headcount skills

Runs the planning cycle — annual budget, rolling forecast, consolidation of business unit inputs, and the variance analysis that explains actuals against plan. Use this to build or challenge a budget, run a forecast cycle, consolidate departmental submissions, explain why results diverged from plan, or improve forecast accuracy.

Owns what gets built and why: product strategy, roadmap, discovery, user experience, and the definition of success for each release. Use this to decide what to build next, to cut scope, to turn a business goal into a product bet, to judge whether a feature is worth its cost, or when engineering and go-to-market disagree about what a release is for. Also use for roadmap sequencing and for killing work that is not earning its place.

Answers a business question with data without fooling yourself — framing the question so an answer would change something, choosing the right comparison, checking the data before trusting it, recognizing the traps that produce confident wrong answers (aggregation reversals, survivorship, regression to the mean, multiple comparisons), and reporting uncertainty honestly. Use this to run an analysis, review one before acting on it, or work out why two people looking at the same data reached opposite conclusions.

Builds and stress-tests financial models for forecasting, scenario planning, and decision support — revenue build, cost structure, driver logic, and the sensitivities that show where a plan breaks. Use this to model a decision's financial consequence, build a forecast or long-range plan, evaluate an investment or hire, or pressure-test someone else's model before relying on it.

Finds the single constraint currently limiting a business's growth and the highest-leverage moves against it, rather than producing a list of everything that could be improved. Use this when growth has stalled or slowed, when deciding where to spend limited time or budget, when revenue rises but profit does not, when prioritizing growth initiatives, or when a business feels busy without compounding.

Designs the warehouse and semantic layer — source-to-mart structure, dimensional modeling, grain, slowly changing dimensions, and the metric layer analytics reads through. Use this to design or restructure a warehouse, model a new source, decide on grain or table structure, build a semantic or metric layer, or diagnose why queries are slow, wrong, or impossible to write.

Takes something built and gets it into the market — tiering the launch to match what it actually warrants, sequencing internal readiness before external announcement, preparing sales and support to answer the questions it creates, choosing the date for a reason, and measuring adoption rather than announcement reach. Use this to plan a launch, right-size one that is consuming more than it deserves, work out why a released feature nobody uses was launched loudly, or run the weeks after launch day.

Establishes whether the business makes money on each customer or unit — contribution margin, acquisition cost, payback period, lifetime value, and the cohort behavior underneath. Use this to assess whether growth is profitable, evaluate a channel or segment, support a pricing decision, judge how fast the business can afford to grow, or diagnose why revenue growth is not producing profit.

Defines and applies visual brand — logo usage, palette, typography, imagery direction, and the guidelines that keep expression consistent across product and marketing surfaces. Use this to establish a brand from scratch, audit whether an existing brand is being applied consistently, build brand guidelines, or decide how a brand should express itself in an unfamiliar format.

Runs voice and meeting infrastructure — phone systems and numbers, emergency calling obligations, conference rooms and their AV, call recording and its retention consequences, and the porting that makes provider changes go badly. Use this to replace a phone system, fix rooms nobody can start a meeting in, meet emergency-calling requirements, port numbers without losing service, or work out why voice quality degrades only sometimes.

Captures how a person or brand actually writes and turns it into reusable voice instructions every other content skill draws from. Use this before drafting any content for a new brand or client, when output keeps coming back sounding generic, when several writers need to sound like one, or when a voice needs defining without existing samples to learn from.

Designs and operates the corporate network — segmentation, remote access, wireless, DNS and addressing, and diagnosing network problems. Use this to segment a network, set up or fix remote access, diagnose intermittent connectivity, plan addressing or DNS, or assess whether the network's trust assumptions still hold.

Evaluates a software or startup idea against problem, market, competition, monetization, defensibility, and execution, and returns a verdict rather than encouragement. Use this when an idea needs pressure-testing before anyone builds, when deciding whether something is worth pursuing, when assessing competition or willingness to pay, or when a validated idea needs a first-customers and MVP plan. Default to scrutiny; the useful answer is usually the unwelcome one.

Reads a set of financial statements and establishes what changed and why — fluctuation analysis against prior period and against budget, profitability, liquidity, solvency and efficiency ratios, benchmarking, and the non-GAAP measures presented alongside them. Use this to interpret results, review a counterparty's or target's financials, diagnose a deteriorating trend, explain a variance to someone who will act on it, or test whether an adjusted number is honest.

Finds, qualifies, and reaches prospects through cold outreach — list building, qualification criteria, cold email and multi-channel sequences, and the follow-up that actually gets replies. Use this to build a prospect list, write cold outreach, fix a sequence that is not getting responses, define qualification criteria, or decide whether a segment is worth pursuing.

Plans, packages, and scripts long-form video for retention and channel growth — idea selection, titles and thumbnails, script structure, and diagnosing why a video or channel underperforms. Use this for video ideas, packaging, scripting, a retention teardown, or channel strategy — including when someone describes a topic and wants it turned into something publishable. For short-form and cross-platform video, use `video-content`.

Builds the marketing plan of record — objectives, channel mix, budget allocation, sequencing, and the measurement that says whether it worked. Use this for annual or quarterly planning, when budget must be allocated or defended, when marketing activity feels busy but undirected, or when a plan needs pressure-testing before commitment.

Plans and delivers a single project — scope, estimation, scheduling, critical path, tracking, and recovering when it slips. Use this to plan a project, build or challenge a schedule, estimate credibly, track progress meaningfully, or recover a project that is late.

Plans and scripts short-form and long-form video, and designs the packaging — titles, thumbnails, and openings — that determines whether it gets watched. Use this to script a video, plan a series, fix retention or click-through problems, design thumbnail and title concepts, or turn written content into video. For a YouTube channel specifically — idea selection, retention teardowns, and channel-level strategy — use `youtube-producer`.

Designs, documents, and fixes operational processes — mapping the current state, finding where work actually stalls, redesigning the flow, and building controls that hold. Use this when the same failure keeps recurring, when a handoff between teams is unreliable, when onboarding a repeated task, when work takes far longer than the work itself, or when deciding whether to automate, standardize, or eliminate a process.

Plans, runs, and optimizes paid acquisition across search, social, and display — account structure, targeting, creative, bidding, budget, and the analysis that says whether to scale or stop. Use this to set up or restructure campaigns, write and iterate ad creative, diagnose rising costs or falling performance, decide budget allocation, or judge whether a channel is working.

Handles the difficult human situations — grievances, complaints, investigations, conflict, and separations conducted properly. Use this to respond to a complaint or grievance, structure an investigation, handle a conflict between colleagues, prepare for a difficult conversation, or work out what a manager can and cannot do in a given situation.

Matches operational capacity to expected demand — forecasting load, sizing teams and systems, managing queues, and deciding when to add capacity. Use this to plan staffing for expected volume, diagnose a queue that keeps growing, size support or fulfillment capacity, or decide whether a bottleneck needs more capacity or better flow.

Converts anonymous traffic into known contacts — lead magnets, gated content, free tools, popups, and the forms behind them. Use this to design or improve a lead magnet, plan a free tool, add or fix popups and overlays, improve form conversion, or decide what is worth gating and what should stay open.