From walkthrough to SOP
Lesson 1 of 6 · The Operator's Binder
1 · Learn the move · Flipped interaction
The processes that hurt are the ones living in one person's head, and asking that person to write it down produces four bullets and a shrug. Flip the interaction. The AI interviews you one question at a time, what starts it, what you open first, what you check, what goes wrong, and it drafts nothing until it can name every step, every system, and every decision point. Give it a stop condition so it knows when it has enough: it can write the steps in order with no gaps, or it tells you exactly what's still missing. The questions pull out the steps you'd never think to type.
You are documenting a process I run from memory. Do NOT draft the SOP yet. Interview me one question at a time, waiting for each answer, until you can write every step in order with no gaps: trigger, systems touched, each step, decision points, what goes wrong, who to call. STOP when you can draft it, say so, list what's still unknown as [NEEDS: ...], then write the SOP. [process name]
2 · Your turn. You write the prompt
New-hire onboarding lives entirely in Maureen's head. She retires in seven weeks, the process crosses email, the HR file, badge access, and the scheduling system, and nobody else has ever run it start to finish. Write a prompt that gets the AI to interview the process out of her before she walks out the door.
Remember: the AI sees only your prompt, not this page. If the situation isn't in your prompt, it doesn't exist.
Optional. These shape the output when you run your prompt below, not your score.