🧠How to write effective AI prompts for high quality output

Knowledge Series #44: Take your prompting skills to the next level. Techniques to use with ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity at work

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Hi product people 👋,

When all you’re faced with is an empty dialogue box staring back at you, figuring out how to phrase your AI prompts to get high quality outputs can feel a little overwhelming.

In this Knowledge Series, we’ll explore 5 of the most powerful types of prompts and how these can be used at work with leading tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity at work.

If you find yourself using AI tools on a day to day basis this should hopefully help sharpen your prompting skills and increase the quality of your outputs.

Coming up:

• What are prompts why are they important? A quick recap

• The 5 main types of prompts explained 

• How you can use these prompts with tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity at work for tasks including:

  • Strategic decision making

  • Customer feedback analysis and triaging

  • API documentation analysis

  • Product design decisions

• Examples of prompts in action - a real world use case of how top tech companies are using prompts in their products

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The Knowledge Series

What are prompts used for? A quick recap

Even though ChatGPT and other AI tools have only been around for just over a year or so, prompting is now firmly part of the daily rituals of many of us who work in tech.

AI prompts are simply inputs or instructions that are given to an AI model or product to guide its response. They are essential for allowing the AI model to understand exactly what it is you want it to do or the specific tasks you’d like it to perform. The higher the quality of your prompts, the more likely it is that you’ll get exactly what you need. 

But higher quality doesn’t necessarily always mean writing longer prompts; yes, in some contexts, adding more detail to your prompt can mean the response is better, but there are plenty of techniques that use other ways to improve the quality of output without having to spend a long time crafting long worded prompts. In many cases, specificity is just as important as length.

The two core ways prompts are generally used

Generally, prompts are either typed into a text field or web interface on tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and others, or they are formed as part of an API request to a specific endpoint.

Use cases for the web interface approach include things like interacting with chatbots or customer service agents, content creation or even UI design / code generation. And use cases for APIs are typically a little more complex where teams want to leverage AI models to power specific features for tasks like:

• Data analysis and insights

• Language translation and sentiment analysis

• Content summarization for features which use summarization techniques 

The 5 most powerful types of prompts explained 

For the purposes of this Knowledge Series, we’re going to focus mostly on using the native web interface rather than APIs to craft prompts.

There are an endless number of different ways to structure a prompt but we’re going to walk through 5 of the main types of prompts - with explanation of how you can use these at work for specific tasks.

Here’s the 5 most powerful types of prompts we’ll focus that you can start using today to create high quality output: