Scaffold · a guided product workbook

Knowing what to build has never been so important. And you’ve never had so little time to come up with a robust strategy.

You’re busier than ever: perhaps the only product manager in a small team, spending a minimum of 50 hours a week at work. Scaffold helps you make better product decisions, and get better at making them.

Join the waitlistSee how it works
Scaffold's Uncontested Market Strategy activity for Vintum, a fictional Lisbon rentals company: a strategy canvas where Vintum's future curve drops hotel-style hospitality and rises above the industry average on off-hours self-entry, B2B invoicing and owner care. It is built on eight earlier activities.
Uncontested Market Strategy for Vintum, a fictional Lisbon rentals company, run through the real product. It was built on eight earlier activities in the same workbook, and every answer records the models that produced it.

You decide what gets built, and you need to defend your choices.

You need to articulate a robust product strategy, and defend the roadmap that delivers it.

You know there are a number of different techniques that can help. But because product management is taught by apprenticeship, it takes a while to understand what to use where.

Every request takes the product in a different direction.

You often feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of feature options you’re facing: direct requests from sales and marketing, requests from customers, and direct asks from the CEO.

This was always hard. But now that engineers are using AI, the pace has increased almost exponentially. You feel frustrated, sometimes almost to the point of burning out.

  • Salesdirect request
  • Marketingdirect request
  • Customersrequests
  • The CEOdirect ask

Analysis paralysis, or prioritising by decibel.

Choices are often made on a hunch, rather than on solid insight.

You alternate between the two: analysing without deciding, or prioritising whoever shouts the loudest. Neither leads to a coherent product making significant headway in the strategic direction that was decided.

Without solving this, you face intervention from leadership to take over the direction, which leaves you completely disempowered.

It’s not only the future of the product that is at stake, but also your future career.

Enter Scaffold

With Scaffold, you can build, present and execute a robust product strategy.

Instead of haphazardly trying different product management models, Scaffold provides an approach that gradually builds a precise picture of where the product should go.

It does so very effectively and efficiently, because each piece of insight is then used to move the thinking forward.

Twenty years of product management experience, in a small package.

Anyone can hand you a Business Case template. Knowing it is not worth writing until you have a market size and a pricing model, and saying so before you waste the afternoon, is the part that takes twenty years.

Business Case → Product Vision · TAM / SAM / SOM · Pricing Models · Performance Metrics · +5 more

The method comes from Cyril Le Roux, who teaches Product Focus's flagship product management course and co-authored their AI course. He learned it doing the job: senior product leader at BT, Photobox, Zoopla and TransferGo, consultant to Companial, Puzzel and Holafly, and board advisor to Connectd.

And what it is not: Scaffold owns the judgement, never the backlog. It records decisions and the reasoning behind them; it does not track delivery, so no sprints, no statuses, no code generation and no OKR tracking. That stays in Linear or Jira.

How that actually works.

One activity, from opening it to the answer landing in your product record. Nothing here is a black box, because the whole point is that you can show your working.

  1. 01

    It picks the next activity

    Every activity declares what it depends on. The workbook knows which ones already have what they need and which have gone stale, so the recommendation is computed from your record, not guessed.

  2. 02

    It loads your record, not a blank prompt

    Porter’s Five Forces opens already holding your Competitor Profiles and Market Watch. You are not pasting context in. The activity names what it pulled, so you can see what it read.

  3. 03

    Nine activities get a council

    On the nine that make claims about the outside world, your competitors and your market, three models draft and a judge reconciles them, tiering each idea by how many models surfaced it. Everything else runs one flagship model.

  4. 04

    You approve before anything is kept

    Nothing enters your product record until you commit it. Revise it, export it, or turn it into a deck. What you approved is what is stored, unedited.

  5. 05

    Everything downstream is told

    Change your personas later and every deliverable built on them is marked as based on outdated context, so you find out from the workbook rather than from someone in a meeting.

That dependency graph is the product. 48 activities, 31 of them in Strategy, joined by 256 declared dependencies, which is what lets the workbook say a Business Case is not worth writing yet, and name everything it is waiting on. See the full library

One question, traced through a workbook.

“What problem are we actually solving, for whom, and how many of them are there?” is a question every product person, you included, answers badly at least once. Here is that question moving through a workbook for Vintum, a fictional company that rents furnished homes in Lisbon to people on work assignments. The company is invented; every screen below is the real product’s output.

  1. Company Foundations

    Completed

    You work from internal documents presenting the company’s vision, mission and strategic pillars, to ensure your product direction is consistent with the C-suite’s ambition. This context is one of the most frequently used across subsequent activities.

    Built on: Vintum - Company strategy 2026.md · Claude Opus 4.8 · 34s · read by 42 of the other 47 activities

    Company Foundations for Vintum, built by Claude Opus 4.8 in 34 seconds from an uploaded internal strategy document: who the company is, with highlights such as a minimum stay of 21 nights and around 180 homes.

  2. Product Vision

    Completed

    Built on the company vision, and on your narrative of what will be true when the product achieves its goal. Scaffold proposes a product vision for the product direction. You tweak it slightly and adopt it. From this point, most product decisions reference this decision.

    Built on: Company Foundations · Claude Opus 4.8 · 23s

    Vintum's Product Vision, built on Company Foundations: Arrival Is a Solved Problem, a world where anyone sent to work in Lisbon lets themselves into a home that simply works from the first night.

  3. Persona

    Validated by 3 models

    You feed it some transcripts of conversations with customers explaining their pains and needs. The AI supplements this with industry research to propose typical personas: Tomás, Sofia, Helena and Rafael. You tweak a few words before saving them as reference personas for future work.

    Built on: Company Foundations, Product Vision, Customer interviews - August 2026.md · Council of 3 · Claude Opus 4.8 · GPT-5.6 Terra · Gemini 3.1 Pro · 3m 20s

    Vintum's personas, produced by a council of three models from customer interview transcripts: Tomás, an engineer on a Lisbon assignment, and Sofia, a mobility lead who books homes for her company's hires.

  4. Value Proposition Canvas

    Completed

    This is where you really look into the jobs for that persona, the pains and the gains, and map them against your product’s value proposition.

    Built on: Persona, Company Foundations, Product Vision +4 more · Claude Opus 4.8 · 32s

    The Value Proposition Canvas for Tomás, the traveller: his customer jobs, pains such as being stranded on the street on a late arrival, and gains such as guaranteed independent entry on the first night.

  5. How many of them are there?

    That is the job of TAM / SAM / SOM, the next one after that. It reads these personas, along with 7 other activities, before it sizes the market.

    Up next · still waiting on: Pricing Models

    TAM / SAM / SOM before it runs: it will use seven completed activities from the workbook, including Personas, and marks Pricing Models as not yet complete.

The product is more successful. And so is your career.

You’re now capable of articulating and defending a strong product strategy. In the process, you learn about all the different ingredients that need to be taken into consideration.

Faster decisions
You make product decisions much quicker.
The right context for engineering
You give the engineering team the right context to build the product the best way possible.
Time at the strategic level
You get more time to interact with stakeholders and engage at a strategic level, which raises your visibility in the organisation.

Be one of the first ten products in the workbook.

As an early user, you shape the activity library, because the first ten are worth talking to. Private alpha, by invitation: no price, no card. Your workbook is stored in the EU; the AI runs through US providers. How your data is handled.

Join the waitlist

Produxity also runs a product consulting practice for founders, product leaders and boards. Deepest sector experience: marketplaces and property portals.

See the consulting practice