/upfront:vision

What it does

/upfront:vision helps you define something bigger than a single feature — an app, a system, a product, a major initiative. It acts as a strategic sparring partner, forcing clarity on who you’re building for, why it matters, and what success looks like before any code is written. The output is a living strategy document that guides incremental delivery.

When to use it

• Starting a new product or major initiative from scratch
• When you have an ambitious idea but haven’t nailed down who it’s for or why now
• Before breaking work into increments — vision defines what the increments are
• When you need to pressure-test strategy before committing resources

How it works

1. Who and Why — forces specificity on the target audience and their pain. Rejects vague answers like “engineers who want to be more productive”
2. Diagnosis — identifies the structural root cause of the problem, not just symptoms. Names the core difficulty — why this hasn’t been solved already
3. Strategy — extracts guiding policies, key assumptions, anti-vision (what you’re NOT building), and kill criteria (when to stop)
4. Coherent Actions — sequences the vision into 3-5 increments, each delivering value to a real person and testing a key assumption

Key principles

• No vague answers — if you can’t be specific about who, why, or what success looks like, you’re not ready to build
• Value-first sequencing — increment 1 delivers value to a real person, not infrastructure
• Every increment is an experiment — each one tests an assumption and has a learning goal
• Kill criteria are mandatory — a project without kill criteria is a zombie
• Anti-vision prevents scope creep — every new idea gets checked against what you explicitly said you wouldn’t build

Output

• specs/[name]-vision.md — living strategy document with audience, diagnosis, strategy, and sequenced increments
• Updated specs/DECISIONS.md — strategic decisions and rationale
• Thinking record capturing what was challenged and sharpened during the conversation

Next step

Start increment 1: run /upfront:feature for the first feature in the increment. After the increment ships, run /upfront:increment for a retro before starting the next one.