🧠 PM Brain-as-Code

Your external product management brain. Single source of truth = latest commit.

A living knowledge base that bridges the gap between Product Management frameworks and actual execution. Git-versioned, shareable, ready to use.

Product teams drown in blog posts and frameworks but don't know how to run sprint planning or write a strategy document by EOD. This gives you battle-tested guides, templates, and playbooks—and product sense is built in: when you work with the repo (e.g. in Cursor), the agent guides you to think first, then structure.

Quick links: Setup · Guidelines · Architecture · Template finder

New here? Open this repo in Cursor and start a conversation—the agent will guide you. No special phrase; say what you're working on (e.g. "I'm stuck on prioritization" or "I need to write a PRD") and you'll be guided.

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📦 What's Inside

pm-brain/
├── 00-Meta/                    # Personal practice (daily log, learning log, growth portfolio, Product Judgment Test)
├── 01-Company-Context/         # Vision, strategy, principles, stakeholders
├── 02-Methods-and-Tools/      # Frameworks, guides, templates (think → strategy → discovery → execution → communication)
├── 03-Research-Artifacts/     # Research storage
└── 04-Initiatives/             # Active bets (opportunity assessments, PRDs, docs)

Latest commit = current reality. No stale Notion or Confluence pages.

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💡 What this is / What it isn't

What it is:

• A bridge from PM theory to daily execution: frameworks plus an agent that guides you to think first, then structure your messy thinking into clear artifacts
• A place to store the messy reality of product work—your raw thinking, decisions, and day-to-day adjustments—using git as the single source of truth
• A way to make AI useful for product work: give it your company context, a framework, and a template, and it helps condense your messy braindump into structured thinking

What it isn't:

• Not a productivity tool that saves hours on trivial tasks (it's about better thinking, not faster checkboxes)
• Not a replacement for project management tools (link to Jira, Confluence, Figma instead of duplicating everything here)
• Not about perfect prompts (the agent guides the conversation; you do the thinking, deciding, and writing)

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🚀 Get Started

1. Clone or fork (fork recommended if you’ll add company-specific context):

   git clone https://github.com/andreaskelm/pm-brain.git
   cd pm-brain

2. Follow SETUP.md — Company Context, AI/agent config, optional 00-Meta setup.
3. Use the repo — Open a framework or start a conversation with the agent; it will guide you (think first, then structure, then templates).

Using the agent (Cursor): Open this repo in Cursor and start a chat. You don't need a special phrase—say what you're working on ("I'm stuck on prioritization," "Help me think through this feature," "I need to write a PRD"). The agent will guide you and signal when it switches from exploring to structuring. Behavior is defined in AGENTS.md (persona), ORCHESTRATION.md (routing & states), and MEMORY.md (what context to load); see .cursor/rules/. No copy-paste required.

Use PM Brain in any project (Cursor only):

npx skills add andreaskelm/pm-brain

Installs the workflow skill from skills.sh; use it in any repo where you do PM work.

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🏗️ Structure & Navigation

• Visual: ARCHITECTURE.md — repo layers and methods flow.
• Agent behavior: ORCHESTRATION.md — routing, states, context loading; MEMORY.md — when to load company/initiatives/research.
• I need a template: 02-Methods-and-Tools/0-template-finder.md.
• Everything about a topic: 02-Methods-and-Tools/1-frameworks-by-topic.md.
• Evals (methods + agent behavior): .cursor/evals/README.md — guidance-based; when to run and where to update: ORCHESTRATION.md → Eval Checkpoints.
• How to use and maintain: GUIDELINES.md.

Product sense (think first, then structure) is built into the agent; see PRODUCT-SENSE-RULES.md and 0-start-here-product-thinking.

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🤝 Contributing

• Fork (private) for company context: after forking, append .gitignore.private or .gitignore.team to .gitignore. See 00-Meta/MODE-SELECTION-GUIDE.md.
• Contribute improvements to the public repo (frameworks, guides, patterns); keep examples generic.

Conventions: follow folder/naming in the repo, clear commit messages, no proprietary info in examples.

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👤 Created by Andreas Kelm

⭐ Star if useful · 🔀 Fork to make it yours

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📚 Credits & License

Frameworks from product management thought leaders. See CREDITS.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — view, use, modify, share with attribution; non-commercial. See LICENSE.