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The 7-day roadmapDay 6 · Spec-Driven Development№ 02 / 03

The BMAD Workflow Map

How BMAD structures the full delivery lifecycle across four phases, and how the Quick Flow track lets you skip phases for smaller, well-understood work.

  • 3 min read
  • Theory and practice
  • Day 6 of 7

Theory

Once you have BMAD installed, the next thing to understand is how its workflow is structured. BMAD doesn't just give you a set of agents: it gives you a phased delivery process where each step produces artifacts that feed the next.

The four phases

Phase 1: Analysis (optional) Use this phase to explore the problem space before committing to a plan. The main outputs are a brainstorming report and a product brief that captures the strategic vision.

Phase 2: Planning Define what to build and for whom. The PM agent helps you write a PRD (product requirements document), and if UX matters, a UX spec. These documents become the source of truth for everything that follows.

Phase 3: Solutioning Decide how to build it. The Architect agent produces an architecture document with explicit technical decisions (ADRs). Work is then broken down into epics and stories, each with acceptance criteria. A readiness gate check ensures everything is in place before implementation starts.

Phase 4: Implementation Build one story at a time. BMAD provides workflows for sprint planning, story preparation, implementation, code review, and retrospectives. Each story is a self-contained unit with context, tests, and done criteria.

The Quick Flow track

For small, well-understood changes where phases 1–3 would be overkill, BMAD offers a Quick Flow: a single /bmad-bmm-quick-spec command produces a compact tech spec (essentially a story file), and /bmad-bmm-quick-dev implements it. This is the right starting point for most bug fixes, small features, and isolated refactors.

Why the phased structure matters

Each phase produces documents that act as context for the next phase. The PRD tells the architect what constraints matter. The architecture tells the developer which patterns to follow. Story files give the implementation agent focused, complete context for a single unit of work. Without this chain, agents make inconsistent decisions and drift from the original intent.

Practice

Run this in a repository you already know, not a toy project. The point is to feel where the practice helps and where it gets in the way on code that has history.

Build a full-stack application using BMAD, following the full workflow from ideation to deployment.

A ready-made project brief is available at github.com/alfonsograziano/ai-native-engineering if you want a starting point. That said, don't feel constrained by it. If you have an idea for a small app you'd like to build, just go for it and have fun with it. The goal is to go through the workflow, not to build any specific thing.

Phase 1: Analysis

Use the product brief workflow to capture what you want to build and why. Even for a small app, this is worth doing: it forces you to make explicit decisions (who is this for, what are the constraints, what does done look like).

Phase 2: Planning

  1. Run the PRD workflow with the PM agent. Use your product brief as input and produce a detailed PRD for the Todo app.
  2. If your app has a UI, run the UX spec workflow to define the user experience.

Phase 3: Solutioning

  1. Use the Architect agent to produce an architecture document: choose your stack, define API contracts, describe the component structure.
  2. Run the epics and stories workflow to break the PRD down into implementable stories, each with acceptance criteria and test scenarios.
  3. Run the implementation readiness check before you write any code.

Phase 4: Implementation

Work story by story:

  1. Use the story preparation workflow to get each story ready before handing it to the dev agent.
  2. Use the dev story workflow to implement each story with an AI agent.
  3. Run a code review workflow on each story before marking it done.
  • The full BMAD artifact set: product brief, PRD, architecture doc, stories with acceptance criteria
  • A working full-stack Todo app with unit, integration, and E2E tests
  • Docker deployment (runs with docker-compose up)
  • A short reflection: which phase was most valuable, where did BMAD save you time, and what would you skip next time?

Note: Don't skip the artifact steps to get to the code faster. The point of this exercise is to experience how each phase shapes the next.

The rest of day 6

  1. 01BMAD: The AI-Driven Delivery Framework
  2. 02The BMAD Workflow MapYou are here
  3. 03BMAD vs Spec-kit: Choosing the Right Framework
Day 6 overviewAll 7 days
Where this comes from

This path is the shortest route to the ideas. AI-Native Software Engineering (O'Reilly Media) is where each one is worked out in full, with the patterns, the trade-offs and the failure modes. The pillars cover the foundations one long essay at a time.