10 ways to make Claude think like a research partner

The cheat codes I run before a study starts and before a readout I'm nervous about

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A few weeks ago, about thirty seconds before a discussion guide left my hands for a client, I typed three words into Claude, “red team this,” and it handed me back three leading questions I’d read straight past a dozen times without noticing. I fixed them on the spot, sent the guide, and ran those sessions without the usual little voice in the back of my head asking what I’d missed.

That tiny moment is the whole reason I’m writing this, and what I’ve come to value most about Claude is having a second set of eyes sharp enough to catch the things I’ve gone blind to in my own work, the leading question I can’t see anymore, the survey set up to hand me bad data, the number in my readout I can’t quite explain. I have a folder on my phone called “AI stuff” that is a graveyard of saved prompt lists I never once opened, and not a single one of them ever did for me what two words typed into Claude did that afternoon.

What actually changed how I work with Claude was a small handful of frameworks I could point at anything, a discussion guide, a slippery stakeholder request, a repository nobody’s opening, a readout I’m half-convinced will get skimmed and forgotten. Once I had the framework, I stopped reaching for the prompt lists entirely.

So these are the ten I keep coming back to, written for the work we actually do all day. The first five turn Claude into a sharper thinking partner. The last five help you find the holes in your work before a stakeholder finds them for you, and if you’ve ever sat through a readout where someone poked the one weakness you didn’t see coming, you already know in your body why I care about it this much.

None of them need a perfect prompt, which is sort of the whole point, since you type a couple of words and the thing on the other side shows up completely differently.

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01. Interview Me

Type “interview me” before any big task and Claude asks you questions before it starts, instead of charging ahead and guessing like an over-eager intern who didn’t want to seem unsure. The questions it fires back at you are the brief you never wrote down, the scope you hadn’t pinned, the audience you waved your hand at and hoped for the best on.

I use this before almost every discussion guide I build now. The version of Claude that asks me six sharp questions first, who’s the participant, what decision is riding on this, what have you already tried, hands me a draft that’s ten times closer to usable than the version that fills in the blanks on its own with whatever it assumed I meant.

Interview me before you write anything. Ask me everything you need to know to build a discussion guide for a generative study on how freelancers manage irregular income, then write the guide once you have what you need.

It works on anything that starts from a blank page, a research plan you’ve been avoiding for a week, a screener you keep getting subtly wrong, or the vaguest gift of all, the stakeholder who drops “can we do some research on the new dashboard” into your Slack and then evaporates. I let Claude interview me to turn that one sad little sentence into a real scope before I write a single word back to them.

Interview me before we scope this. My PM asked for "some research on the new dashboard" and gave me nothing else. Ask me the questions that will turn that into a real research plan with a clear decision, a method, and a timeline.

We are researchers. Being interviewed before the work starts is the most natural thing in the world to us, so do yourself a favor and let Claude do to you what you do to your participants every week.

02. Socratic

Type “teach me this using the Socratic method” and instead of dumping the answer in your lap, Claude teaches by asking you questions until you walk yourself to it. Anthropic built a whole Learning mode around this, because it’s how the thing actually stays in your head past Tuesday.

I reach for this with the corners of research I never formally trained in, the stats most of all. When Claude just hands me a sample-size formula, I forget it by the next study and have to go looking for it again like keys I swear I left on the counter. When it walks me there through questions, I remember it well enough to defend it when a data scientist raises an eyebrow at me across the table.

Teach me how to calculate the sample size for a benchmarking usability test using the Socratic method. Ask me questions instead of handing me the formula.

I use it before I run a method for the first time too, when I’d rather understand the analysis than fake my way through and pray nobody asks a follow-up. You can tell Claude to pause and check your understanding as it goes, which keeps you honest about whether you genuinely followed or just nodded along the way we all do in meetings we’ve mentally left.

I'm setting up my first card sort and I'm shaky on how to analyze the results. Teach me how to read the output using the Socratic method, and pause to check I'm following before each new concept.

The real gift here is retention. A formula Claude hands me lives in a Slack message I will never find again, and an idea it walked me to lives in my head, ready and waiting for the exact meeting where someone asks me to explain myself.

03. Ultrathink

This one only works in Claude Code, so tuck it in your back pocket for when you’re in there. Type the word ultrathink anywhere in your prompt and Claude’s thinking budget jumps to roughly eight times its normal amount before it answers, which buys you its deepest reasoning on the genuinely hard problems instead of the quick first thing that pops into its head.

I save it for the design decisions where I can feel three tradeoffs pulling against each other like dogs on three different leashes, and I want every one of them named before I commit to anything.

ultrathink, help me design the analysis approach for a mixed-methods study where I have 14 interviews and a 600-response survey, and flag every tradeoff in how I combine them.

The other place it earns its keep is when two data sources flatly disagree and I need to reason carefully about which one to trust and why, the kind of problem where a fast answer will march me somewhere confident and completely wrong.

ultrathink, my survey says users are satisfied with onboarding but my interviews say they're frustrated and confused. Help me work through every reason these two could disagree, and how I should weigh them in my readout.

I don’t reach for it on the small stuff, though. Asking Claude to ultrathink a simple screener is like booking a moving truck to carry one kitchen chair. On the messy structural problems, the extra wait pays for itself.

04. Second Order

Add “second order” before a decision and Claude tells you what happens next, and then what happens after that, the downstream stuff most of us sail right past when we’re staring at the immediate win.

This earns its keep around democratization, where I keep watching researchers make a call that looks fantastic on Monday and detonates a quarter later when nobody’s looking.

Second order, if I hand my PMs a self-serve usability testing tool so they can run their own sessions, what happens next, and then what happens after that?

What I’ve found is that the first-order answer is always “more research gets done, great,” and the second-order answer is where you meet the person who’s going to be cleaning up all the bad data, and that person, plot-wise, is you.

I run it on the quiet process decisions too, the ones that look harmless in the moment and grow teeth later. The faster method that saves you a week now and costs you a re-do in three. The incentive you trim to protect your budget that craters your show-rate. The report template you standardize until every readout looks identical and reads like wallpaper. Second order is how I catch those while they’re still hypothetical and cheap.

Second order, if I switch from moderated to unmoderated testing to save time this quarter, what happens next, and then what happens after that, to the depth of what we learn and how stakeholders treat our findings?

05. Inversion

Instead of asking Claude how to make something work, you flip the whole thing over and ask how it could fall apart. Claude maps out every way the thing fails, and you walk off with a checklist of exactly what to avoid, which is a much more useful object than a vague pep talk about doing your best.

I run this on readouts constantly, because the question I actually care about isn’t “how do I make a good presentation,” it’s “how does a perfectly good presentation still end up ignored by Thursday.”

Invert this. I want stakeholders to act on this readout. List every way this presentation could get nodded at in the room and then completely forgotten by Thursday.

It’s just as good on the work where the failure stays invisible until it’s far too late to fix. A survey can pull six hundred responses and still be worthless if the questions were leaking or the wrong people wandered in, so before I launch one I ask Claude to invert it and tell me every way it plans to betray me.

Invert this survey. I want clean, trustworthy data on why users churn. List every way this survey could hand me garbage, leading questions, the wrong respondents, scales people misread, and tell me what to fix before I send it.

The whole trick with inversion is treating the failure list as your to-do list. Every item Claude names is a thing you go fix, one by one, before the work ever leaves your hands.

06. ELI5

Short for “explain like I’m 5.” Add it to any prompt and Claude breaks the most intimidating thing into the smallest, plainest possible words. I use it on the things I’m a little embarrassed to admit I’ve been nodding along to for months, the p-value my data scientist drops in Slack like it’s obvious, the SQL my analyst keeps referencing, the clause in a research vendor contract I definitely signed a year ago and definitely did not fully read.

ELI5, what does a p-value of 0.03 actually mean for the A/B test my data scientist just shared, and what can I honestly say about it in my readout?

I recommend this one hard if you came into research from a non-quant background like I did. There is no shame in not knowing something, there’s only shame in standing up in a readout and presenting a number you couldn’t explain if someone gently asked.

The move I love even more is flipping it around and asking Claude to ELI5 my own finding for one specific stakeholder, because if I can’t get my insight down to something a busy exec grasps in a single read, I usually don’t understand it half as well as I’d been telling myself.

ELI5 this finding for a VP of Product who has 30 seconds and cares mostly about revenue: "Users abandon checkout because the trust signals are buried below the fold and they don't believe their card is safe."

The day I can’t ELI5 my own finding is the day I know in my gut it isn’t ready to leave my laptop.

07. Pre-Mortem

Drop this in front of any plan and Claude pretends the project already cratered six months from now, then works backward to tell you exactly why. It surfaces the blind spots while they’re still cheap, before you’ve poured a quarter of real, unrecoverable time into them.

I wish I’d had this before the first research repository I ever set up, the one I lovingly tagged and color-coded and organized into oblivion, and then watched nobody open for the better part of a year.

Pre-mortem this. I'm about to launch a research repository for a 50-person product org. Pretend it's six months from now and nobody is using it. Walk me through exactly why it failed.

The failures Claude names are the ones I’d have sworn on my life wouldn’t happen to me, which is precisely why I needed to hear them out loud before launch instead of after, when they’re just called regret.

Pre-mortem and inversion are close cousins, and I use them for different sizes of bet. Inversion gives me a cold list of ways an artifact could fail, perfect for a survey or a deck. Pre-mortem tells me a whole story about a future where my big commitment already collapsed, which is the version I want before I sink real time into a repository, a research roadmap, or a democratization program I’m about to sell to leadership with my name on it.

Pre-mortem this. I'm about to pitch leadership on a democratization program where trained PMs run their own usability tests. Pretend it's a year from now and it's blown up in our faces. Tell me the story of how.

08. Steelman

Tell Claude to “steelman the other side” and it builds the strongest, smartest version of the argument you disagree with, the one that’s actually hard to swat away. It’s uncomfortable in the useful way, the way a good editor is uncomfortable, because it shows you exactly where your own thinking has gone soft.

I use this to prep for the stakeholder who wants to skip research and ship yesterday. If I can only argue against a cartoon version of their position, I lose the room in about ninety seconds, and if I’ve already heard the best possible version of “we don’t have time for this,” I can walk in and meet it head on.

Steelman the case for skipping research on this feature and shipping now. Give me the strongest version of my PM's argument so I can actually respond to it in our planning meeting.

The braver use is turning it on myself. When I catch myself dismissing a method out of hand, I ask Claude to steelman it, and every so often it changes my mind, which is embarrassing and also the entire point of asking.

I've been dismissing surveys for this question because I think it needs depth. Steelman the case that a well-designed survey is actually the better method here, and be convincing.

I run it on my own conclusions before a big readout too, asking Claude for the strongest possible case that my data says the opposite of what I’ve decided it says. I would so much rather find the hole in my story at my own desk, in my pajamas, than have a VP find it for me in front of the room.

09. Red Team

Add “red team this” before any plan, guide, or deck and Claude attacks it from every angle a critic would, like handing your work to a panel of professional skeptics who give you their honest notes in thirty seconds flat. You find the holes before the room does, which is the only good time to find them.

This is my last pass on every discussion guide I write. Leading questions hide so well from the person who wrote them, smiling and looking reasonable, and Claude is very good at catching the ones I’ve gone completely blind to.

Red team this discussion guide. Show me where my questions are leading, where I'll get shallow socially-acceptable answers, and where I'm asking people to predict their own future behavior.

I’ve started running it on the readout deck itself before big presentations, asking Claude to sit in the chair of the most skeptical person in the room. The VP who’ll ask “you only talked to eight people?” before you’ve finished your second slide. The engineer who distrusts anything qualitative on principle. The PM hunting for a reason to do the thing they already wanted to do. Hearing all of their objections a day early means I walk in with answers instead of standing there blinking.

Red team this readout deck. Sit in the seat of a skeptical VP and a data scientist who distrusts qualitative work. Where will they poke holes, question my sample size, or wave off the findings, and how should I answer each one?

10. First Principles

Add “break this down from first principles” and Claude stops parroting the conventional wisdom back at you and rebuilds the answer from what’s actually true. This is the one Elon Musk won’t stop talking about at parties, and the reason I love it for research is that so much of what we do is inherited habit nobody has questioned since before we got here.

Break this down from first principles. Do I actually need to recruit 5 users for this usability test, or is that just a number we all repeat because we read it once and it sounded official?

Half the time the first-principles answer brings me right back to the convention, which is fine and good, because now I’m doing it on purpose with my eyes open instead of on autopilot. The other half, it frees me from a rule that never fit my situation in the first place and was just along for the ride.

I aim it at the rituals I’ve stopped even noticing, the ones surviving on pure momentum because the last researcher did them this way and the one before that. The 60-minute interview that could have been 35 and everyone’s relieved. The full slide deck nobody asked for when a one-page memo would have moved twice as fast. The quarterly cadence we follow without ever once choosing it on purpose.

Break this down from first principles. We run a 60-minute interview and a full slide deck for every study out of habit. What is each of those actually for, and what would I do if I designed our process from scratch today?

Asking “what is this for, from scratch” is how I find the work I’m allowed to stop doing, and for most of us drowning in requests, that’s the most valuable answer there is.

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Stack them

These get properly dangerous when you combine them, and stacking is where the real thinking-partner magic shows up.

Pre-mortem this research repository rollout, then steelman the strongest reason a team would refuse to use it, then give me the 3 changes I should make before launch.

Mix and match based on whatever you’re trying to figure out. Inversion plus red team for a survey you’re nervous about. Second order plus steelman before you walk into a democratization conversation you suspect will get tense. Interview me, then first principles, when you genuinely have no idea what you’re even solving yet. Or red team your readout, then ELI5 the fix for every objection it surfaces, so you can say each one out loud in the meeting without fumbling for words.

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The one thing I’d love for you to take from all this is exactly where I started, treating Claude less like a search bar you fire questions at and more like the sharp, slightly skeptical colleague who reads your work before anyone important does. I didn’t need a folder of 500 saved prompts to get that second set of eyes, I needed about ten small moves and the nerve to point them at the work that actually scares me.

So if you do one thing with this, make it small and make it this week. Open the messiest thing on your plate right now, the discussion guide you’ve been avoiding, the survey you’re unsure about, the readout you’re presenting on Thursday, and before it leaves your hands, run one of these on it. Red team the guide, invert the survey, pre-mortem the launch, whichever one matches the part you’re most afraid of getting wrong, and let Claude find the hole while it’s still cheap to fix.

Come tell me in the comments which one you reached for first, and what it caught.

Stay curious,

Nikki

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