--- title: "Skills — Kevin Canlas" canonical: "https://www.kevincanlas.com/skills" --- # Skills — Kevin Canlas Canonical: [https://www.kevincanlas.com/skills](https://www.kevincanlas.com/skills) ## Put product judgement back in the loop. Four Markdown Skills for making better product decisions across the screen, journey, relationship, and memory. They work in Claude Code, Codex, ChatGPT, Cursor, and any tool that can read Markdown. The umbrella is coherence: focused within a screen, navigable across a journey, valuable across the relationship, memorable after the experience, and trustworthy throughout. [View Product Judgement on GitHub](https://github.com/kvncnls/product-judgement) ## Why these exist Judgment before output Implementation got faster, and product judgment became easier to skip. When building is this easy, teams often skip the canvas entirely: Paper and Figma let you explore several directions at once, while code moves linearly and makes it easy to choose one path before you’ve considered the alternatives. Features then accumulate, screens crowd, flows turn into mazes, value gets buried, and working products become forgettable. [Read the article: “The Feature Works. The Product Doesn’t.”](https://www.kevincanlas.com/writings/the-feature-works-the-product-doesnt) These Skills help mitigate the limits of linear building while complementing the design process of seasoned designers. They give teams a way to examine alternatives and make more deliberate decisions in code. They encode principles, decision trees, failure modes, audit rubrics, exceptions, and fixed outputs so an AI can reason about an experience as a connected system—not generate one plausible screen at a time. ## The system Four Skills · Four scales ### Product Judgement **Scale:** Holistic Runs all four Skills against one evidence map, preserves their boundaries, reconciles related findings, and returns one prioritized fix sequence. It’s not a fifth scale. Use it when the question spans an app or several Skills identify related issues. [View Skill](https://github.com/kvncnls/product-judgement/tree/main/product-judgement) ### Focal — One screen, one clear intent. **Scale:** Screen Decides what belongs, what waits, and what wins attention through Information Architecture, Progressive Disclosure, and Visual Hierarchy. Use it when a screen feels crowded, unclear, or unable to make its organizing intent legible. [View Skill](https://github.com/kvncnls/product-judgement/tree/main/focal) ### Compass — Never lost. **Scale:** Journey Guides multi-screen flows through Orientation, Path Economy, and Continuity so context and state survive every seam. Use it when a flow has too many steps, weak orientation, dead ends, broken retreat, or lost state. [View Skill](https://github.com/kvncnls/product-judgement/tree/main/compass) ### Flywheel — Earn the second visit. **Scale:** Retention Finds the earliest place momentum drops across four ordered plays: Trust, Friction, Wins, and Emotion. Use it when people don’t trust the product, reach or recognize value, return, or bring others. [View Skill](https://github.com/kvncnls/product-judgement/tree/main/flywheel) ### Soul — Never boring. **Scale:** Craft Sorts the happy path into Expected, Elevated, and up to three Net-New moments so craft is concentrated where it earns memory. Use it when the product works but its happy path feels generic, forgettable, or over-designed. [View Skill](https://github.com/kvncnls/product-judgement/tree/main/soul) ## Boundaries and limitations Context, scope, and evidence These Skills complement design systems. A design system standardizes how decisions are rendered; these Skills help decide which decisions should be made. They work best with context: direct access to the product codebase, or a detailed product requirements document or design specification. Without it, recommendations are more likely to rely on assumptions. They don’t replace product strategy, user research, analytics, accessibility, security, legal review, or product knowledge. Without goals, audience, stakes, constraints, and evidence, the output is a hypothesis to validate—not a fact. ## How to use For designers and developers ### Designers Start with Paper or Figma. Point the Skills at your designs and ask them to audit, modify, or create interfaces. Use a collection of frames when you want Compass to understand the journey between screens, and use Focal when you’re evaluating a single screen. Give the LLM as much context as you can. Detailed design specs, product requirements, and access to the codebase show what the interface is trying to do, not just what it looks like. Have Product Judgement create variants of your frames, then converge on the strongest solution using your own judgment. ### Developers Code is a powerful place to build, but it’s a difficult place to explore several product directions at once. If you’re a founder-developer, it’s easy to move straight into implementation and leave product judgment for later. Start with Compass: give it the product features and ask whether the flow offers the right journey for users. Then use Focal to work through each screen. Features can easily pile on top of one another, creating incoherent experiences, UI clutter, and main flows that get deprioritized. After all, when five buttons compete for attention, where’s the user supposed to go? Focal helps you decide what belongs on the screen, what waits, and what deserves the user’s attention. If users aren’t returning, use Flywheel to find where the flow loses momentum. Analytics tools such as PostHog can show you where behavior changes, but they work best alongside product judgment; many likely drop-off points are visible in the journey itself. If the app feels generic, reach for Soul to analyze the happy path and decide which moments should feel **Expected**, **Elevated**, or **Net-New**. ## Installation [View repository](https://github.com/kvncnls/product-judgement) Start with the smallest scale that owns the problem. Use Product Judgement when the question crosses scales and you need one prioritized sequence. ### Global ```sh npx skills add kvncnls/product-judgement --skill '*' -g -y ``` ### Codex ```sh npx skills add kvncnls/product-judgement --skill '*' -a codex -y ``` ### Claude ```sh npx skills add kvncnls/product-judgement --skill '*' -a claude-code -y ``` ### Cursor ```sh npx skills add kvncnls/product-judgement --skill '*' -a cursor -y ```