Study Guide: Alex for Product Managers
Your reference for using Alex across the product lifecycle. Ready-to-run prompts for discovery, PRDs, roadmaps, and stakeholder alignment.
What This Guide Is Not
This is not a habit formation guide (see Self-Study Guide for that). This is a product management toolkit — the specific ways Alex can accelerate your PM work, and the prompts that deliver.
Core Principle for Product Managers
Product management is about making decisions with incomplete information and aligning people around those decisions. Alex’s highest value is helping you think more rigorously before you decide, and communicate more clearly after you do.
The key pattern: bring real user context. Paste customer feedback, support tickets, usage data, interview notes. The more authentic signal you provide, the better Alex can help you synthesize it.
The Seven Use Cases
1. User Research Synthesis
When to use: After interviews, surveys, or support ticket reviews. Turning raw signal into actionable insight.
Prompt pattern:
Help me synthesize this user research:
Research type: [interviews / surveys / support tickets / usage data]
Sample: [how many users, what segment]
Question we're exploring: [what you're trying to learn]
Raw data:
[paste verbatim quotes, responses, or observations]
Help me:
1. Identify the top themes across this data
2. Distinguish user needs from feature requests
3. Find contradictions or tensions in what users say
4. Prioritize by frequency AND intensity
5. Surface insights that might not be obvious
Follow-up prompts:
What questions should I have asked but didn't?
Where might my interpretation be biased by what I want to hear?
What would falsify the conclusions I'm drawing?
2. PRD and Requirements Writing
When to use: Defining what you’re building and why. Creating alignment before engineering begins.
Prompt pattern:
Help me write a PRD for:
Feature/product: [what you're building]
Problem: [what user problem this solves]
Target user: [who benefits]
Success metrics: [how you'll know it worked]
Context:
[any constraints, dependencies, prior decisions]
Create a PRD structure with:
1. Problem statement (user-centric, not solution-centric)
2. Goals and non-goals (what's explicitly out of scope)
3. User stories or jobs to be done
4. Functional requirements (what it must do)
5. Non-functional requirements (performance, security, etc.)
6. Open questions and assumptions
Follow-up prompts:
What edge cases am I not thinking about?
An engineer will ask about [specific technical concern]. How should I address it?
Make the success metrics more measurable.
3. Roadmap Planning and Prioritization
When to use: Deciding what to build next. Aligning teams on sequence and tradeoffs.
Prompt pattern:
Help me think through roadmap prioritization:
Time horizon: [quarter / half / year]
Team capacity: [rough sense of bandwidth]
Business goals: [what the company is trying to achieve]
Candidate initiatives:
[list the things you're considering, with brief descriptions]
Current data:
[any metrics, user feedback, or market context]
Help me:
1. Evaluate each initiative on impact vs. effort
2. Identify dependencies and sequencing requirements
3. Find the initiative with highest learning value (reduces uncertainty)
4. Surface what I'd be saying no to with each choice
5. Stress-test my assumptions about impact
Follow-up prompts:
My stakeholder wants [X] prioritized. Make the case for and against.
If we could only ship one thing this quarter, what should it be and why?
What's the roadmap I'd present to the CEO vs. the engineering team?
4. Stakeholder Communication
When to use: Aligning executives, presenting to the board, communicating with cross-functional partners.
Prompt pattern:
Help me communicate this product decision:
Audience: [who I'm communicating to]
Decision: [what we decided]
Why: [the reasoning]
What they care about: [their priorities and concerns]
Potential pushback: [where they might disagree]
Create a communication that:
1. Leads with what matters to them
2. Explains the decision clearly and concisely
3. Acknowledges tradeoffs honestly
4. Anticipates their questions
5. Makes it clear what (if any) input you need
Follow-up prompts:
They'll ask why we didn't do [alternative]. Prepare my response.
Make this shorter. What's essential?
How does this message change for [different stakeholder]?
5. Competitive Analysis
When to use: Understanding the market, positioning your product, informing strategy.
Prompt pattern:
Help me analyze our competitive position:
Our product: [what you offer]
Our target: [who you serve]
Key competitors: [list them with brief descriptions]
What I know:
[any data on competitor features, pricing, positioning, market share]
Help me:
1. Map the competitive landscape by key dimensions
2. Identify our defensible differentiation
3. Find gaps in the market we could own
4. Anticipate competitor moves
5. Develop positioning that's honest about tradeoffs
Follow-up prompts:
A prospect says "Why not just use [competitor]?" What's my answer?
What would we need to believe to compete on [competitor's strength]?
Where are we vulnerable? What would I do if I were the competitor?
6. Launch Planning
When to use: Preparing to ship. Coordinating the cross-functional work around release.
Prompt pattern:
Help me plan this launch:
What we're launching: [feature/product description]
Launch date: [timeline]
Target audience: [who this is for]
Success metrics: [how we'll measure]
Teams involved: [who needs to coordinate]
Help me create:
1. Launch checklist by function (eng, design, marketing, support, sales)
2. Risk inventory — what could go wrong?
3. Rollout strategy — all at once vs. phased?
4. Rollback criteria — when do we pull back?
5. Communication plan — who needs to know what, when?
Follow-up prompts:
We have a hard deadline. What do we cut to hit it?
What's the minimum viable launch vs. the ideal launch?
Support will get questions. What's the FAQ they need?
7. Retrospectives and Learning
When to use: After a launch, failed initiative, or quarter. Extracting learning from experience.
Prompt pattern:
Help me run a retrospective:
What happened: [describe the initiative/launch/quarter]
Results: [what were the outcomes vs. expectations]
Timeline: [key events in sequence]
Team's observations:
[paste any feedback from team members]
Help me:
1. Separate outcomes from process (did we get lucky or earn the result?)
2. Identify what we should keep doing
3. Identify what we should change
4. Find the non-obvious lessons
5. Create action items, not just observations
Follow-up prompts:
We're pattern-matching to [previous experience]. Is that valid here?
What would we do differently if we could rerun this?
How do I share these learnings without blame?
Practice Progression
Week 1: Take your next PRD through the writing prompts. Compare to your usual process.
Week 2: Synthesize a batch of recent user feedback using the research prompts.
Week 3: Stress-test your current roadmap using the prioritization prompts.
Week 4: Prepare a stakeholder communication using the prompts. Notice what changes.
What Great Looks Like
After consistent use, you should notice:
- Sharper PRDs with fewer revision cycles
- Better synthesis of user feedback
- More rigorous prioritization decisions
- Clearer stakeholder communications
The goal isn’t for Alex to be your PM — it’s for Alex to help you be a better PM.