Capstone: The Engagement Starter Kit
Build all six engagement-starter artifacts with AI, apply the edit pass to each, and capture the result as your first piece of reusable IP — holding none of the client's secrets.
This capstone puts the full practice together. You will build all six artifacts in the engagement starter kit using AI, apply the edit pass to each one, and capture the result as your first piece of reusable IP.
The brief: pick one engagement type — a strategy review, an operational diagnostic, a market-entry assessment. Make it generic. Use a fictional client with no real names, no real data, no material that could be connected to any actual client or engagement. This constraint is not cosmetic. It is the confidentiality gate in practice.
The Six Artifacts
Work through all six in order. Each one: hand the brief to AI, review the draft, apply the edit pass.
Proposal outline. Give AI your generic brief and ask for a proposal outline with scope, deliverables, timeline, and success criteria. Review the draft: are the scope boundaries right? Are the deliverables specific enough to mean something? Are the success criteria things you could actually measure? Rewrite anything that is vague or that does not reflect how you scope this type of engagement.
Discovery questions. Ask AI to generate a structured interview guide for this engagement type — covering the problem, stakeholders, constraints, and desired outcomes. Review it against what you have actually asked in similar engagements. Add the questions that AI did not think to include. Cut the ones that are generic filler. What comes out should sound like your interview approach, not a generic consulting questionnaire.
Hypothesis and framework. Give AI the engagement brief and ask it to propose an analytical framework and initial hypothesis. Push back on what it gives you. Is the framework the right one for this type of problem, or the obvious one? What is a second hypothesis worth testing? The output you keep should reflect your analytical instincts, not just the first framework that came up.
Deck outline. Ask AI for a slide-by-slide deck outline: narrative arc, one-sentence message per slide, suggested data types. Edit the narrative so it is the argument you would actually make for this engagement type. Cut the slides that do not earn their place. Add the slides that are specific to how you structure this kind of recommendation.
Stakeholder map. Ask AI to suggest a stakeholder map for this type of engagement — who owns the decision, who influences it, what each stakeholder group needs to hear. Think through whether the map reflects the actual political dynamics in this kind of engagement. Add nuance where AI has been generic.
Executive summary. Draft the exec summary last. Ask AI to compress the other artifacts into a one-page summary: situation, recommendation, rationale. Edit the recommendation section until it is specific, directional, and defensible. If it says "the organization should consider" — it is not ready. If it says "the right move is X, because Y, with Z as the first step" — it is ready.
The Edit Pass on Every Artifact
Apply the four-step edit pass to each artifact before moving on to the next one. Do not shortcut it. The discipline of adding your frameworks, stripping the generic take, verifying any figures, and owning the recommendation is the whole point.
This is where the reusable IP is forged. The AI draft is generic. The edited version, after you have applied your frameworks and your point of view, reflects how you actually work. That is what is worth keeping.
Capture the IP
Once all six artifacts are edited, run the IP capture step.
Ask AI to help you distill what you have built into a reusable template — a prompt set or document structure that encodes your approach for this engagement type. Before you do: confirm that every artifact you pass in contains only the generic fictional scenario and your frameworks. No real client names, no real data, no confidential material of any kind.
What you end up with is a starter kit in your own voice, built on your own frameworks, that you own completely and can deploy on the next engagement of this type from day one.
Continue at academy.jeremyknox.ai or the full collection at jeremyknox.ai.