ai-shaped-readiness-advisor

SKILL.md

Assess whether your product work is AI-first or genuinely AI-shaped, and prioritize which capability to build next.

Evaluates your maturity across 5 essential PM competencies: Context Design, Agent Orchestration, Outcome Acceleration, Team-AI Facilitation, and Strategic Differentiation

Distinguishes between efficiency gains (AI-first: automating existing tasks faster) and transformation (AI-shaped: redesigning how teams operate around AI as co-intelligence)

Identifies foundational gaps—Context Design is prerequisite for orchestration and acceleration—and recommends which competency to prioritize based on your current state

Provides tailored 4-week action plans for each competency, from building constraints registries and memory architecture to compressing learning cycles and establishing team norms

Includes diagnostic framework to detect context stuffing (volume without intent) versus context engineering (structure for attention)

Purpose

Assess whether your product work is "AI-first" (using AI to automate existing tasks faster) or "AI-shaped" (fundamentally redesigning how product teams operate around AI capabilities). Use this to evaluate your readiness across 5 essential PM competencies for 2026, identify gaps, and get concrete recommendations on which capability to build first.

Key Distinction: AI-first is cute (using Copilot to write PRDs faster). AI-shaped is survival (building a durable "reality layer" that both humans and AI trust, orchestrating AI workflows, compressing learning cycles).

This is not about AI tools—it's about organizational redesign around AI as co-intelligence. The interactive skill guides you through a maturity assessment, then recommends your next move.

Key Concepts

AI-First vs. AI-Shaped

Dimension
AI-First (Cute)
AI-Shaped (Survival)

Mindset
Automate existing tasks
Redesign how work gets done

Goal
Speed up artifact creation
Compress learning cycles

AI Role
Task assistant
Strategic co-intelligence

Advantage
Temporary efficiency gains
Defensible competitive moat

Example
"Copilot writes PRDs 2x faster"
"AI agent validates hypotheses in 48 hours instead of 3 weeks"