Turning a method into product behavior

A coaching framework, a teacher’s sequence, a clinician’s intake flow: these are full of judgment that lives in a person’s head. Turning one into a product means making that judgment explicit enough to build, and measurable enough to trust.

Start with archetypes

Name the recurring states a user actually arrives in, not the features you want to build. An archetype is a repeatable pattern: the user’s state, the need underneath it, the path to a good outcome, and the ways it goes wrong.

Archetypes are the unit of design and the unit of evaluation. If you can’t name the moment, you can’t build for it or tell whether a change helped it.

Golden examples set the bar

Sit with your experts and capture the exchanges they would endorse, word for word. These golden examples are worth more than a style guide: they are the reference your evals grade against, and the fastest way to align a model with how the work is really done.

Encode the boundaries

Just as important as what the product does is what it must never do: diagnose, prescribe, advise beyond its competence. Refusal and escalation are product features, designed up front, expressed in the interaction itself, not a policy bolted on at the end.