VDF AI Prompting Guide

Master the art of prompting VDF AI to get the best results from your agile team management, document analysis, and business intelligence needs.

Table of Contents

  1. Prompting Fundamentals
  2. Agent vs Manual Mode
  3. Document Analysis Prompts
  4. Agile & Scrum Prompts
  5. Visualization & Diagram Prompts
  6. Integration-Specific Prompts
  7. Advanced Prompting Techniques
  8. Common Use Cases
  9. Troubleshooting Prompts

Prompting Fundamentals

The VDF AI Advantage

VDF AI is designed for agile teams and business intelligence. It excels at:

  • Context-aware responses using your connected data (Jira, Confluence, Google Drive)
  • Multi-modal processing (text, documents, voice, visualizations)
  • Specialized agents for specific tasks (Story Generation, Scrum Consulting, etc.)
  • Real-time collaboration with team metrics and project data

Basic Prompting Principles

Be Specific and Contextual

  • ❌ "Help me with my project"
  • ✅ "Analyze our current sprint velocity and suggest improvements for our React development team"

Provide Relevant Context

  • ❌ "Create a user story"
  • ✅ "Create a user story for implementing Google OAuth in our mobile app, considering our existing authentication system"

Use Natural Language

  • ✅ "What are the bottlenecks in our development process?"
  • ✅ "Generate a retrospective agenda based on our last sprint data"
  • ✅ "Create a causal loop diagram showing how technical debt affects delivery time"

Agent vs Manual Mode

Agent Mode (Recommended for Complex Tasks)

Best for: Multi-step tasks requiring coordination between different AI agents

Example Prompts:

  • "Draft a comprehensive product strategy based on our market research and create user stories for the top 3 features"
  • "Analyze our team's performance issues and create an improvement plan with actionable steps"
  • "Review our backlog, identify gaps, and suggest prioritization based on business value"

Manual Mode (Best for Focused Tasks)

Best for: Specific, well-defined tasks using specialized tools

Available Tools:

  • Story Generation: "Create a user story for implementing dark mode"
  • Backlog Refinement: "Analyze our current backlog and suggest improvements"
  • Scrum Consultant: "Help us improve our daily standup process"
  • Value Identification: "Assess the business value of adding AI features"
  • Persona Generation: "Create personas for our B2B SaaS product"

Document Analysis Prompts

Document Processing

Upload documents and ask:

  • "Summarize this 50-page technical specification in 5 key points"
  • "Extract all action items from this meeting transcript"
  • "Identify risks and opportunities in this contract"
  • "Convert this requirements document into user stories"
  • "Create a checklist from this compliance document"

Multi-Document Analysis

  • "Compare these three proposals and highlight the best option"
  • "Merge insights from these research papers into a single summary"
  • "Find inconsistencies between these technical documents"
  • "Create a unified requirements document from these scattered specs"

Document Transformation

  • "Turn this technical document into a user-friendly guide"
  • "Convert this meeting notes into a project plan"
  • "Transform this data into a presentation outline"
  • "Create a FAQ from this support documentation"

Agile & Scrum Prompts

Sprint Planning & Management

  • "Analyze our last 3 sprints and suggest improvements for planning"
  • "Create a sprint goal for our next iteration focusing on user authentication"
  • "Identify dependencies between our current stories"
  • "Suggest story point estimates for our upcoming backlog items"

Team Performance & Metrics

  • "Analyze our team's velocity trends and suggest optimizations"
  • "Identify what's causing our cycle time to increase"
  • "Create a team performance dashboard with key metrics"
  • "Suggest ways to improve our code review process"

Retrospectives & Process Improvement

  • "Generate a retrospective agenda based on our sprint data"
  • "What patterns do you see in our team's impediments?"
  • "Create an action plan to address our technical debt"
  • "Suggest process improvements based on our team dynamics"

User Story & Backlog Management

  • "Review our backlog and identify stories that need clarification"
  • "Create acceptance criteria for our authentication stories"
  • "Prioritize our backlog based on business value and effort"
  • "Identify missing stories for our user registration feature"

Visualization & Diagram Prompts

Causal Loop Diagrams

  • "Create a causal loop diagram showing how technical debt affects delivery time"
  • "Visualize the relationship between team size and communication overhead"
  • "Show how context switching impacts productivity"
  • "Map the feedback loops in our development process"

Process Flow Diagrams

  • "Create a flowchart for our code review process"
  • "Visualize our deployment pipeline with decision points"
  • "Map our user onboarding journey"
  • "Show the flow from feature request to production"

Data Visualizations

  • "Create a velocity chart for our last 6 sprints"
  • "Visualize our bug distribution by component"
  • "Show our team's capacity utilization over time"
  • "Create a burn-down chart for our current sprint"

Business Diagrams

  • "Create a value stream map for our feature development"
  • "Design a user journey map for our mobile app"
  • "Visualize our product roadmap with dependencies"
  • "Create a risk assessment matrix for our current projects"

Integration-Specific Prompts

Jira Integration

When Jira is connected:

  • "Create a Jira story for implementing user authentication with acceptance criteria"
  • "Update the story points for PROJ-123 to 5 and add a comment about the technical approach"
  • "Find all high-priority bugs in our current sprint"
  • "Analyze our sprint burndown and suggest adjustments"
  • "Create a backlog refinement session for our next sprint"

Confluence Integration

When Confluence is connected:

  • "Search our Confluence for information about our API design patterns"
  • "Find documentation related to our authentication system"
  • "Summarize our team's coding standards from Confluence"
  • "Create a knowledge base entry for our new deployment process"

Google Drive Integration

When Google Drive is connected:

  • "Analyze our product requirements document and create user stories"
  • "Review our market research and suggest product features"
  • "Extract key decisions from our strategy meeting notes"
  • "Create a project timeline based on our planning documents"

GitHub Integration

When GitHub is connected:

  • "Analyze our code quality metrics and suggest improvements"
  • "Review our pull request patterns and identify bottlenecks"
  • "Create a technical debt assessment for our main repository"
  • "Suggest code review process improvements based on our metrics"

Advanced Prompting Techniques

Multi-Step Workflows

  • "First, analyze our current sprint performance, then create an improvement plan, and finally generate user stories for the next sprint"
  • "Review our backlog, identify gaps, create missing stories, and prioritize everything based on business value"
  • "Analyze our team dynamics, create a causal loop diagram, and suggest process improvements"

Context-Rich Prompts

  • "Given our team of 6 developers working on a React application with 3-week sprints, analyze our velocity and suggest improvements"
  • "Based on our current technical debt and upcoming deadlines, prioritize our backlog and create a realistic sprint plan"
  • "Considering our distributed team across 3 time zones, suggest improvements to our communication and collaboration processes"

Iterative Refinement

  • "Create an initial user story for user authentication, then refine it based on our security requirements"
  • "Generate a causal loop diagram for our development process, then add the impact of remote work"
  • "Create a retrospective agenda, then customize it for our team's specific challenges"

Cross-Integration Analysis

  • "Analyze our Jira velocity data, GitHub code quality metrics, and Confluence documentation to identify process improvements"
  • "Combine insights from our Zoom meeting transcripts, Jira issues, and Google Drive documents to create a comprehensive project status"
  • "Use our Slack discussions, Jira backlog, and GitHub activity to assess team productivity and suggest optimizations"

Common Use Cases

Daily Standup Preparation

  • "Based on our current sprint progress, create talking points for today's standup"
  • "Analyze our recent Jira activity and suggest discussion topics for the team"
  • "Identify blockers and dependencies for our current stories"

Sprint Planning

  • "Review our backlog and suggest stories for the next sprint based on our team capacity"
  • "Analyze our velocity and create a realistic sprint plan"
  • "Identify missing stories and create acceptance criteria for our upcoming features"

Retrospectives

  • "Generate a retrospective agenda based on our sprint data and team feedback"
  • "Analyze our team's performance patterns and suggest improvement areas"
  • "Create action items from our retrospective discussion"

Product Planning

  • "Analyze our market research and create a product roadmap"
  • "Review our user feedback and suggest feature priorities"
  • "Create user personas based on our customer data"

Technical Documentation

  • "Generate API documentation from our code comments"
  • "Create a technical architecture diagram for our system"
  • "Document our deployment process with step-by-step instructions"

Troubleshooting Prompts

When Results Are Too Generic

  • "Be more specific about our React/Node.js stack and team of 5 developers"
  • "Focus on our e-commerce domain and B2B customers"
  • "Consider our current technical debt and legacy system constraints"

When You Need More Detail

  • "Expand on the technical implementation details"
  • "Provide specific examples for our use case"
  • "Include acceptance criteria and testing requirements"

When Results Are Off-Target

  • "Refocus on our agile/scrum methodology"
  • "Consider our distributed team structure"
  • "Align with our company's technical standards"

When You Need Different Perspectives

  • "Approach this from a product manager's perspective"
  • "Consider the developer experience implications"
  • "Think about the end-user impact"

Best Practices

Prompt Structure

  1. Context: Provide relevant background information
  2. Task: Clearly state what you want to accomplish
  3. Constraints: Mention any limitations or requirements
  4. Output: Specify the desired format or structure

Example Structure

Context: We're a team of 6 developers working on a React application
Task: Create user stories for implementing user authentication
Constraints: Must integrate with our existing OAuth system
Output: Stories with acceptance criteria ready for Jira

Iterative Improvement

  • Start with broad prompts and refine based on results
  • Use follow-up questions to dive deeper into specific areas
  • Combine multiple prompts for comprehensive analysis
  • Save successful prompt patterns for reuse

Integration Optimization

  • Always mention connected services when relevant
  • Reference specific projects, boards, or documents
  • Use team metrics and historical data for personalized insights
  • Leverage cross-platform data for comprehensive analysis

Prompt Templates

Sprint Analysis

"Analyze our [timeframe] sprint performance focusing on [specific metrics] and suggest [type of improvements] for our [team context]."

User Story Creation

"Create user stories for [feature/requirement] considering our [technical constraints] and [business context] with acceptance criteria suitable for [development team]."

Process Improvement

"Analyze our [process/ceremony] effectiveness based on [data sources] and suggest improvements considering our [team structure] and [challenges]."

Documentation Generation

"Generate [document type] for [topic] based on [source materials] formatted for [audience] with [specific requirements]."

Visualization Requests

"Create a [diagram type] showing [relationships/processes] for [context] with [specific elements] and export options for [presentation format]."

Remember: The more context and specificity you provide, the better VDF AI can tailor its responses to your unique situation and needs.