A product manager is using Claude to ideate options for a new self-service portal. The team needs breadth before narrowing and will evaluate trade-offs across the options in a separate session.
Which prompting strategy fits this stage?
A.
Request multiple distinct options ordered by Claude’s assessment of feasibility, so the team can focus its trade-off discussion on the most feasible options first.
B.
Request a single recommended option with strong reasoning, since well-reasoned single options give the team a clearer starting point than several weakly reasoned alternatives.
C.
Request multiple distinct options with stated trade-offs, and avoid committing to a single recommendation in this round.
D.
Request multiple distinct options and ask Claude to recommend the strongest one with reasoning, so the team starts the trade-off discussion from a leading candidate.
Answer C is correct. The team is in a divergent ideation stage, where the objective is to explore a broad range of possibilities before selecting or prioritizing an approach. Claude should therefore generate multiple genuinely distinct portal options and identify the relevant benefits, limitations, dependencies, and trade-offs of each. The prompt should explicitly prevent premature selection of a single recommendation because evaluation and narrowing will occur in a separate session.
Option A introduces early feasibility ranking, which can anchor the team on familiar or easily implemented ideas before it has considered the full solution space. Option B immediately narrows the work to one recommendation and directly conflicts with the stated need for breadth. Option D generates several options but then asks Claude to identify a leader, which can similarly bias the team’s later evaluation toward that candidate.
Separating divergent and convergent thinking improves the workflow. The first round should maximize meaningful variety and make differences between options visible. The later session can apply agreed criteria such as customer value, accessibility, implementation effort, cost, risk, and strategic alignment. Anthropic’s prompting guidance emphasizes giving Claude clear success criteria, relevant context, and explicit output requirements. At this stage, success means diverse, comparable alternatives—not a final decision. Anthropic prompting best practices
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