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Oji Udezue (25-year PM, former CPO at Typeform and Calendly, ex-product lead at…

2026-08-07 · 21:13 UTC ·@aakashgupta ·2 min read

Brief

Oji Udezue built and open-sourced a pre-coding “viability gate” (implemented as Claude Code/Skill) that enforces product judgment before engineering begins. The 11-step workflow scores ideas across six explicit dimensions—problem clarity & urgency, target user, competitive landscape, differentiation, technical feasibility, and revenue—and automatically recommends stopping when an idea gets three weak scores. In recorded demos, the gate passed a repo-safety analyzer (0 weak; 3 strong; 3 moderate, with moderates turned into a de-risking agenda) and killed a Slack-to-digest bot (weak overall; competitive landscape strong in the bad way, thin differentiation, low urgency). The stack also includes a discovery skill that requires naming five real customers and other modules (Vet a Feature, scope cutter, roadmap from strategy). Udezue’s argument: with engineering velocity up ~10–20×, product judgment is the bottleneck—“judgment at engineering speed” prevents shipping into crowded markets and accumulating zero-star repos.

Why it matters

Oji Udezue (25-year PM, former CPO at Typeform and Calendly, ex-product lead at Twitter) open-sourced a pre-development “viability gate” implemented as a Claude Code/Skill: an 11-step workflow that scores ideas on six dimensions (problem clarity & urgency, target user definition, competitive landscape, differentiation, technical feasibility, revenue) and recommends stopping if an idea gets three weak scores.

Key details

  • In live demos the gate evaluated two ideas: a repo ‘vibe’-to-production-safety tool (0 weak, 3 strong, 3 moderate → pass with three moderates flagged as de-risking work) and a Slack-to-daily-standup bot (scored weak overall; competitive landscape marked strong in the negative sense, differentiation thin, low urgency → recommended not to build, on camera).
  • His customer-discovery skill refuses to produce a plan unless you name five real target customers (fewer than five is treated as a signal of missing market access). The open-source library includes modules like Vet a Feature, sharp problem test, scope cutter, roadmap from strategy, and listening machine on GitHub.
  • Central claim: engineering speed has accelerated (~10x–20x faster in ~5 years), creating a ‘three-speed problem’ where faster development outpaces product judgment; the fix is “judgment at engineering speed,” otherwise teams ship into crowded markets and many repos end up at zero stars.
Source evidence

Every AI tool is built to agree with you.

Oji Udezue built one that tells you no.

He has been a PM for 25 years. Former CPO at Typeform and Calendly, former product lead at Twitter. What he open sourced runs before any code gets written. He calls it a viability gate.

You describe a business problem in Claude Code. Before it writes anything, an 11-step workflow scores the idea on six dimensions: problem clarity and urgency, target user definition, competitive landscape, differentiation, technical feasibility, revenue.

Three weak scores and it recommends you stop.

He ran two ideas through it live.

The first: a tool that reads vibe-coded repos and gives a plain English verdict on whether the code is production safe. Zero weak, three strong, three moderate. Pass, with the three moderates flagged as a de-risking agenda instead of a silent pass.

The second: a Slack bot that turns comments into a daily standup digest. Weak. Competitive landscape scored strong, which is the bad direction. Differentiation thin. Urgency was just workflow convenience.

The skill told him not to build it. On camera.

Here is why that matters more than any prompt library.

If you open a chat window and say "I have an idea," the model tells you it is a good idea. Better prompting does not fix that. Agreeableness is the default, and it gets expensive, because you find out the market was crowded after you already shipped.

Oji grounds the no in a framework with evals instead of model vibes. Same with discovery. His customer discovery skill refuses to produce a plan until you name five real target customers. Fewer than five and it treats that as a signal in itself. You may not have access to the market.

All of it traces back to what he calls the three-speed problem. Development time is being cut roughly 10x, maybe 20x in five years. But "should we build this" is customer bound, and getting it into people's hands is customer bound. Speed up only the middle and the whole pipeline jams on product.

That is what "PMs are the bottleneck" actually means. Engineers ship in an afternoon. The idea they are shipping still took three weeks to validate.

GitHub is full of repos sitting at zero stars for exactly this reason. People build first and look for a customer second.

The whole library is open source on GitHub. Vet a Feature, sharp problem test, scope cutter, roadmap from strategy, listening machine.

Judgment at engineering speed is the whole game now.

Video

Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta)

This guy literally dropped a masterclass on Claude Skills:

1:35 – Skills most people never build
3:58 – One prompt to full repo
5:41 – The gate that kills bad ideas
8:42 – AI scores his idea live
10:02 – Perplexity-level research, free
15:34 – Inside a $50K skill file
17:02 – How to make AI say no
18:06 – The perfect CLAUDE.md
19:04 – Never leak secrets again
37:20 – Watch an idea die on camera
38:58 – Why your repo has zero stars
52:00 – Why AI made you slower
59:53 – Boris's six-line CLAUDE.md

Video

— https://nitter.net/aakashgupta/status/2085574748482760746#m