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CCAO-F · Study Guide

← Domain 3: Product and Model Selection

3.1 · Lesson 1 of 4

Product Features

What you need to know

Domain 3 is Product and Model Selection (12%). Lesson 3.1 is about choosing the right claude.ai surface for the job. Chat, Projects, research mode, and Artifacts each fit a different shape of work. Pick by whether the task is one-off, repeated, source-heavy, or deliverable-centred.

Match the feature to the work

  • Chat

    One-off questions, quick drafts, and exploratory thinking where nothing needs to persist.

  • Projects

    Recurring work with standing instructions and uploaded knowledge so every conversation starts with the same context.

  • Research mode

    Questions that need multi-source investigation and a synthesised answer with sources to check.

  • Artifacts

    Standalone outputs you will edit, share, or reuse, displayed next to the conversation.

Stay inside the blueprint

CCAO-F tests the claude.ai product. Developer tooling, programmatic access, and agent systems are related topics and are not examined here. Keep exam answers inside chat, Projects, research mode, Artifacts, and the model-tier choices that follow in 3.2–3.4.

Worked example

Six real scenarios: a one-time email rewrite (chat), weekly status with fixed brand rules (Project), a market scan across many sources (research mode), a reusable meeting template (Artifact, often inside a Project), a quick policy yes/no (chat), and a board brief you will edit for a week (Artifact). Swapping the weekly status into a bare chat forces re-pasting context — that is the signal you chose wrong.

Exam traps

  • Use a fresh chat every week for the same recurring job

    If you paste the same background repeatedly, move it into a Project.

  • Open research mode for a quick lookup

    Research mode suits multi-source synthesis. Simple lookups belong in chat.

  • Put every short answer in an Artifact

    Artifacts fit standalone, reusable, or heavily edited deliverables — not quick Q&A.

  • Treat developer tools and agent systems as in-scope for CCAO-F

    This exam covers the claude.ai product only. API, SDK, MCP, and Claude Code CI are out of scope.

Practice scenario

A team writes the same weekly status report every Friday and keeps pasting the same background into a fresh chat. Which claude.ai feature fits best?

Choose one answer

Build exercise

Pick the Right Feature for Six Work Scenarios

3.1 · Beginner · ~30 min · claude.ai

What you will practise

  • What chat, Projects, research mode, and Artifacts each do best.
  • How a one-off question differs from recurring work.
  • How a multi-source question differs from a quick lookup.
  • How to justify a feature choice in one sentence.

Map six of your own scenarios on the Domain 3 exercises page and test at least two in the product.

Open Domain 3 exercises

Path: /learn/claude-associate/exercises/3-product-model-selection

Sources

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