---
title: "Foundation Sprint Basics: Brainshelf Book Catalog (Day 1 Morning)"
description: "Day 1 morning bundled artifact for Brainshelf: target customer, important problem, team advantage, and competitor map as one coherent strategic frame."
artifact: foundation-sprint-basics
version: "1.0"
repo_version: "2.15.0"
skill_version: "0.1.0"
created: 2026-05-14
status: sample
thread: brainshelf
context: "Brainshelf Day 1 morning Basics; books-as-memory target customer commitment"
---

<!-- PM-Skills | https://github.com/product-on-purpose/pm-skills | Apache 2.0 -->

## Scenario

The Brainshelf team is in Day 1 morning of their Foundation Sprint. Jamie invokes `tool-foundation-sprint-basics` to facilitate four foundational decisions: target customer, important problem, team advantage, and competitor and alternative map. The output must be one coherent strategic frame, not four separable decisions.

## Target Customer Statement

> **People who read 25 or more books a year, treat their personal library as memory rather than identity, and feel friction with both Goodreads (too social, too noisy) and paper journals (too lossy, hard to search).**

Specific markers: age 30-55, urban or suburban, owns 100 or more books physical or digital, has tried at least one tracking tool and abandoned it, uses Pocket or Notion or Apple Notes for non-book knowledge capture today.

Note-and-vote outcome: 3 of 4 votes for this customer over "social readers in book clubs" (1 vote). Decider supervote confirmed.

## Important Problem Statement

> **"I read a lot, but I can't remember what I've read or what I want to read next, and the tools that should help me feel like work or like social media."**

Why this is painful enough to matter:

- Active readers report losing 15-20 minutes per book trying to remember "did I read this already?" at the bookstore or library.
- Recommendations from friends and articles accumulate but are never captured because the friction is too high.
- Goodreads collected 12 of the 22 interviewees' early enthusiasm and then lost them within 90 days. The reasons clustered as "too many notifications," "embarrassing public reading," "the data is theirs not mine."

This is a painful enough problem to drive switching from "do nothing" or paper journals. It is not a mild annoyance.

## Team Advantage Inventory

| Advantage | Evidence | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| Riley's network of 12k book bloggers | Active Discord; warm intros for customer research | Distribution + research access |
| Alex's design heritage in low-friction capture tools | Shipped 2 features at Notion-like company | Capability: fast-capture UX |
| Sam's mobile + offline-first engineering experience | Previously built Pocket-style sync engine | Capability: fast launch on iOS |
| Jamie's reader-community background | 8 years running a private reading group of 60+ active readers | Insight: knows the audience |

Note-and-vote outcome: team selected "low-friction capture UX" and "private-by-default reader insight" as the two advantages worth committing to.

## Competitor and Alternative Map

| Competitor / Alternative | What customers use it for | Why people leave (or stay) |
|---|---|---|
| **Goodreads** | Social shelving, friend feeds | Too social; owned by Amazon; stale UX; private surface dropped |
| **StoryGraph** | Tracking + recommendation alternative to Goodreads | Better than Goodreads but still social-first; limited iOS polish |
| **Bookly** | Reading-stats tracking on mobile | Feels like a gym tracker, not a memory tool |
| **LibraryThing** | Cataloging-focused, hobbyist | Dense UI, learning curve |
| **Notion / Apple Notes / Excel** | DIY tracking | Friction to set up; no book metadata |
| **Paper journal / bullet journal** | Manual tracking | Lossy; not searchable |
| **Do nothing** | Memory + bookstore browse | Books re-bought; recommendations forgotten |

"Do nothing" is the strongest alternative for the team's target customer. The team named it explicitly before evaluating against named competitors.

## Note-and-Vote Trace

| Decision | Options considered | Vote distribution | Decider supervote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Target customer | Individual collectors / Social readers / Book club coordinators | 3 / 1 / 0 | Books-as-memory readers (Decider confirmed top vote with reframing rationale) |
| Important problem | Forgetting books / No good recommendations / Tracking statistics | 3 / 0 / 1 | Forgetting books (Decider confirmed) |
| Top 2 advantages | Capture UX / Engineering / Insight / Distribution | 4 / 1 / 3 / 2 (multi-vote) | Capture UX + Insight (Decider confirmed top 2) |
| Strongest alternative to beat | Goodreads / Do nothing / Paper journal | 1 / 3 / 0 | Do nothing (Decider confirmed; explicitly named inertia as the baseline) |

## Decider Checkpoint

**Decider sign-off required before Day 1 afternoon (Differentiation) begins.**

- [x] Jamie confirms target customer statement is specific enough to design for.
- [x] Jamie confirms important problem is painful enough to drive switching from "do nothing."
- [x] Jamie commits to capture UX + private-by-default reader insight as the two advantages we will build on.
- [x] Jamie confirms "do nothing" is the strongest competitor.
- [x] Bundled artifact ratified as a coherent strategic frame; ready to proceed to Differentiation.

**Signed:** Jamie (founder, PM), 2026-05-13 12:45 PT
