BoardSnap is an iOS app that reads a feature spec whiteboard — user flows, states, edge cases, acceptance criteria — and produces a structured feature brief in one snap.
Feature specs are best started at a whiteboard. You can sketch the user flow end to end, draw the state machine, mark the edge cases, and diagram how the feature interacts with existing systems — all in the same visual space. The engineers in the room can point at the board and say 'what happens here?' and the answer gets added immediately.
Then someone has to write the actual spec document. That person usually wasn't drawing — they were talking. The spec ends up as a linear document that can't capture the visual relationships between states. The edge cases that were explicitly circled on the board don't make it in. Engineers implement the happy path; the edge cases stay on the whiteboard that's been erased.
Skipping the whiteboard and going straight to writing doesn't help. A feature spec written in isolation, without the spatial exploration a whiteboard enables, is usually missing the hard questions. The whiteboard is where you find the edge cases before they find you in production.
Start with the core user flow — left to right, top to bottom. Each step is a box. Arrows connect the steps. Write the action or trigger between each arrow. This is the skeleton of the spec.
For each step, note the system state. Loading, empty, error, success. Add branching arrows for each state. 'If API fails → go here.' Draw all the paths the user can take, not just the intended one.
Circle or star every edge case you identify. Write a brief description next to each: 'What if the user has no payment method?' 'What if the request times out after 30s?' These circles are the highest-value content on the board.
In a separate section of the board, write acceptance criteria as 'Given / When / Then' bullets or plain English: 'User sees an inline error, not a full-page error' or 'Loading state appears within 200ms.' Number each criterion.
Write the systems or APIs the feature depends on in a box at the bottom: 'Depends on: Auth service, Payments API v2, Notification queue.' Draw a line from the feature boxes that use each dependency.
Open BoardSnap. The flow diagram, edge cases, acceptance criteria, and dependencies should all be visible in frame. BoardSnap AI reads the flow structure, circled edge cases, numbered acceptance criteria, and dependency box.
A structured feature brief: happy-path user flow described as ordered steps, state transitions listed for each step, edge cases as a numbered list, acceptance criteria as a numbered list, and technical dependencies as a separate section. The output reads like a feature spec, not a transcript of a whiteboard — paste it into your PRD template or Notion feature page.
PM, designer, and lead engineer sketched the checkout flow on a whiteboard. Fifteen steps, four error states, six edge cases. BoardSnap read the flow direction (left to right, then wrapping down) and produced a step-by-step spec with all edge cases listed. The engineer had questions answered before sitting down to code.
The team diagrammed the new auth flow alongside the legacy systems it needed to talk to. Dependency arrows went between the new flow and the old system boxes. BoardSnap captured the dependency relationships and flagged them in the output, which helped the engineer estimate the migration work accurately.
Two engineers sketched an API endpoint spec on a whiteboard — request shapes, response shapes, error codes, rate limiting behavior. No designer involved. BoardSnap turned the technical spec diagram into documentation that went directly into the API docs.
Yes. Standard flowchart shapes — rectangles for steps, diamonds for decision points, parallelograms for I/O — are recognized. The output describes the logic the shape encodes, not just the text inside it.
BoardSnap reads both. Wireframe sketches are described in the output as interface states. The more labeled the sketches are (screen name, component labels), the more specific the output will be.
Both work. Numbered items are output in order. Unnumbered bullets are output as a bullet list. Mixing the two is fine — BoardSnap preserves the distinction.
Snap the board, ship the action items in ten seconds.