identify-assumptions-existing

This skill acts as an AI-powered product strategist to rigorously stress-test feature ideas for existing products. By adopting a multi-perspective 'devil's advocate' approach, it helps product managers, designers, and engineers uncover hidden risks before moving into development. It systematically evaluates concepts across four critical domains—Value (customer problem-solving), Usability (user adoption and learning curves), Viability (business alignment and sales/legal support), and Feasibility (technical architecture and integration risks)—ensuring that decisions are grounded in validated assumptions rather than intuition.

• Multi-perspective analysis: Simulates the critical viewpoints of a Product Manager, Designer, and Engineer to identify diverse failure modes.

• Four-quadrant risk framework: Categorizes assumptions into Value, Usability, Viability, and Feasibility.

• Risk-assessment workflow: Evaluates the specific nature of potential failure points, assigns confidence levels (High/Medium/Low), and suggests concrete experiments or validation methods.

• Strategic alignment: Connects product discovery to established frameworks like the Assumption Prioritization Canvas and Teresa Torres' Continuous Product Discovery.

• Best used when refining a PRD, preparing for a sprint, or conducting discovery for an existing product backlog.

• Inputs: Ideally, provide relevant context such as PRDs, design prototypes, user research findings, or current market data to allow the AI to perform a contextualized assessment.

• Outputs: A structured report outlining key assumptions, risk levels, and actionable testing strategies to either refine or pivot the feature idea.

• Constraints: While highly analytical, this skill is a diagnostic tool; it requires human judgment to prioritize which identified risks warrant immediate experimental focus versus those that are acceptable trade-offs.

• Integration: This skill is a core component of the pm-product-discovery plugin and can be chained with brainstorming or prioritization skills to create an end-to-end discovery workflow.