07Tips & Best Practices
Prompt like an operator,
not an enthusiast.
The operational principles that separate teams getting strategic value from teams generating clever throwaway content.
Specificity beats cleverness
Replace every variable with concrete inputs. "Senior account executives in EMEA" outperforms "sales people" every time.
Assign a role first
Lead with "Act as a…" framing. The model's tone, vocabulary, and structure shift dramatically when you anchor identity.
Constrain the output shape
Specify format, length, and structure. "Return as a 5-row table with columns X, Y, Z" produces deployable artifacts.
Iterate in two passes
Generate broad, then refine narrow. Treat your first prompt as a discovery tool, not a final draft.
Operator's checklist
- 01Define the audience (role, level, context) before you prompt
- 02State the business outcome, not the activity
- 03Include the constraint or non-goal
- 04Specify tone (executive, instructional, conversational)
- 05Request the output format explicitly
- 06Ask for assumptions surfaced at the end
- 07Run a critique pass: "What's weak about this output?"
- 08Save winning prompts to your team SOP
Don'ts
- Don't paste confidential employee data without sanitization
- Don't accept the first output as final — always SME-review
- Don't use AI to replace stakeholder conversations
- Don't forget to version-control prompts that ship to production