Ship features users love

You own the feature roadmap and need to connect user feedback to shipped features, keep engineering and design aligned, and prove you're solving real problems. This guide takes you from research through Goal → Initiative → Brief → Plan → first action, then back into the loop to sustain momentum.

Who this doc is for

You're a product manager turning user problems into shipped features. You want the problem, evidence, and success metric to travel with the work so engineering and design build the right thing. Start with the outcome you want to move, and Hamster will shape the work beneath it for your team to steer.

Pre-flight checklist

Before you start:

• Gather your user research, feedback, or usage data, even if it's informal. Hamster uses it to ground the Goal, Initiative, and Briefs it drafts.
• Get clear on the outcome you're trying to move, using the language your team already uses.
• Know who's building it — the engineers and designer you'll bring in to review.

Your first session

A concrete path from a user problem to delivery, start to finish in one sitting:

1. Tell Hamster the outcome you want to move. Hamster captures it as a Goal in your team's language and connects a Metric when measurement helps.
2. Hamster shapes the Initiative that could move the Goal. You steer the bet with the user problem, evidence, and boundaries.
3. Hamster drafts a Brief for the Initiative. Link the research, then invite engineering and design to refine it.
4. Generate a Plan once the team agrees on the problem, scope, and what success looks like.

Post-creation next steps

Once the Goal, Initiative, first Brief, and Plan exist:

1. Pick the first action from the Plan: assign its first Task, begin design exploration, or deliver the Brief to a pull request with a Cloud Agent.
2. Track the work against the Initiative and its Goal, so progress stays connected to the outcome rather than the number of tasks completed.
3. Carry what the team learns back into the Brief and its Plan as delivery continues. Hamster updates the drafts from that context, and the team steers the next decision.
4. Keep momentum by returning to the Initiative after delivery: choose the next action, revise the bet, or close it when the Goal has moved enough.

Hamster is the harness and automatically applies relevant Methods throughout this flow. Methods are optional components you can customize when Hamster needs to follow a convention specific to your team.

Feature depth

Go deeper on the artifacts a PM leans on most:

• Goals — connecting feature work to a business metric.
• Initiatives — shaping the bets that move Goals and group related Briefs.
• Briefs — refining Hamster-drafted work with a user problem, success criteria, and explicit non-goals.
• Plans — reviewing the design, engineering, and product Tasks Hamster generates from a Brief.
• Methods — optional components for customizing how Hamster shapes and delivers work.
• Delivering Briefs — shipping a ready Brief to a GitHub PR and tracking the result.
• Cloud Agents — handing delivery to the cloud when the work doesn't need an engineer at the keyboard.

Sample first session

1. Before you start: gather the user feedback and research you already have.
2. Minutes 0–5: tell Hamster the outcome and align on the Goal it captures.
3. Minutes 5–15: steer the Initiative and review the Brief Hamster drafts.
4. Minutes 15–45: refine that Brief with engineering and design until you're aligned on scope and success criteria.
5. Same morning: generate its Plan. It can take a few minutes, as it really breaks the work down. Then begin the first action.
6. Same day: review what changed, then choose the next action to keep momentum.

Common pitfalls

"Should I start with a Goal or a Brief?" Start with the outcome. Hamster captures the Goal, shapes its Initiative, and drafts the Brief, which then feeds its Plan.

"Do I need to write every artifact?" No. Hamster drafts the Initiative, Briefs, and Plans from your context. The PM steers the problem, evidence, scope, and success criteria with the team.