Case Study
Ghost PM Signal — PM Intelligence Dashboard
The Problem
PMs at independent platforms face a recurring challenge: they're surrounded by signal but lack a fast way to turn it into decisions. User feedback lives on a forum. Competitor moves land in a changelog. Community sentiment is scattered across Hacker News. Strategic bets are buried in GitHub.
A good PM synthesises all of it. But doing it manually takes time most PMs don't have — and it's easy to miss things. I wanted to build a tool that does this work automatically: aggregate every relevant signal source for a platform, run it through a PM-grade decision framework, and produce a brief that's actually useful.
I chose Ghost as the subject because independent publishing is a genuinely interesting product space — creator monetisation, the open social web, and the tension between platform growth and editorial independence are all live problems. Building the tool around a real platform with real public data made the output meaningful rather than hypothetical.
What I Built
A live PM intelligence dashboard that aggregates six data sources into one interface and uses Claude to synthesise them into a weekly decision brief.
Six signal sources, all live
Six tabs in the dashboard — PM Brief, Feature Votes, GitHub, HN Pulse, Competitor Watch, and Ghost Releases — each surfacing a different layer of the signal stack.
Design Decisions
- —Data loading and synthesis are separate: The dashboard loads all six sources on page open — fast, zero AI cost. Synthesis is on-demand: clicking "Generate PM Brief" triggers Claude. This makes the raw data immediately useful and keeps the synthesis moment feel deliberate. The tool works as a data viewer even if the API were unavailable.
- —ActivityPub as a strategic signal, not a bug tracker: Ghost is making a long-term bet on the Fediverse — federation with Mastodon and decentralised social publishing. Surfacing the TryGhost/ActivityPub repo separately, labelled 'Ghost's Fediverse Bet', frames it correctly for a PM: this is direction-setting work, not feature work.
- —Kit over Beehiiv or Substack: I tried all three. Beehiiv's changelog is JavaScript-rendered — inaccessible from a serverless function. Substack has no public product changelog. Kit publishes a parseable HTML changelog. Beyond accessibility, Kit is Ghost's most direct competitor in creator monetisation — what Kit ships is what Ghost users will start expecting.
- —Seven sources is the minimum viable intelligence layer: Each source alone is a partial picture. Ghost Forum without competitor context gives you a wishlist. Kit's changelog without Forum data gives you competitor moves without urgency. The synthesis only becomes useful when sources can be connected — a 174-vote Forum request becomes urgent when a competitor shipped the same feature last quarter.
- —Promise.allSettled, not sequential fetches: All six sources fetch in parallel. Individual failures are handled gracefully — one source going down doesn't break the page. This is how production data aggregation tools are built: resilient by default, not by accident.
The Synthesis Layer
The Claude synthesis prompt is built around a four-section PM decision framework — not a summary of what happened, but a brief on what to do about it.
The system prompt explicitly prohibits hedging and requires evidence citations from the actual data. The framing — act as a senior PM preparing for a product strategy session — changes the output. Summary tells you what happened. A PM brief tells you what to do.
What the Data Revealed
Running the tool for the first time surfaced an immediate finding: the top Ghost Forum feature request has 174 votes — third-party SSO. In the same period, Kit shipped comparable authentication features.
That pattern — high-vote Forum request mapped to a competitor ship — is exactly the kind of gap the synthesis layer is designed to surface. Ghost users are asking for features that Kit already has. The urgency isn't theoretical; it's evidenced.
Other patterns: custom email sequences (50 votes) are Kit's core product strength. Ghost users are asking for Kit's product inside Ghost. Email provider alternatives (56 votes) point to creator frustration with Mailgun lock-in — an infrastructure pain point with real churn implications.
What It Demonstrates
Ghost Creator Suite
Ghost PM Signal is part of a five-tool suite built to understand Ghost's product ecosystem end-to-end.