In this lesson, we tackle one of the most important steps in any greenfield project: planning the product. We'll create a Product Requirements Document (PRD) and break it into a set of buildable milestones using the BM PRD Creator skill — a custom Claude Code skill I'm releasing through the BM Skills marketplace. You'll see how the skill interviews you to define core purpose, in-scope and out-of-scope features, tech stack alignment with the Build New template, third-party integrations, the data model, and feature-level UX details. Throughout, I emphasize the most important skill for builders today: thinking like a product designer and architect to make deliberate decisions about what to build and what to cut. By the end, we have a clean PRD plus three milestone prompts ready to feed into Claude Code one at a time.
In this lesson:
- Why upfront planning matters even with AI tools — and the trap of building everything
- Installing the BM Skills marketplace and the BM PRD Creator skill in Claude Code
- Doing an initial brain dump (with voice dictation) to seed the PRD interview
- Defining the core purpose statement and top-level features
- Explicitly defining what's out of scope for V1 (and why that matters)
- Confirming the tech stack from the Build New template (Rails, Inertia, React, Postgres, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, Solid Queue)
- Selecting third-party integrations: OpenAI for summaries, Resend for email
- Designing the data model — and trimming entities that aren't really needed
- Drilling into each feature: CRUD, tagging, search, AI summaries, email sharing
- Choosing a milestone strategy (three milestones vs. condensed or more granular)
- Reviewing the generated PRD and milestone prompts in the
_build-planfolder