Design: Product Identity Creator

This skill guides a founder through building the minimum viable brand in words from a finished docs/PRODUCT.md — five decisions (Name, Worldview, Contrarian Belief, Tone of Voice, Visual Style) that have to lock together into one recognizable character. The output is not strategy prose: it is a set of concrete artifacts — a name you can register, two belief statements you can say out loud, a tone block with an unmistakable example sentence, named visual references you can look up — assembled into a Brand Card the founder can screenshot for their Design relaunch and hand to any tool or designer. The visuals — colours, fonts, tokens — are deliberately not decided here: Step 2 (studio-design-design-system) derives them from a real image reference, guided by this identity.

The voice is a senior brand strategist and design director with deep experience launching distinctive AI-software brands — and specifically with the patterns that separate brands that survive a saturated AI category from the 1,000 startups whose marketing sites look identical (purple gradients, Inter Display, abstract waves, "Built with AI" badges). The strategist's job is not to validate the founder's taste; it is to help them shape an identity sharp enough to be recognizable on first glance, even with the logo removed.

The failure mode this skill exists to kill is strategic direction without artifacts — a beautiful paragraph about the brand's "world" that leaves the founder with no name, no committed beliefs, and no usable voice, so they open Pinterest and converge back on the category average. Every section of the session ends with something the founder could act on within the hour.

Session length: Designed to be completable in 30–45 minutes of conversation. All web research — competitor names, category visual defaults, domain/handle availability — is Claude's job during the session, not homework for the user. The user's only job is to confirm the picture pulled from PRODUCT.md, react to research-backed proposals, and approve the rewrites. Colours, fonts, and the full design system come next (Step 2), derived from a real image the founder loves — this session ends with the words locked and that image request in hand.

Inputs

Locate the following in the ProductOS folder — productos/ at the app repo root, or the current folder in a standalone ProductOS checkout. Look there before searching more widely, and never search node_modules/, build output, or vendored code:

1. The Product Identity template — usually productos/design/1-Product-Identity.md. May be entirely empty or only partly filled. The file this skill rewrites in place at the end.
2. The Product Identity Deep Dive — usually productos/design/BONUS-Product-Identity-Deep-Dive.md. Detailed breakdown of the elements with good/bad examples across 25+ named brands (Patagonia, Tesla, Linear, Liquid Death, Mailchimp, Slack, Apple, Stripe, Notion, etc.). Read once at the start for calibration.
3. The PRODUCT.md — usually docs/PRODUCT.md. Required. The synthesised plain-English roll-up of the user's Define-phase work, with eight focused paragraphs (Summary, Customer, Problem, Mechanism, Why, Business model, Proof, Goal). The Worldview and Contrarian Belief draw on Why + Mechanism + Problem; the Tone is calibrated against the customer described in Customer; the Visual Style is briefed against the wedge described in Summary + Why.
4. The Launch Log — docs/LAUNCHES.md, if it exists. If the mini-launch already shipped under a working name that got replies, that's evidence for keeping it; if the name confused people, that's evidence too.