Describe it. | product engineering

A product description treats the product as a state chart the user moves through. The skill writes it feature by feature, from the user’s point of view, on the same skeleton every time, drafted from the code and tests and then verified by hand against the running product.

Say this, get this

You say	You get
“Write a product description for the editor”	A repo of documents: one per feature, plus the files that steer them
“Describe the user experience of the CLI”	The same, mapped onto a command-line product
“Add the export dialog to the product description”	A new feature document on the existing skeleton, and the coverage table updated

Modes

This skill has no modes: one workflow, run in phases.

Setup


`required`	the source repo path and its commit, read-only
`required`	a way to bring up the surface: a command and URL, a binary, or an account
`optional`	python3, for the link and anchor checker
`convention`	the output is its own repo, one surface per repo

What it produces

README.md            purpose, conventions, document template, method, coverage table
goal.md              standing instructions for whoever drafts next
glossary.md          the vocabulary; the source of truth for every term
AGENTS.md            "Read README.md, then goal.md."
CLAUDE.md            "Read @AGENTS.md."
{area}/{feature}.md  one document per feature, all on the same eight-section skeleton
verification/        the protocol and one checklist per cluster of documents
bug-triage.md        every suspected defect, deduplicated, with repro and severity

Scope comes first: which product and surface, the source repo and commit, how to run it, what is out of scope. Then the steering files, a pilot document, the rest on the coverage table, verification against the running product, and triage. The Document a product workflow walks the whole run.

Handoffs

Fixing a triaged defect: pe-build. Product-level context that stays in the product repo: pe-design, understand mode.

Provenance

Carries 9 files from Steve Ruiz (9). Every vendored file is hash-locked to a pinned upstream commit.
vendored with the author’s permission · skills/pe-product-description