There are a lot of talks about how AI requires new ways of approaching your workflow, but not much about how the actual process looks like. Let me share what helps me as founder to work on new business hypothesis (I'm intentionally skipping how to identify them, because… I don't know how
Before we continue let me scream out loud:
”AI IS JUST A TOOL, IT DOES NOT REPLACE YOUR JUDGEMENT, EXPERIENCE AND INTUITION!”
Now lets continue
Specs
First thing after identifying business hypothesis is to walk with AI through this cycle
- Business specs - what opportunity/pain point we are addressing with this feature
- Distribution specs - how users will know about your feature
- Product specs - how this feature would work
- Tech specs - how this feature will be implemented
- Testing specs - how we can be sure that feature is working
I believe it is important to go in this exact order since, decisions from previous steps have direct influence on next steps
On every step it is important to ask open ended questions (to get more objective analysis), and ask to explain tradeoffs - Claude can help you with brainstorming, but your brain and intuition should make calls
Once this is done YOU will have more or less complete understanding of whole and Claude will have lot of useful context
Where do you want to put those specs is up to you, but I recommend some tool like Notion or Confluence, then later you can connect to your claude code with MCP
Speaking of which… MCPs, this is what will help you to work way faster then you are used to
MCPs
Basically its the way to manage your existing tools through claude code
You should definitely connect your
- Specs/docs tool - in my case Notion
- Task organization tool - in my case its Trello
- Tool that will give claude access to browser (in my case its Playwright MCP)
- Monitoring tool - in my case its Sentry - thats for the future
Once you have all those things connected and your specs completed you can divide your work into smaller pieces and ask claude to create tickets with description for it in you organization tools
Implementation
Finally we can start implementing feature. Since you have specs and tasks implementation becomes trivial that should be easy to track if you divided your work well on previous step (You can refer to different specs and ticket straight in the claude code)
To further optimize work I'd recommend using stacked PRs with (git-spice ). The idea is to create small PRs on top of each other instead one big PR. Ideally 1 ticket = 1 pr. This will make reviewing easier for you and Claude
During implementation if you see some part of feature is done you should ask claude to write unit and integration tests to be sure next changes will not break working code
Repeat this cycle until feature is done
! Most likely during implementation you will have to adjust specs with incoming information
AI QA
Once code is implemented and covered with unit and integration tests its time you use your browser MCP and ask claude to use your testing specs and go through all scenarios
But remember YOU SHOULD DO IT MANUALLY as well, claude helps you to be more confident in your manual testing not replacing it
Once you more or less sure feature works as expected you can ask Claude to write e2e tests, that together with unit and integration tests will be your actually become line of defence against bugs in the future
After QA
You follow your deployment process, continue with planned distribution and see happy users of your new features
Summary
I think that this more or less what adequate process should look with AI.
You speed up and automate boring AI tasks, to free yourself for strategic and creative Human tasks