Induction: Project Setup

Induction happens once when starting a new project. By the end of these three steps, your project has a product vision, technical decisions, and a prioritized roadmap.

Step 1: Create the PRD

Define what you're building, who it's for, and what success looks like.

The AI follows a 4-phase process:

1. Template analysis — studies the 13-section PRD template
2. Hypothesis-driven questions — asks structured questions about users, pain points, features, and KPIs
3. Document generation — produces the PRD following the template
4. Iterative review — submits for your review and refines based on feedback

The PRD becomes the source of truth for every subsequent step. All planning and implementation traces back to it.

Step 2: Bootstrap the Project

Generate technical standards, configure quality gates, and set up your PM tool.

The AI guides you through five decision areas:

• Project categorization — Pet/PoC, Startup, or Enterprise (determines rigor level)
• Architecture pattern — monolith, microservices, serverless, etc.
• Tech stack — language, framework, testing, database, with version pinning
• Infrastructure — deployment, CI/CD, hosting
• Way of working — methodology (Scrum/Kanban), branching strategy, quality gates

Each decision produces an adoption file. Bootstrap composes several capability skills internally (/pair-capability-assess-architecture, /pair-capability-assess-stack, etc.) — you don't need to invoke them individually.

For existing projects: Start here instead of Step 1. Ask the AI assistant to analyze your codebase and produce adoption files from what it finds, rather than writing them from scratch.

Step 3: Plan Initiatives

Extract strategic objectives from the PRD and prioritize them.

Initiatives are the highest-level work items — each represents a strategic objective spanning 6-8 sprints:

• P0 (Must-Have) — core value proposition, without these the product doesn't ship
• P1 (Important) — significant business value, planned for early delivery
• P2 (Nice-to-Have) — desirable but deferrable

The AI extracts objectives directly from your PRD sections (goals, features, success metrics) and proposes the prioritization. You validate and adjust.

What You Have After Induction

.pair/
├── adoption/
│   ├── product/adopted/
│   │   └── PRD.md                 ← Product vision and requirements
│   └── tech/adopted/
│       ├── architecture.md        ← Architecture decisions
│       ├── tech-stack.md          ← Technology choices with versions
│       ├── way-of-working.md      ← Methodology and quality gates
│       └── infrastructure.md      ← Deployment and CI/CD

PM Tool:
├── Initiative (P0): ...
├── Initiative (P0): ...
├── Initiative (P1): ...
└── Initiative (P2): ...

Every AI session from this point forward reads these files. Decisions never drift.

Next

Strategic Planning — break initiatives into epics.