Idea to Product Roadmap

What you'll need

• Your idea
• Any AI chat assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, and the like)

The steps

1. Before you start: get clear on an idea you are interested in developing into a project or business.
2. Copy the entire prompt and paste into the LLM you would like to use. If Claude, create a "Project" to keep all information on this idea development in one place.
3. Paste the prompt below. Follow up with the second prompt when you are ready.

I'm starting a new project. After this message, I'll explain in my own words what I want to build and its features.

Before proposing any plan, interview me. Ask questions one topic at a time until you understand the project and the intended end product. Don't move forward on assumptions or guesses about things that genuinely shape the project. For trivial details (naming, colors, minor wording), use sensible defaults and just flag them — don't make me decide everything.

When you believe you have enough to proceed, summarize your understanding back to me and ask me to confirm before moving on.

Once I confirm, write the full project vision in a clear, structured format and save it as a markdown file (e.g. project-vision.md) — detailed enough that a fresh session could read it and understand the project fully without me re-explaining anything. Also give me a one-paragraph plain-English summary I could share with a non-technical partner.

Then walk me through the key decisions one at a time. If this is a software project, cover frontend, backend, database, hosting, and auth; if it isn't, adapt the categories to what actually matters here. Explain each choice in plain language and clearly flag anything that would be costly or hard to undo later.

Only after we've agreed on the overall structure, propose a build plan broken into small, reviewable stages — not the whole thing at once. After each stage, stop and let me review before continuing.

Throughout, tell me if any tools, connectors, or skills would help specifically for this project, and explain how I'd connect them.

Save this as project-vision.md, then give me a one-paragraph summary I can share with a non-technical partner.

What you'll get

An interview, not an instant answer: the AI asks one topic at a time until it understands your project, then plays its understanding back for you to confirm. Once you say yes, it saves a structured vision document (project-vision.md) plus a one-paragraph summary you could hand a partner. It then guides you through the key build decisions one at a time — flagging anything costly or hard to reverse — and finishes with a staged, reviewable build plan, recommending tools and connectors along the way.

If it's not quite right

• Too long and things still up in the air? Prompt it, "Summarize everything you know so far and list only the questions still blocking you."
• Worried things may go wrong with your plan? Prompt it, "Before you build this stage, tell me what could break and what I should test when it's done."