Share Your Ideas: Workshop Your Product One-Pagers with AI

In 2004, Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint at Amazon. Instead, he mandated structured written documents - six-pagers for complex proposals, one-pagers for everything else. The reasoning was simple: slides let you hide behind bullet points, but writing forces clarity. If you can't explain your idea in a concise, structured format, you probably don't understand it well enough yet.

Amazon's one-pager became a forcing function for clear thinking. It answers the essential questions upfront: What's the problem? What's the solution? Who benefits? Teams could align faster because the document did the heavy lifting before the meeting even started.

Product managers everywhere have adopted this discipline. A product one-pager forces you to answer the hard questions before you invest weeks of effort: What problem are you actually solving? Why does it matter? Who are you solving it for?

Most ideas start messy - scattered notes, half-formed thoughts, intuitions you can't quite articulate. The act of writing a one-pager is what turns that fog into clarity. You discover the gaps in your own thinking. You realize which assumptions need validation. You understand your idea better because you had to structure it.

The challenge is that this clarity doesn't come easy. Staring at a blank document, you're left wondering where to start and what to include. That's where AI can help - not by writing for you, but by guiding you through the right questions until your own thinking crystallizes.

Solution: Workshop your ideas with AI as your guide

Here's a quick walkthrough of how it works:

  1. Start with your captured idea. Use a memo or raw notes from a previous capture session (see my previous post on capturing ideas). You can also start from scratch.
  2. AI asks the right questions. The skill guides you through mandatory sections - the why (problem/opportunity), the what (your solution), and the target user persona. It asks up to three focused questions per section to draw out your thinking.
  3. Add optional depth. Choose which additional sections matter for your idea: success criteria, user value, business value, strategic alignment, key metrics, or risks. The AI will workshop these with you too.
  4. Iterate until it's right. Review the generated one-pager and refine any section. Ask the AI to adjust metrics, sharpen the value proposition, or reframe the problem. It's your voice - the AI just helps structure it.
  5. Export and share. Put the final one-pager into a canvas (ChatGPT, Gemini), Artifact (Claude) or use an MCP-based integration (e.g., Notion) to share it. Now you have a document ready for feedback from colleagues and stakeholders.

For setup instructions and the full skill file, check out my GitHub repository.

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