Strategy
/flow-next:strategy produces and maintains STRATEGY.md: a short, durable anchor at the repo root that captures what the product is, who it serves, how it succeeds, and where the team is investing.
The doc lives next to README.md and GLOSSARY.md, never under .flow/. The project’s strategy belongs to the project, not to flow-next.
When to use it
Section titled “When to use it”- Starting a new product and need to lock down direction.
- Updating the roadmap after a pivot.
- Downstream skills (
/flow-next:prospect,/flow-next:plan,/flow-next:interview,/flow-next:capture) ask for grounding and no strategy exists yet.
The five required sections
Section titled “The five required sections”| Section | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Target problem | What real problem are we solving? |
| Our approach | How are we solving it differently? |
| Who it’s for | Who specifically benefits? |
| Key metrics | What signals tell us we’re winning? |
| Tracks | Where is the team investing right now? |
Two optional sections — Milestones (only if there are externally visible dated anchors) and Not working on (only if the team keeps being tempted by the same dead ends) — are gated behind a routing question. A Marketing section is deliberately not offered.
Rigor in the questions
Section titled “Rigor in the questions”The section headers are plain English. The interview discipline lives in references/interview.md:
- Free-form answers for substance. No menu options on the strategy questions themselves — recommendations would prime the user out of their own language.
- Two rounds of pushback maximum per section. After round 2, the user’s words are captured verbatim and the section gets a
<!-- worth revisiting -->marker. - Anti-pattern labels (
vanity,fluff,feature-list,goal-stated-as-problem) drive the follow-ups but never appear in the question text.
Durable across runs
Section titled “Durable across runs”Strategy is rerunnable. On a second run the skill summarizes the current file, asks which section to revisit, and only re-interviews that section. Untouched sections stay byte-identical. last_updated bumps to today’s date.
The doc is constrained to four sentences per section (Tracks excepted). Adding sections beyond the locked seven is forbidden. Short is a feature.
Ralph-blocked
Section titled “Ralph-blocked”/flow-next:strategy is human-in-the-loop only. Autonomous loops have no business deciding repo strategy — the skill hard-errors when invoked under Ralph.
Foreign-file safety
Section titled “Foreign-file safety”If a STRATEGY.md exists that flow-next did not generate, the skill refuses to overwrite. The user is asked to keep, migrate (deferred to a future version — currently means rename and re-run), or rewrite (with a second confirmation prompt).
Next step
Section titled “Next step”/flow-next:prospect [focus]Or, if .flow/ is already populated, downstream skills will read the new STRATEGY.md on their next invocation.