Gemini Prompts

Components of a Prompt

Persona

Set the stage for the tone and voice
- ‘You’re a senior user experience designer’
- ‘You’re a director of product management’
- ‘You’re a math major at MIT’

Context

Help the model understand the constraints and details of what you’re asking it. The more the better.

Task(s)

Describe in detail what you want whether as simple as a step-by-step list or as complex as mapping out a user’s experience and mindset.

Format

Ask for the response to be formatted in things like table, bulleted list, elevator pitch, keywords, sentence, paragraph etc.

Examples

Give an example of what you want to see. This can be contextual, formatting, writing style, etc. Often called ‘few-shot learning’.

Follow up

Don’t overlook the ability to refine the original ask with additional questions or tasks. Probe for more detail, different formatting, or more creative ideas. This is often called ‘chain of prompts’.

(Image created with Gemini in Slides)

Prompt Structure

Persona

Who is the model pretending to be and what sort of things are they really great at?

Context

Describe the user and what are they trying to accomplish
Describe the product or service
Describe the user, their age, interests, needs, etc.
Describe the timeline to build some of these features, is it 5 years from now or 6 weeks?
What is the ultimate goal? What does success look like?

Task

Briefly describe the task. Add instructions and additional asks. You can even ask the model to be fun or creative. You can tell it to not be limited by the constraints of today!

Format

Table, markdown with headers and lists, paragraph, elevator pitch, bulleted list, keywords, etc

Example

Add in an example of what you want to see or how you want it format (or both!)

Follow up

Highlight a section for improvement and summarize, elaborate, shorten, bulletize, or add a custom follow up prompt

Great Prompts usually have various ingredients

Here are some general principles that are great to follow as you start. But the beauty is that you can tweak them and make them custom to what you want or the goal you have in mind!

🟡[Give a role]

🟢[Define the goal]

🔵[Specify audience]

🔴[Set Restrictions/Style]

🟣[Format the result]

Good prompt:

Categorize the budget objectives into 5 different types

Better prompt:

Persona: You are a state data analyst employee

Context: This sheet contains annual performance data of the state budget office for 2018-2023. There are many different objectives and it’s difficult to synthesize the data based on these objectives. You are being asked by executives to create a cover sheet that contains categories for this data.

Context: Your mission is to analyze the data and make data easier to understand for state residents.

Task: Categorize the objectives using column I as a reference for the data.

Format: Display the results in a new sheet.

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