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Case study60 minutesUnit 1 of 8 · Lesson 1 of 3

Your first Monday

Unit 1 of 8 · Lesson 1 of 3Index
Monday 9:40Day one at Sona

9:40am, day one at Sona. Maya, the founder, forwards you 200 app reviews with one line: “what should we fix?” Nothing else.

A desk on the first day: a laptop, a lanyard, an unopened notebook and a cold coffee.

Your desk, 9:40am.

  • Maya, founder

    What should we fix? Need a view by Friday.

  • Dev, engineering

    Mid-sprint until Thursday. Talk after?

  • Priya, support

    400 tickets this month. I think it is the same three things.

Signal, cluster, claim

A still from the film for Your first Monday

  1. Two hundred reviews and one question. No meeting, no context, a Friday deadline. This is what the job looks like on day one.

  2. You will want an idea. Hold it. Two hundred people are saying the same few things in two hundred different ways.

  3. Sort reviews by the failure they describe, not the words they use. The biggest pile is a candidate, not a conclusion.

  4. Similar words can hide different bugs. Read twenty quotes from the largest cluster. If two problems share a pile, split it.

  5. One sentence: who it hurts, what breaks, a real quote, and how many. If you cannot point at the evidence, it is not a claim yet.

How Slack handled it

Slack2013
Public commentary. No affiliation.
  1. The situation

    Slack started as the internal chat tool of a failing game studio.

  2. What they did

    The team noticed they could not stop using it, killed the game, and shipped the tool. Before launch they watched a few friendly teams for the moment they could not work without it.

  3. Why it matters to you

    Nobody handed them a brief either. The signal was already there. Someone had to see it.

Doing it with AI, and where it breaks

The move

Ask a model for one row per review: problem label, severity guess, and the exact quote. Then sort and count.

The trap

It merges complaints that share words but not causes. “Can't log in” and “keeps logging me out” land in one pile and belong to two teams. Read 20 rows yourself.

Prompt worth stealing

For each review below, return JSON: {quote, problem_label, severity_1_to_5}. Copy the quote exactly. Use at most 8 problem labels. Do not summarise.

Build it

The artefact

A one page memo to Maya: what is broken, for whom, and what you would do first.

Claude or ChatGPTGoogle Sheets

0/4

The worked solution

Stuck, or want to compare?

There is a worked solution. Try the build first. Reading it before you have attempted anything is the fastest way to learn nothing.

Checkpoint

If you did the build, these take two minutes. If you cannot answer one of them, that is the part to go back to.

Go deeper

Moving on marks this lesson complete. Finish the build first, it is the part that counts.

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