What counts as a good microproduct
Good microproducts share several observable traits—most of them discoverable directly from Markdown contracts plus live demos:
- Narrow decision surface with observable inputs and outputs documented in /standards/folder-contract#markdown-contract-purposes.
- Transparent evaluation—even qualitative rubrics—in /standards/folder-contract#markdown-contract-purposes.
- Honest acknowledgement of brittle assumptions surfaced in README + AGENTS files.
- Repro instructions that do not rely on unpublished secrets (
demo.md). - Material external data dependencies have documented provenance and usage rights in
data-contract.md. - Material data products have a recorded, justified architecture in
architecture.md.
Signals that should block promotion
| Anti-pattern | Why it fails |
|---|---|
| Dashboards without actions | Humans cannot automate follow-ups |
| Vague personas | Unable to prioritize roadmap |
| Implicit model drift | Silent failures undermine trust |
| Missing agent entrypoints | Blocks hybrid human/agent teams |
| Unknown or incompatible data usage rights | A legally unusable dataset is an undocumented dependency; Frame is incomplete until it is resolved |
| Unjustified stack complexity | Kafka, Spark, or a lakehouse with no product requirement is overhead, not maturity; Frame is incomplete until complexity is justified |
Treat this page as prose backing the actionable items listed in /AGENTS.md.