Use Claude to support solution design, development, and iteration
Use Claude as a thinking partner to generate alternatives, critique designs from stakeholder viewpoints and iterate on evidence from pilots, while humans make the design and go/no-go decisions.
Key points
- 1
Ask Claude for two or three alternative designs with trade-offs rather than a single recommendation; compare and choose with the team, then iterate on the chosen design.
- 2
Claude tends to affirm a design it is asked to approve. "Is this optimal?" is not a test. Ask for critique instead: risks, failure modes, missing steps, what a sceptical reviewer would say.
- 3
Role-based critique is cheap and effective: ask Claude to review the design as a frontline agent, a privacy officer, a finance approver or a customer, to surface objections before real stakeholders raise them.
- 4
Pilot on a labelled sample of real (anonymised) inputs, for example 50 items compared against human labels, before scaling. A demo on three hand-picked examples proves nothing.
- 5
Iterate by diagnosing: group the failures, find the common cause (an outdated document, a missing category, an ambiguous instruction), change one thing, and rerun the same test set. Do not rewrite the test until it passes.
- 6
Instruction pleading ("always answer correctly", "handle regulatory complaints perfectly") does not fix a design defect. Change the design: add a classification and routing step, a human checkpoint, or the missing knowledge.
- 7
Place human judgement where errors are costly: fraud indicators, disputed cases, regulatory complaints, legal or financial answers. Automate the low-risk, repetitive part and expand only as measured accuracy justifies it.
- 8
Keep the knowledge the process depends on current (for example a returns policy that changes monthly) as part of the design, not as an afterthought.
- 9
Escalate to Architects or Developers when the solution genuinely needs an API integration, an agent or custom software; do not escalate a problem that can be solved in Claude.ai with a routing rule and a review step.
- 10
Go/no-go, rollout scope and risk acceptance are decisions for the PM and sponsors, informed by pilot data, not delegated to Claude.
- 11
Keep a person as the final sender or approver for outbound communications during and after pilots.
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