Steering Retrieval and Multistep Work
Add Persona When Vocabulary Matters
Use personas when domain-specific terminology matters: security, performance, accessibility, reliability. Skip personas when the task is straightforward and adding persona context wastes tokens without adding value.
You are a staff-level reliability engineer reviewing a proposed multi-region failover design.Review for:
blast radius, failover trigger ambiguity, data consistency risk, observability gaps, runbook gaps, rollback assumptions.
Assume partial regional outages, degraded dependencies, and an on-call engineer executing under time pressure.
The persona doesn't add knowledge. It changes which knowledge gets retrieved by shifting vocabulary. The same control interface applies to code search, web research, vector databases, and sub-agent delegation: "multi-region failover risks" retrieves different context than "deployment issues."
Define the Reasoning Path for Multi-Step Work
When tasks require multiple steps, define the execution path. You are not asking for hidden reasoning; you are dictating the route so the agent cannot skip diagnosis, evidence, or validation.
1. Identify the affected funnel stages and the before/after metric deltas.
2. Compare the old and new onboarding sequence at the product-experience level.
3. List hypotheses across copy, flow, permissions, data readiness, and reliability.
4. Mark each hypothesis as supported, unsupported, or needs data.
5. Propose experiments or fixes with expected signal.
Provide evidence for every claim and call out assumptions separately.
Use this whenever the path must be enforced: diagnosis before recommendation, evidence before conclusion, validation before implementation. It does not make the agent deterministic; it just makes skipped steps and premature claims easier to detect.