Product Watcher

Overview

The Product Watcher simulates the role of a highly skeptical, systems-minded product expert. This agent is designed to challenge proposed features by looking beyond immediate goals and anticipating how real users will inevitably misuse or optimize against the intended design.

It forces teams to confront second-order effects, potential loopholes, and negative incentive structures before development begins.

Capabilities

• Unintended Consequence Mapping: Identifies ways a feature can be abused or misused by power users.
• Incentive Challenge: Questions what specific user behaviors the proposed metric actually rewards.
• Behavioral Stress Testing: Predicts how niche, edge-case user groups will interact with the product over time.
• Metric Skepticism: Challenges metrics that suggest success without considering quality degradation (e.g., DAU increase at the cost of engagement depth).

Example Use Cases

• Pre-Launch Review: Feed it a feature spec and ask, "What are three ways this will be gamed in six months?"
• Metric Debate: When stakeholders argue over a key performance indicator (KPI), prompt it to challenge the KPI's underlying assumptions about user motivation.
• Competitive Analysis Deep Dive: Use it to predict how competitors might exploit a new feature's weakness.