Nine blocks sit behind a strong AI answer, and almost everyone fills in just one. That one is the request you type into the chat window. John Munsell walked through his AI Strategy Canvas on The Story-Driven Business Podcast, and the pitch is simple: the other eight blocks are where the quality comes from. Most people polish the request. This approach polishes everything around it, and the results show up fast.
The key idea
The model can only work with what you hand it. If you give it one line, it fills every gap with the average of the internet. That’s why so many people get the same bland output from the same bland prompt. Two people can type nearly identical requests and get nearly identical mush, because neither one told the model anything that separates them from the crowd. The Canvas fixes this by giving you a checklist of what to supply before you ask for anything. Think of it as a briefing packet. You wouldn’t hand a new freelancer a single sentence and expect work that sounds like your brand, so don’t do it to the model either.
Old way vs. new way
The old way: open a chat, type “research this topic and write a post about it,” and hit enter. You get something readable and forgettable, because the model had to guess your audience, your voice, your angle, and your limits. Then you spend twenty minutes editing it into something usable, or you give up and post it as is.
The new way: treat the request as block 9, and load blocks 1 to 8 first. The model stops guessing and starts working from your actual situation. The editing time drops, because the draft starts closer to the finish line.
Take the audience block. Writing “CEOs of healthcare companies” gets you a decent result. Building a full persona instead, with their pains, fears, goals, and personality, and feeding it in as a document, tightens what the model infers. For example, a persona might say this CEO worries about compliance, distrusts vendor hype, and reads emails on a phone between meetings. Now the model knows to keep things short, skip the buzzwords, and lead with risk. Same request, much stronger output.
The 8 blocks before the request
- 🎯 Target audience: who you’re writing to. Go beyond a job title and include what keeps them up at night.
- 🏢 Company: what your company is about, including your mission and what makes you different.
- 🧰 Products and services: what you offer and how it connects to the topic.
- 💭 Context: your own thoughts and opinions on the topic.
- Role: who you’re “hiring” the AI to be for this job. A seasoned editor and a punchy copywriter will produce very different drafts.
- Style and brand voice: how it should sound. Paste in a few samples of your best writing if you have them.
- Resources: documents or URLs it should reference, such as past posts, case studies, or product pages.
- Rules: what it must not do, plus any required disclosures. Banned phrases, claims you can’t make, and legal notes all belong here.
Block 9 is the actual request.
The block people skip most
Context, block 4. Munsell flagged it as the most skipped, and it’s the one that makes your output different from everyone else’s. If you ask AI to research a topic and write about it, you get what every other person who typed that prompt got. If you feed it your real opinion, tied to your business and your audience, the output finally sounds like it came from you.
A quick way to fill it in: spend two minutes talking or typing your honest take. What do you agree with? What do you think is overhyped? What happened with a client that proves your point? Rough notes are fine. The model doesn’t need polish here, it needs your perspective. Even three or four bullet points will pull the draft away from generic advice and toward something with a spine.
How to put it to work
- Write down your answers for blocks 1, 2, 3, 6, and 8 once. These rarely change.
- Save them as a single document. A community member in the thread suggested dropping it into a project, custom instructions, or a saved prompt, so you never rebuild it each time. That’s a solid move.
- For each new task, add only the parts that change: your take on the topic (block 4), the resources (block 7), and the role (block 5).
- Build a proper persona document for your audience instead of a one-line label.
- Type your request last. Keep it short, because the other eight blocks are doing the heavy lifting.
- Review the draft against your rules block. If the model slipped, add a line to block 8 so it doesn’t happen again. Over time, your saved document gets sharper with every run.
As one commenter put it, a lot of folks treat the prompt like a search bar instead of giving the model something to work with. The Canvas is a simple way to stop doing that.
Your move
Pick one task you prompt for every week. Fill in the eight blocks once, save them, and run the same request again. Compare the two outputs side by side. The gap will tell you more than any explanation could!
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why does my AI output feel so generic?
Most people only work with the last block, the actual prompt, and skip block 4 (context), which is where your unique take lives. Instead of asking AI to research a topic, feed it your actual opinions and insights tied to your business and audience. That’s what makes your output distinct from everyone else’s.
Q: Do I really need to rebuild all 9 blocks every time?
Nope. Blocks 1, 3 (target audience, company, products), 6 (brand voice), and 8 (rules/disclosures) rarely change, so write them once as a document or save them in custom instructions. Then for each new request, just swap in your context and role, add resources, and hit send. You’ll save time and keep outputs consistent.
Q: How specific should my target audience description be?
The more specific, the better. “CEOs of healthcare companies” is fine, but building a fuller persona, pains, fears, goals, personality traits, and feeding it as a document tightens the model’s inferences way more and produces noticeably stronger results.
Q: Which block is most overlooked but most impactful?
Block 4 (context). Adding your actual perspective and opinions, connected to your business and audience, is what separates cookie-cutter output from something that actually hits. It’s the block that makes the model smarter about what you really need.
AI Strategy Canvas
by u/Admirable_Phrase9454 in PromptEngineering