Our product reviews were supposed to center on live demos and existing project artifacts. Slides and elaborate pre-reads weren’t required.
In practice, mine were elaborate Notion pages.
I’d spend hours working out how to showcase a project in a way that landed with leadership. The requirements, designs, and technical decisions already existed. Still, I’d sit down and write another account of the work.
When I started building a Claude skill to help with product reviews, I had to ask what I needed from all that preparation.
Choose the conversation first
A review can focus on what shipped, how the team built it, or what you learned. The same project can support all three, but they lead to different conversations.
That became the first question in my workflow. Before gathering material, the skill asks me to choose the framing.
It can read the project documents. Deciding which conversation I need to have with leadership is still my job.
From there, it drafts a speaker script using the material I provide, then builds a single-page visual companion with diagrams, relevant metrics, and existing project artifacts.
Reading the script gives me a chance to work through the explanation before deciding what belongs on screen.
Am I recreating the same problem?
I had an obvious question for myself: was I replacing an elaborate Notion page with an elaborate page somewhere else?
The distinction depends on how I use it.
The visual page supports the live conversation. People aren’t expected to read it beforehand. It gives them something concrete to look at while I explain or demo the work.
It also draws on artifacts we’ve already produced. A working demo or design can show something I’d otherwise spend several paragraphs describing.
I tried this workflow for a recent product review and used the resulting script and visual page in the session. It gave me a different way to prepare, though I still need to watch the temptation to keep adding material.
A page can become elaborate in any tool.
I’d been treating a polished document as evidence that I was prepared. Working through this process gave me a more useful check: could I explain what changed, show the work, and answer the questions it raised?
That’s what I want my preparation time to help me do.