Product Mode

product-mode


**A CLAUDE.md for product teams who ship the right thing- not just ship fast.**

The PM-team counterpart to [andrej-karpathy-skills](https://github.com/forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills). Credit to [@karpathy](https://x.com/karpathy) for naming the failure modes that inspired this work.

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The Two Problems

Karpathy named the problem for engineers working with LLMs:

"The models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them... They don't manage their confusion, don't seek clarifications, don't surface inconsistencies, don't present tradeoffs, don't push back when they should."

His CLAUDE.md fixes this for solo engineers. It's excellent.

But there's a failure mode it doesn't touch, the one that kills product teams:

**Shipping the wrong thing, well.**

A beautifully implemented feature for a problem that doesn't matter is still waste. And in mixed PM + engineering teams working with Claude Code, that's the more expensive mistake.

**product-mode** adds the missing layer: problem framing, scope discipline, tradeoff articulation, outcome measurement, and decision logging- applied *before* the code gets written.

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The Seven Principles

#	Principle	What it prevents
1	Frame the Problem Before the Solution	Building for the wrong user
2	Make Assumptions & Unknowns Visible	Silent guessing
3	Ship the Minimum Viable Change	Scope creep, gold-plating
4	Name the Tradeoffs	Invisible costs, political decisions
5	Define Done by Outcome, Not Output	"Merged" mistaken for "done"
6	Instrument Before You Ship	Shipping blind
7	Log the Decision, Flag Reversibility	Repeating mistakes, calcifying defaults

Plus a **pre-flight checklist** (5 questions before any non-trivial change) and a **when-to-skip-this-rigor** table: because not every typo needs a decision log.

Full file: [`CLAUDE.md`](./CLAUDE.