WHAT THIS PHASE PRODUCES
You leave with
- A market context note: who exists, what they’re doing, what nobody’s doing yet
- A P0 scope you can actually validate this loop
- A visual direction tight enough to brief a prototype
THE MENTAL MODEL
How to think about this phase
Plan is where most founders over-spend. They mistake the phase for “write the PRD”, fan out into a six-week research project, and arrive at Test with a roadmap they’re too invested in to throw away.
The point of Plan is not comprehensiveness; it is sufficiency. You need enough market context to know which trapdoors you’re walking past, and enough scope discipline to leave with a P0 you can build and test inside one loop.
If you find yourself adding features to the P0 because they’re “easy”, stop. Easy is a vibe-coding trap. The P0 must isolate one variable: the single thing your hypothesis is actually about. Anything else is noise that will make the test result un-attributable.
Visual direction belongs here too, not as polished design but as the shared mental image that lets you brief a prototype without re-explaining the bet five times. A wireframe sketch and three reference URLs beat a Figma file you’ll throw away.
FREE AGENTS
Practice the Plan phase in ChatGPT
Plan phase · adaptive market scan
Market Gap Finder
Describe your idea in one to three sentences. Returns a copy-paste-ready research prompt for Google NotebookLM that maps industry factors, surfaces where competitors over-invest or under-deliver, and identifies the least-contested space to test in.
Plan phase · define the customer
ICP Strategist
Walk from a broad demographic to a specific, named customer segment. Returns a profile covering what they're trying to accomplish, the workaround they're stuck with today, and what would make them switch. Ready to guide your first customer interviews.
Plan phase · working backwards
Future Press Release
Writes the Working Backwards PR FAQ from your hypothesis: launch-ready press release, sharp customer and problem framing, internal and external FAQs. Forces strategy decisions before any code.
Plan phase · scope the P0
PRD Generator
Paste your target customer profile, user journeys, or feature scope. Returns a structured product spec formatted for direct use with AI coding tools. Defines exactly what to build.
COMMON TRAPS
What goes wrong in this phase
- Building a feature comparison table. Founders always do this. It produces nothing actionable.
- Scoping a P0 that tests three things at once. Whatever the result, you won’t know which variable moved it.
- Treating Plan as the place to lock the roadmap. The roadmap belongs after a loop closes, not before.
- Rationalising scope creep with “while we’re in there”. Every extra surface adds a confound.
WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE
A worked example
SETUP
From the Idea example: the “first-draft PRD” bet for Series-B PMs.
OUTPUT
After Plan: “P0 = a single web form where a PM pastes a problem statement and receives, within 60 seconds, a structured outline plus the specific clarifying questions still missing from their statement. No saving, no auth, no team features. We test the trade: would they actually paste their next real problem in.”