Anthropic’s Claude Academy shares a single prompt that turns Claude into a personalized guide to its own capabilities — tailored to your job, complete with 5 example prompts you can try immediately.
Most people start using an AI assistant by asking it a random question and hoping for something useful back. Anthropic’s Claude Academy — a free learning resource for getting more out of Claude — is pushing a different approach: describe your job, and let Claude figure out what’s actually worth trying.
Step One: Describe Your Role, Not Just Ask a Question
The core prompt is simple. Tell Claude your job title and what you actually spend your day doing, then ask for examples you can try immediately. Claude Academy’s own sample prompt uses a product manager persona: “I’m a product manager at a B2B SaaS startup. I mostly work on roadmap prioritization and customer research. I’m new to Claude. How can I use you most efficiently? Can you give me 5 examples I can try right now, ideally things that would actually make a difference in my daily work. Surprise me with one of them!”
Sharing Documents Turns Generic Tips Into Specific Ones
The prompt works with just a role description — no documents required. But Claude Academy is explicit that context is what separates a useful answer from a generic one: connecting a Google Drive account or uploading working documents lets Claude reference actual projects instead of speaking in hypotheticals. In the worked example, once Claude has access to the user’s documents, its suggestions shift from generic PM advice to specifics — referencing a real onboarding project, real interview subjects, and real competitor names pulled straight from the user’s files.
Claude Returns 5 Tailored Examples, Then Offers a Live Demo
In the sample output, Claude doesn’t just list generic features — it returns five concrete, numbered examples built around the user’s actual documents: synthesizing customer interview themes with direct quotes as evidence, stress-testing a roadmap prioritization by “poking holes” in it, drafting a competitive teardown from a rival’s marketing site, and turning rough notes into a one-page decision document. The fifth example is framed as a “surprise”: Claude offers to pull a specific document it found — customer interview notes — and surface patterns or contradictions in it immediately, in about 30 seconds, if the user simply replies “go.”
From Examples to Real Deliverables in One Follow-Up
Claude Academy suggests three follow-up moves once the initial examples land. First, bring Claude an actual deliverable that’s due — the example given is turning rough notes into a leadership-ready one-pager by end of day. Second, if you’re not sure how to frame a problem at all, ask Claude to interview you about it instead of the other way around. Third, ask directly what other Claude features — Projects, web search, file creation, integrations — might be relevant to your specific role, since most users only ever touch the basic chat window.
Two Small Adjustments Make the Prompt Work Better
Claude Academy flags two specific tweaks that improve results: sharing actual documents rather than just a job title, since “product manager” alone produces generic output while an uploaded roadmap or interview notes produce specific, referenceable suggestions; and naming concrete pain points directly — phrases like “I spend hours on status updates” or “I struggle to synthesize interview feedback” — rather than leaving Claude to guess what’s actually slow or frustrating about the workday.
A Free Structured Course Sits Behind the Prompt
For users who want something more structured than a single prompt, Claude Academy points to Claude 101, a free course covering Claude’s full toolkit that includes a completion badge. Anthropic frames the standalone prompt and the structured course as two entry points to the same goal: moving past ad hoc chat questions and into using Claude as a built-in part of daily work, in Anthropic’s words, for anyone from “product manager” to “butcher, baker, or candlestick maker.”