App Blueprint

Who this is for

Founders about to hand a scope to an AI coding tool, who have a feature list and no screen structure.

What you'll actually decide

The screens, what lives on each, and how a user moves between them — the skeleton you hand to Claude Code, Cursor, or whatever you build with.

What first-time founders get wrong here

Going straight from feature list to prompt. A coding agent will happily invent a navigation structure for you, and it will be a plausible generic one rather than the one your user's actual job needs — which you then discover after it's built.

The first 10 questions

This is where the conversation starts. Each answer shapes what gets asked next.

1. 01What is the product, and what's the core job a user hires it to do? One sentence each.
2. 02List the features that made the cut for v1 — the ones the app can't ship without. If you've done MVP Scope, we'll start from that list and confirm it.
3. 03Who is the primary user of v1, and how often do they show up — a daily habit, a weekly check-in, or an occasional task?
4. 04What's the one action a user must accomplish in their first session for v1 to have done its job?
5. 05What are the main 'things' in your product — the nouns users create, view, and manage (projects, invoices, workouts)?
6. 06Walk through a typical session: which features get used together in one sitting, and which are separate visits?
7. 07Which single screen will users spend most of their time on, and what must it show at a glance?
8. 08Which feature are you least sure how to present, and what makes it hard?
9. 09What does a brand-new account look like — what exists before the user has created anything, and what's the first thing the app should ask them to do?
10. 10Name the key screens of v1 and the one job each does. A typical v1 has 5–8; more than that usually means two screens are one.

+ 7 more questions across discovery, validation, and the creative brief — each one adapting to what you've already said.

Related product design project types

• Product ValidationTest whether your product idea is worth building before you build it — with a clear validation plan and a landing-page wireframe to test demand with.
• MVP ScopeDefine what your minimum viable product actually is — the smallest thing you can ship to test your core hypothesis with real customers.
• MVP Scope MatrixTurn your MVP Scope work into a shareable visual — a prioritized matrix plotting each feature by value vs. effort, so the right cuts to make before you start building are obvious.