Product planning

Templates that connect upstream product planning (PoC / MVP / Phased) to the Forge Ore pipeline. Uses the existing PDLC-SDLC bridge and discipline bridges to show how business drivers flow down to daily Sparks.

Planning hierarchy

Business Driver (PDLC P1–P3)
  └── Product Spark (PoC / MVP / Phase release)
        └── Forge Iteration(s) (1–2 week cycles)
              └── Ingots (refined work items)
                    └── Sparks (executable tasks, 1–4 hours)
                          └── Charge (today's selected Sparks)

This maps to the existing WBS hierarchy: Milestone → Epic → Story → Task. Forge terms layer on top without replacing the ID scheme.

Documents

File	Purpose
`PLANNING-FLOW.md`	Full pipeline from vision to daily Sparks
`release-plan.template.md`	Forge release plan template (Product Spark)
`poc-plan.template.md`	PoC planning template
`mvp-plan.template.md`	MVP planning template
`phase-plan.template.md`	Phase planning template
`forge-planning.mdc.template`	Cursor rule for guided planning

Product Spark

A Product Spark is a potentially shippable product iteration that may span multiple Forge iterations. It represents the coarsest grain of delivery planning in Forge:

Product stage	Product Spark type	Assay Gate focus
PoC	Hypothesis validation	Did we learn what we needed?
MVP	Core value delivery	Does the minimum viable feature set work?
Phase	Incremental capability	Is this phase complete and releasable?

Product Manager agent

For product-level planning (vision, strategy, roadmap, business case, market analysis, WBS, product bootstrap), see the Product Manager agent package. It provides:

A Cursor rule (forge-product-manager.mdc.template) that orchestrates product strategy and bootstrap through dialog.
A product bootstrap flow for taking a new product from zero to first Charge.
A first charge template with pre-defined product bootstrap Sparks.

The Product Manager agent is upstream of forge-planning — it creates the strategic inputs (vision, roadmap, business case) that forge-planning then decomposes into Forge work units.

PDLC connection

Product planning in Forge connects to PDLC phases:

P1–P2 (Discover/Validate) → generates the business drivers that become Ore
P3 (Strategize) → defines Product Sparks and their scope
P4 (Launch) → Product Spark passes Assay Gate and ships
P5 (Grow) → learning feeds new Ore