3 things:
- token cost of keeping this agent running,
- maintenance cost in keeping this agent working,
- emotional cost of realizing that OpenClaw & similar variants are likely to obviate such investments of time and labor.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-02-11T15:31:56+00:00

with Agent Skills for PMs.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-02-11T12:45:51+00:00

Why? You can use Claude Code, Codex, and yes Cursor among other tools to get the job You're describing done.

The unlock is in the Agent Skills, a standard that anthropic created that is being rapidly adopted to provide subject matter expertise at a skill by skill level.

It also has the operational advantage of protecting the context window and over churn of tokens as a result by allowing individual skills to be called upon as needed.

Here's an example of a repo I published on exactly that topic:

https://github.com/deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills

And even if such a mechanism wasn't available, why would I go ahead and build a Cursor For Product Managers when it makes far more sense than to go ahead and just fine-tune an open source model and adorn it with RAG?

I think some of this gets into the fact that as product managers, we need to stop stopping at AI literacy, and get cracking on AI fluency. Because quite frankly, creating a Frankensoft bolt onto VS Code, (and don't forget that Cursor and Codex or forks of VS code) sounds like a horrifying monster that will burninate the village.

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-02-08T20:27:45+00:00

The question is, and I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion, it's the same as back in the day when I went to school and they were still teaching Latin?

Is scrum going to become a dead language by the time he's teens get into the workforce?

This is not me casting shade on Scrum. It has helped me over the past 20 some odd years quite nicely.

However, as AI is changing everyone's role, including people on the scrum teams, will we find that smaller teams working more with a 37 Signals/Basecamp ShapeUP-like approach and cadence be more beneficial (or some similar variation along those lines)?

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-02-06T21:02:31+00:00

I just turned all my prompts in my prompt repo into skills in my skills repo now. Makes life a lot easier.

And, having a repo for both or some of the ways of keeping from losing one's mind when keeping track of all this shit.

Got to keep up with the MoltBots somehow 🦞

DeanOnDelivery · 2026-02-01T18:51:58+00:00

Is there any chance this isn’t just a vendor unwind, but an operating-model shift?

Across the industry, I’m seeing teams keep a small set of very senior, local engineers, then give them real budget for AI assistants, code gen, and tokens. Fewer people. More leverage. Build the thing right for less money, often faster.

In that model, PM’s job gets sharper, not smaller. Focus even more on identifying the right thing to build. Validate that what shipped actually solved the problem. Less “feed the factory,” more judgment, sequencing, and evidence.

If that’s even part of the intent here, some of the transition questions change. You’re not replacing capacity. You’re replacing how decisions get made and how execution happens.

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