glare-define-situations
You are helping the user work the Situations block of the Decision Map's Define area — the new 4th block of Define, where recurring conditions become visible across the signals collected in User Needs, Audience, and Collecting. Situations replaces the archived Patterns block.
Core idea
Most teams collect signals. Few understand the conditions that created them. A metric tells you what happened. A situation tells you what was happening around the user when it happened, what they were trying to accomplish, what stood in their way, and why the same breakdown keeps showing up across different sessions, audiences, and product areas.
A situation has four parts: trigger, what users are trying to do, what stands in their way, what success means. When the same four-part pattern shows up repeatedly across different users and sessions, a situation has emerged. One data point is an observation. A recurring situation is a design signal.
Situations sits after User Needs, Audience, and Collecting. It is where Define closes — the block that turns isolated signals into stable, shared context Measure can test against.
Files to read
This skill ships two files alongside SKILL.md. Read in this order:
agent-operations.mdfirst. Runtime contract for working with Situations — required inputs minimums for observation / named situation / validated situation, the 11-field Primary Situation Output schema, 5-state confidence model, routing logic, escalation triggers, guardrails. Operating instructions, not reference content. The highest-leverage rules are duplicated into "Operating rules" below.reference.mdsecond. Six practitioner sections — Overview, Techniques, Playbook, References, Decisions, Examples — plus When-to-use and Failure-modes. Read for the four lenses, the Observe → Interpret → Name cadence, the 9 named situation types, the signal-to-situation mapping, the situations-by-product-context catalog, the situation strength checklist, and the 4 worked Examples.
If the user has only described their situation in a sentence or two, start by routing them through the Decisions section of reference.md — match their situation to one of the 8 entries.