Signal to Strategy · Course resources

Session 1: Automate the Signal

Everything from Session 1 of Signal to Strategy. Slides, the working guide, every prompt we ran, the Launchpad data pack, and the actual conversation we walked through.

Session1 of 4
DateSeptember 9, 2026
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The six steps

This is the whole build.

The prompt pack we ran live, unchanged. Each one is a move, not a magic string: you're copying the reasoning, not the words. The bold callouts are the judgment moves.

These prompts are written against the Launchpad workspace in the data pack above. Download it and they run as-is. The same six-step pack ships inside the zip as PROMPTS.md.

01 · 2 min

Set your context

I'm working at Launchpad, a B2B onboarding/enablement platform that helps SaaS companies guide customers from signup to first value. Our annual logo churn is 14% and leadership wants it under 10% by end of year. This Cowork workspace has our Q1 2026 discovery data: interview transcripts, support tickets, NPS responses, and a company overview. Help me synthesize this to find the highest-leverage opportunities to reduce churn. When you analyze it: 1. Find patterns ACROSS all sources, not just within one. 2. Surface contradictions or tensions between segments. 3. Distinguish high-frequency complaints from high-impact ones. 4. Tell me what's notably ABSENT, and whose voice is missing or under-represented in this data. Don't build a framework yet. Read everything first and confirm the goal.

The last line is the one doing the work. It stops the model performing analysis before it has read anything. If the reply could apply to any SaaS company, your context isn't specific enough.

02 · 3 min

Load the data

Read all the interview transcripts in this workspace, then the support ticket and NPS CSVs. Orient yourself on what each column means. When you've read them, tell me what NEW patterns emerge when you combine all three sources, e.g. "the mobile issue appears in 3 interviews, 10 tickets, and 12 NPS comments."

Watch it run commands to open the CSVs rather than working from the column names. Then compress before you go on, "summarize that in 10 bullets", because a wall of analysis is not a finding. On your own data later, connectors do the loading: hook up Gong, Zoom, Granola or Drive and transcripts come in directly, no manual exports.

03 · 7 min

Ask for surprises

Before we build any framework, tell me the most surprising or non-obvious observations across these three sources, not summaries. 1. What patterns only appear when you cross-reference interviews, tickets, and NPS? 2. Where do different customer segments disagree? 3. What's notably ABSENT, and whose voice is missing or under-represented? 4. What's the single most important insight for churn reduction?

The highest-value moment in the whole workflow. Protect it. If the first answer is thin, push back out loud: "That's a pattern, not a surprise. Tell me something I wouldn't have guessed from reading two transcripts." And ask explicitly who isn't represented, churned-and-gone customers, the quietly dissatisfied, smaller accounts, before you trust the picture.

04 · 10 min

Build your framework

Opportunity Solution Tree is the default. If the OST skill is loaded, run that instead of the prompt and notice the difference: user-need framing, experiments rather than solutions, evidence grounding, all automatic. That gap between a thin prompt and a real skill is the whole point.

The skill: opportunity-solution-tree, built on Teresa Torres' Continuous Discovery Habits. Get it from mcpmarket, or download the SKILL.md and add it to your own Claude. Run the prompt below first, then the skill, and compare.

Build an Opportunity Solution Tree for Launchpad's churn-reduction goal. DESIRED OUTCOME: reduce annual logo churn from 14% to <10%. Identify 4-6 OPPORTUNITY areas. For each: - Name it as a USER need, not a company problem. - Rate evidence: Strong (3+ sources), Moderate (2), or Emerging (1). - List 2-3 SOLUTIONS framed as experiments with the assumption each tests. - Note which customer segments care most. - Include the most compelling supporting quote. Organize from strongest evidence to weakest.

Jobs-to-Be-Done is the alternate if you'd rather understand why customers hire or fire the product. The designer track, How Might We statements plus a journey map, is a third option. Both are in the working guide, along with a problem-prioritization matrix, a hypothesis brief and a segmentation map.

05 · 5 min

Pressure-test and own it

Pressure-test this: 1. What's the weakest link? Where is the evidence thinnest? 2. Argue AGAINST the #1 recommendation. What would you say? 3. What additional data would we need before deciding? Then reformat as a 1-page executive summary for a VP Product meeting: strategic question, top 3 recommendations ranked by evidence, key risks, and what to validate next.

Don't lose the human. Before you trust a theme, open two or three of the raw verbatims behind it. Averaging 75 tickets into four bullets is useful, and it quietly erases the specific person who was frustrated. And own it: when this goes to the VP, you own the recommendation, not Claude.

06 · 3 min

Make it yours

Open a new Cowork space for your own product. Adapt the step 1 context prompt: who you serve, what decision you're making. No customer PII needed. Point it at one folder of your real discovery data, or connect Gong, Zoom or Drive, and run step 3 on it.

What discovery data do you already have sitting unsynthesized, a Granola folder, a Zendesk export, last quarter's NPS? Pick one and run this on it.

The question people forget to ask

Did it actually use the skill?

Did you use the analyzing-user-feedback skill for the feedback analysis?

In the run we walked through, the answer was: "No, I didn't. Honest answer." It had the skill. The skill was relevant. It didn't read it, and it only said so because it was asked. Follow with "just the delta, what changes vs. the current analysis" and you see the size of the gap.

The four tests

Real signal, or a loud anecdote?

Run every finding through these four before it reaches a stakeholder.

  • Frequency. How many times, out of how many? "Six mentions" means nothing. Six out of forty is a pattern; six out of six hundred is noise.
  • Spread. How many different sources, and how many different segments? One angry account filing nine tickets is one data point that learned to type.
  • Consequence. What's attached? Revenue, churn, deal cycle, support cost. A theme with no consequence attached is a preference.
  • Corroboration. Does anything independent agree? Behaviour beating words is the strongest form: they said it's fine and the usage says otherwise.

Worked example from the Launchpad data: self-serve fails frequency in NPS badly, one comment out of 120, and passes everything else, appearing in all ten interviews and fifteen tickets, and named by the 17 accounts that left for a competitor. Mobile passes frequency with ten NPS mentions and thins out fast: six accounts churned on it. Count mentions and you ship a mobile fix. Weigh consequence and you build the flow editor.

These are a floor, not a ceiling.

One sentence from your largest account can outrank fifteen small-tier tickets, and no amount of counting will tell you that. AI counts frequency. You decide what matters, which is exactly the judgment that lands in the trap quadrant.

The augmentation audit

Score each job twice.

Can AI do this? 1 is confident garbage, 3 is a solid first draft you do real work on top of, 5 is at or above your level. Should it? 1 is never delegate the decision, 3 is delegate the draft and own the call, 5 is delegate freely. Three is the pivot, and the worksheet counts only 4 and 5 as high.

Can: high · Should: high

Automate

Hand it over Monday.

Can: high · Should: low

Trap

It'll do it, and you'll lose the thing you're accountable for.

Can: low · Should: high

Queue

You would, the tools aren't there yet.

Can: low · Should: low

Leave it

Not now, revisit.

Should: the hard half

Judgment depth. How much of this is a call rather than a task?
Reversibility. What does a wrong answer cost, and can you undo it?
Accountability. Whose name is on this in a room full of executives?
Presence. Does the value come from a human actually being there?

Can: the easy half

Input verifiability. Can you check whether the answer is right?
Context. Does it need things that live only in your head or your org?
Volume. Is there enough of it that a machine actually helps?

Put in hours per month.

That field is what turns the audit from an interesting chart into a decision: the job sitting in automate with the most hours behind it is the one to hand over first. It's usually the least interesting thing you do, which is exactly why it's the biggest win.

Homework

Before next Wednesday.

  1. Finish all twelve jobs in the audit and post your trap quadrant in the cohort channel. Week 2 assumes you know which of your decisions you're not allowed to delegate.
  2. Get your signal intake running on one real source and post one surprise it found. One source is enough: a ticket export, a folder of call notes, last quarter's NPS.
  3. Bring a live decision to Session 2. One you're carrying right now and aren't sure about. We're going to try to break it. The ones you're certain on make for a boring session.

Week 2: Stress-test the bet.

Validation prompts for a real decision, tuned to the people who actually push back on you. Your CEO reads risk. Your CFO reads payback. Your eng lead reads scope. Different lens, different prompt. Session 2 resources →


Momentum Product Co. · Heather Gawel + Babajide Okusanya · Launchpad is fictional. For course use only.