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PlayerZero AI Chat: Business Analyst / Solution Architect Guide

As a Business Analyst or Solution Architect, PlayerZero AI Chat helps you turn “how the system really works” into clear, traceable artifacts.
  • Access Living Documentation & Architecture Maps: Generate current-state maps of services, data models, APIs, and dependencies from the code and runtime behavior.
  • Connect Business Rules to Code: Trace policies, pricing rules, SLAs, and workflows directly to the functions, services, and jobs that implement them.
  • Shorten Learning Curves: Bootstrap domain knowledge, uncover hidden edge cases, and surface decision context so you can onboard quickly and design solutions with confidence.

Prompting Best Practices and Examples

Effective Prompting Strategies

  • GOOD: “Show me the checkout service.”
  • BETTER: “Map the end-to-end checkout flow—from cart submission to payment capture, fulfillment, and post-purchase notifications—including external services and failure paths.”
  • GOOD: “Where is discounting handled?”
  • BETTER: “Show all discount business rules (codes, stacking limits, eligibility) and trace each rule to the exact modules, jobs, and API endpoints that implement them.”
  • GOOD: “Explain the subscription lifecycle.”
  • BETTER: “Produce a sequence diagram of the subscription lifecycle (create, upgrade/downgrade, proration, renewal, cancel). Include the services, events, and data stores involved, and list the key business rules referenced.”
  • GOOD: “Where is rate limiting implemented?”
  • BETTER: “Show how we enforce SLAs (rate limits, timeouts, retries) for the public API, the configuration points, and where SLOs are monitored and alerted.”
  • GOOD: “How did billing change?”
  • BETTER: “List billing-rule changes in the last 90 days, the PRs involved, impacted services, and any migrations or feature flags tied to the rollout.”

Unsatisfactory Prompting Examples

  • POOR: “How does pricing work?”
  • WHY: Too broad; lacks system scope and artifacts.
  • BETTER: “List pricing strategies (tiered, usage-based, discounts) and map each to the code paths and data models that implement them, with example inputs/outputs.”
  • POOR: “Show all APIs.”
  • WHY: Lacks purpose; yields unprioritized lists.
  • BETTER: “Show APIs used in the customer-onboarding journey and how they enforce KYC/verification requirements.”
  • POOR: “Open the payment controller.”
  • WHY: Misses orchestration, retries, and dependencies.
  • BETTER: “Map the payment orchestration across services, queues, and third-party processors, including error handling, idempotency, and reconciliation jobs.”
  • POOR: “We should add a cache—where?”
  • WHY: Ignores bottlenecks and correctness requirements.
  • BETTER: “Identify read-heavy endpoints with p95>400ms and propose safe caching layers with invalidation rules and consistency trade-offs.”

BA & SA Use Cases

Before you get started, double-check which repositories and datasets PlayerZero has access to. You can find this in your settings at go.playerzero.app/settings

Living Documentation & Architecture Maps

  • “Generate a service-dependency map for order, payment, inventory, and notification services, including external providers.”
  • “Show a C4-style overview of the platform with containers, major components, and data stores.”
  • “List event topics and which services publish/subscribe to each.”
  • “Catalog all public API endpoints for account management with request/response shapes and auth requirements.”
  • “List gRPC/GraphQL/REST interfaces between checkout and billing, with versioning and backward-compat details.”
  • “Show message schemas for asynchronous jobs and where they are produced/consumed.”
  • “Map the critical paths instrumented with tracing and show current SLOs, alert thresholds, and dashboards.”
  • “Show long-running jobs and their schedules, dependencies, and failure notifications.”
  • “List feature flags controlling user-visible flows and who owns them.”

Business Rules & Policy Traceability

  • “Trace discount eligibility rules to code, list edge cases (stacking, exclusivity), and show unit tests covering them.”
  • “Map usage-based pricing calculation, including meters, aggregation windows, and rounding rules.”
  • “Show tax/VAT logic by region and how configuration overrides are applied.”
  • “List entitlement checks for premium features and where roles/permissions are enforced.”
  • “Show segmentation rules for marketing campaigns and where segments are computed and stored.”
  • “Trace trial/expiration rules and grace periods to services and scheduled jobs.”
  • “Show where PII handling, masking, and retention policies are implemented for user profiles.”
  • “Map audit-logging implementation for admin actions and how logs are queried for compliance.”
  • “Show consent-management logic and how it propagates to data collection and exports.”

Cross-System Process & Data Flows

  • “Produce a sequence diagram of order-to-cash: order creation, invoicing, payment, fulfillment, and revenue recognition.”
  • “Map lead ingestion from marketing to CRM to product signup and data warehouse.”
  • “Show reconciliation jobs between gateway settlements and internal ledger entries.”
  • “Trace customer profile fields from input through validation, storage, and analytics pipelines.”
  • “List ETL/ELT jobs that transform raw events into executive dashboards and the business rules they apply.”
  • “Show where referential integrity is enforced across operational DB and warehouse.”
  • “List external providers (payments, KYC, tax, messaging) and their failover/retry strategies.”
  • “Show webhook consumers and how signature verification and replay protection are handled.”
  • “Map batch imports/exports with schedules, SLAs, and error-recovery paths.”

Impact Analysis & Change Planning

  • “Given PR #____, list impacted services, feature flags, and downstream consumers; estimate blast radius and required test scenarios.”
  • “Show tables, migrations, and backfill jobs affected by the new subscription schema.”
  • “Identify backward-compat risks for API v2 and how v1 clients are supported.”
  • “Show the rollout plan for feature X: flags, percentage ramp, guardrails, and automatic rollback conditions.”
  • “List data migrations with timings, lock behavior, and recovery steps.”
  • “Map dependencies that must be deployed together (or in sequence) to avoid incidents.”
  • “Which customers/segments are affected by this change and what SLAs are at risk?”
  • “Show dashboards/alerts teams should watch during rollout and the on-call schedules.”
  • “Draft customer-facing impact notes with precise timing and mitigation steps.”

Requirements, Acceptance Criteria & Tests

  • “For the requirement ‘users can pause subscriptions’, list implementing modules and existing tests; propose missing acceptance tests.”
  • “Generate acceptance criteria for the new refund policy and link to validation rules in code.”
  • “Map user stories to endpoints, events, and DB changes they rely on.”
  • “List boundary conditions for address validation (i18n, formats, PO boxes) and where they’re enforced.”
  • “Show failure modes for payment retries and idempotency collisions.”
  • “Identify concurrency risks in cart updates and how they’re mitigated.”
  • “Draft an RFC outline for introducing store credits, including alternatives, trade-offs, and migration plan.”
  • “Generate a comparison of design options for auth session storage with pros/cons and references to code.”
  • “Create a decision record (ADR) summarizing the selected approach with links to PRs.”

Onboarding & Knowledge Transfer

  • “Create a 30-day onboarding map for a new architect: critical services, read-mes, dashboards, and alerts to learn.”
  • “Summarize recurring pain points and their known mitigations with code references.”
  • “List tribal-knowledge gotchas for deployments and schema changes.”
  • “Generate a glossary of domain terms (e.g., ‘plan’, ‘entitlement’, ‘invoice’) with canonical definitions and where they’re enforced.”
  • “Map synonym/alias usage across code and data to reduce ambiguity.”
  • “Show which metrics are considered ‘source of truth’ for revenue vs. product analytics.”

Performance, Reliability & Cost (NFRs)

  • “List SLOs for user-facing APIs and show endpoints currently breaching p95 targets.”
  • “Identify top cost drivers (DB reads/writes, egress, third-party calls) and potential optimizations.”
  • “Show retry/circuit-breaker policies and where back-pressure is implemented.”
  • “Document graceful-degradation paths if inventory service is unavailable.”
  • “Map sharding/partitioning strategies and hotspots in multi-tenant workloads.”
  • “List caching layers and invalidation rules tied to critical pages.”
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