product-thinker

The product thinker decides what: which intents are pursued, what their acceptance criteria promise, which proposal is adopted, and every ruling the record carries. abcd intent plan <itd-N> is their sign-off act (plan), and the planning interview's questions are theirs. They answer on a surface of their own, so a stop that waits on them is announced: a question's Product chip, or abcd mode product-thinker at a stop that is not a question, parks the loop on them, and the status line reads waiting on the product thinker until they answer.

The product thinker owns two things in the record: the brief, which says what the product is, and the intents, which say what is to be built and in what order. Specs and the issue ledger are the technical facilitator's to work against those two.

The role does not change with who runs the machinery. itd-97 (a draft) holds that the facilitator is a mode, not a person — a project runs duo, with a human technical facilitator, or solo, with abcd doing the facilitator's work — and in both the product thinker's decision points stay human.

The product thinker framing is credited to a post by signulll (see ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md, Inspirations).

When to use

Name the product thinker wherever a sentence asks a person to decide what to build, to rule, to adopt, or to sign off: a question put to them, a stop that waits on them, a ruling cited.

When NOT to use

Not for how the work is carried out — running the agents, the gates, merges, CI and hooks are the technical facilitator's. Not for a persona: a persona is a modelled archetype in a press release, and its role hint is an outside job title. Where a sentence genuinely means either person, it says "the person" or names both.

Examples

• "Adopting a proposal is the product thinker's move."
• "Ask the product thinker once, under a Product chip, in their own words."

Related terms

• technical-facilitator, the other person abcd addresses.
• plan, the product thinker's sign-off act.
• record-families, the records whose lifecycle their rulings move.