Prompt Lab

A great prompt has five ingredients. Add all of them and the AI stops guessing and starts giving you work you can actually use. Here is what each one is, and why it earns its place.

The 5 Ingredients of a great prompt

Five ingredients, six quick parts. Use them as your checklist.

1 Role

Tell the AI who to be. Give it an expert hat (a lawyer, a copywriter, a CFO) and its answers get sharper and more expert.

2 Context

Fill in the background it cannot guess: the situation, the details, what has happened so far. Less guessing, better fit.

3 Target audience

Say who it is for. A note to your board reads nothing like one to a new customer. Name the reader and it pitches it right.

4 Task instructions

Spell out the steps, in order. The more specific you are, the closer the result lands to what you pictured.

5 Tone of voice

Set how it should sound: formal, warm, blunt, plain. Tell it once so you are not rewriting the output afterwards.

6 Objective

Name the win. Say what a great result looks like and what it is for, so the AI aims at the target instead of wandering.

See the difference

Average · scores 1

"Write me a monthly board report."

First class · scores 5

You are an experienced chief of staff. I run operations at a 60-person consultancy and write a monthly board update covering finance, delivery, people and risks. It is read by our seven-person board, half of them non-executive and time-poor, on their phones. Write it in plain, direct English, under 800 words: open with four bullets on what matters this month, then a short section per area, giving each risk a likelihood, impact and owner. The goal is to let them govern well in a 10-minute read and see the two or three decisions they actually need to make.

Same task. The second one just has all five ingredients, so the AI has nothing left to guess.

How the practice works: draft a prompt for any task, get a score out of 5 and one thing to fix, then refine until you hit 4 or more.

No sign-in. Your drafts are private and not stored.