Creating Your Prompt Taxonomy
Lesson 9: Designing the blueprint for your prompt operations
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In our last lesson, we explored frameworks for structuring your prompt operations. Before we start building a prompt library or creating templates, we need to step back and think systematically about how we'll organize our prompts … or at least get started. This is where taxonomies comes in.
So you might be wondering what a taxonomy is and what that has to do with content or AI. Simply put, its a way of organizing things … in this case prompts.
Think about how a grocery store organizes its products. It's not random - there's a careful system that groups similar items together and creates logical pathways for shoppers.
Produce is grouped together, with fruits in one section and vegetables in another. Dairy products have their own area. Frozen foods are grouped by type - vegetables, ready meals, desserts.
This organization isn't just about putting things in neat rows - it's about understanding how people use these items and navigate the physical space.
For example, a grocery store's layout creates meaningful connections. Fresh vegetables sit next to fresh fruits, forming a produce section. Nearby, you'll often find the deli with fresh-made salads.
This shows how these chains are understanding the ways shoppers think about and use these items together, not just like with like.
Someone making a salad might need tomatoes (produce), croutons (bakery), and salad dressing (condiments), so these sections are often within easy reach of each other.
The same kind of multidimensional thinking applies to organizing prompts. While you might have clear categories like "content creation" or "content analysis," the real power comes from understanding how these categories relate to each other in practice.
Just as the grocery store creates useful adjacencies between related products, your prompt taxonomy should reflect the natural connections in your content workflows.
And just as grocery stores have different sections for different types of products, your prompt taxonomy will have different categories for different types of prompts.
Why Taxonomy Matters in Prompt Operations
Creating a taxonomy is about being organized, but its also about creating a system that supports your workflows. When a grocery store decides where to place items, they think about how people shop - placing frequently bought items like milk toward the back, grouping items that are often bought together, and putting impulse purchases near the checkout.
Similarly, when creating your prompt taxonomy, you need to think about how you and your team work with prompts:
What prompts do you use most often?
Which prompts are typically used together?
How do different team members think about and search for prompts?
What relationships exist between different types of content work?
Let's see how the grocery store principle works with prompts in a content marketing operation.
Imagine you regularly create product announcements across different channels. You might have prompts for social media posts, email newsletters, blog articles, and press releases. A simple categorical organization might just list these as different types of content:
Social Media Prompts
Email Prompts
Blog Prompts
Press Release Prompts
But this one-dimensional organization misses important relationships in how these prompts work together. In practice, when launching a new product, you'll need prompts that help you maintain consistent messaging across all these channels while adapting the tone and format for each one.
A more useful organization would also consider these relationships. You might group your prompts both by channel (like grocery store departments) and by common workflows (like recipe ingredients). For a product launch, you might have:
Product Launch Bundle:
Core messaging prompt (develops key points)
Channel adaptation prompts (adjusts tone and format)
Audience targeting prompts (customizes for different segments)
Timeline prompts (creates content schedule)
These prompts naturally go together, just like spaghetti ingredients. While they could live in different "departments" of your library, they should be easy to find and use together across your prompt library. Your taxonomy might even include pre-made "recipe cards" - templates that combine these prompts in proven workflows.
This multidimensional organization means someone working on a product launch can easily find not just individual prompts, but entire workflows. Just as a grocery store might feature a display with everything needed for a summer barbecue, your prompt taxonomy should support common content creation scenarios.
This kind of thoughtful organization becomes even more valuable as your prompt library grows. A good taxonomy helps new team members understand not just what prompts are available, but how they work together to achieve specific content goals.
Creating Your Basic Taxonomy Structure
Before we explore complex relationships between prompts, let's start with a basic hierarchical organization - like creating the main departments and aisles of our prompt store.
A linear taxonomy starts with broad categories and moves to increasingly specific subcategories. For content operations, we typically begin with the primary functions our prompts serve. For instance, a content marketing team might start with these top-level categories:
Generation Prompts: These create new content from scratch
Transformation Prompts: These adapt existing content for new purposes
Enhancement Prompts: These improve or optimize existing content
Analysis Prompts: These evaluate content effectiveness
Within each category, we then identify specific types of prompts. For example, under Generation Prompts, you might have:
Ideation Prompts: Help brainstorm content ideas and angles
Outline Prompts: Structure content organization
Draft Prompts: Create initial content versions
Polish Prompts: Refine and complete content pieces
Let's see how this works with a real example. Imagine you're organizing prompts for a technical documentation team. Your initial taxonomy might look like this:
Documentation Prompts
Product Description Prompts
Feature Overview Prompts
Technical Specification Prompts
Integration Guide Prompts
Tutorial Prompts
Getting Started Prompts
Basic Usage Prompts
Advanced Usage Prompts
Troubleshooting Prompts
Common Issues Prompts
Diagnostic Prompts
Resolution Prompts
Reference Prompts
API Documentation Prompts
Configuration Prompts
Command Reference Prompts
Each level becomes more specific while maintaining clear relationships to its parent category. This hierarchical structure provides a foundation for finding and organizing prompts. For instance, if a team member needs to create API documentation, they can navigate directly to Reference Prompts → API Documentation Prompts to find relevant prompt templates.
The key to creating an effective basic taxonomy is balancing breadth and depth. Too many top-level categories can be overwhelming, while too few can make it difficult to find specific prompts. Similarly, going too deep with subcategories can make the system overly complex, while staying too shallow might not provide enough organization.
Start by identifying 3-5 main categories that cover your core content workflow. Then within each category, create no more than 3-4 subcategories. You can always add more granularity as your prompt library grows, but starting with a manageable structure helps ensure the system remains usable.
Understanding Relationships in Your Taxonomy
Just as a grocery store exists in three-dimensional space, your prompt taxonomy needs to capture multiple types of relationships. But visualizing these relationships can be challenging when you're just getting started. This is where tools like mind mapping and knowledge graphs become invaluable.
Think about how a grocery store creates useful adjacencies. The bakery might be near both the coffee section (morning routine) and the deli counter (lunch combinations), while also connecting to the broader center aisles where you find packaged breads and pastries. These multiple connections reflect different ways shoppers think about and use these products.
Mind mapping helps us visualize similar connections between prompts and prompt blocks. Starting with a central concept like "Product Launch Content," you might branch out to identify different types of needed content: social media, email, blog posts, press releases. But then you can add another layer showing how these connect through shared elements like tone guidelines, key messaging, or audience personas. Drawing these connections helps reveal patterns you might miss in a simple hierarchical list.
For example, a mind map for product launch prompts might reveal that your "audience" prompt blocks connect not just to product documentation, but also to sales content, customer support scripts, and technical blog posts. This insight might lead you to create more versatile audience prompts that serves multiple content workflows.
Knowledge graphs take this concept even further by allowing us to specify the nature of these relationships. In a knowledge graph, you don't just show that prompts are connected – you describe how they're connected. A "tone guidance" prompt might "inform" multiple content creation prompts, while "audience persona" prompts "constrains" how those same prompts operate.
Let's look at how this might work in practice. Consider these relationship types in your prompt taxonomy:
Hierarchical Relationships: A high-level "brand voice" prompt might contain or govern several more specific tone and style prompts. Just as the produce department contains the fruit section, which contains the apple display.
Adjacent Relationships: Your "product feature description" prompt naturally connects to both "technical specification" prompts and "benefit statement" prompts. These adjacent prompts often work together but serve different purposes, like finding pasta near sauce.
Workflow Relationships: Some prompts naturally sequence together. A "research synthesis" prompt might feed into an "outline generation" prompt, which then connects to various drafting prompts. This is similar to how a grocery store might organize ingredients in the order you'll use them in a recipe.
Functional Relationships: Prompts that serve similar purposes might be grouped together even if they're used in different contexts. All your "audience analysis" prompts might be connected, whether they're used for blog posts, email campaigns, or social media.
Creating a visual map of these relationships serves several purposes:
It helps you identify gaps in your prompt collection
It reveals opportunities for prompt reuse across different contexts
It makes it easier to train new team members on your prompt system
It supports the development of more sophisticated prompt workflows
You can start mapping these relationships with simple tools like paper and pencil, or digital mind mapping software like Miro or Context Mind. As your system grows more complex, you might want to explore dedicated knowledge graph tools (like Anytype) that can help you manage and visualize more sophisticated relationship networks.
Remember that, like a grocery store's layout, your relationship map should reflect how people actually work with prompts. Pay attention to which prompts tend to be used together, which ones support or depend on each other, and which ones might benefit from being more closely connected.
In our next several sections, we'll explore exactly how to build your own taxonomy from the ground up. I'll guide you through practical exercises and strategies for organizing your prompts, including:
A step-by-step process for identifying your key prompt categories
Common pitfalls to avoid when structuring your taxonomy
Real examples of taxonomies for different content scenarios
Advanced techniques for evolving your system as your needs grow
➡️ Paid subscribers get access to these detailed guides along with exercises and examples to help implement your own prompt taxonomy.
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