87 situation-specific prompts and 71 agent-ready skills for engineering managers, directors, and VPs.
- Prompts — copy-paste-and-fill templates for recurring leadership tasks (status updates, roadmaps, reviews, incident comms), each with placeholders, an example, and tuning notes.
- Skills — the same expertise packaged so an agent (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, or any LLM) can act: gather inputs, apply structure, and produce the finished artifact. Portable plain-markdown files with a small YAML header.
Weekly Comms - 15 prompts
The communication layer of leadership. Status updates, stakeholder emails, launch announcements, incident comms, and more.
| # | Prompt | When to Use |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Exec Status Update | Monday morning, synthesising team leads' updates for your VP/CTO |
| 02 | Team Weekly Summary | Friday wrap-up for your direct team |
| 03 | Stakeholder Project Update | Keeping PMs, design, and business leads aligned on delivery |
| 04 | Cross-Team Dependency Update | Flagging blockers and handoffs across teams |
| 05 | Internal Launch Announcement | Announcing a shipped feature or service to the company |
| 06 | External Launch Announcement | Customer-facing or public comms for a release |
| 07 | Team Wins Celebration | Highlighting team accomplishments to leadership and peers |
| 08 | Org Change Announcement | Communicating reorgs, new hires, or structural shifts |
| 09 | Incident Stakeholder Comms | Real-time or post-incident updates for non-technical stakeholders |
| 10 | Meeting Recap & Action Items | Turning messy meeting notes into clear follow-ups |
| 11 | Skip-Level Update | Writing upward comms for your boss's boss |
| 12 | Board Engineering Summary | Distilling engineering progress for board-level audiences |
| 13 | Engineering Newsletter | Monthly or bi-weekly update for a non-technical company-wide audience |
| 14 | Vendor Escalation Email | Escalating a blocked vendor issue in writing |
| 15 | Engineering All-Hands Agenda | Planning a quarterly or monthly all-hands meeting |
Planning Artifacts - 14 prompts
The documents that shape what gets built and when. Roadmaps, RFCs, retros, decision records, and operational playbooks.
| # | Prompt | When to Use |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Quarterly Roadmap | Start of quarter, turning goals into a structured plan |
| 02 | RFC Outline | Proposing a technical change that needs cross-team buy-in |
| 03 | Sprint Retro Summary | Turning retro discussion into actionable themes |
| 04 | Tech Debt Prioritisation | Building a case for paying down debt with a ranked backlog |
| 05 | Build vs Buy Analysis | Evaluating whether to build in-house or use a vendor |
| 06 | Project Pre-Mortem | Identifying risks before a project starts |
| 07 | Capacity Planning | Mapping team bandwidth against committed work |
| 08 | Migration Plan | Structuring a phased approach to a system migration |
| 09 | OKR Drafting | Writing measurable OKRs from vague business goals |
| 10 | Architecture Decision Record | Documenting a technical decision with context and trade-offs |
| 11 | Incident Postmortem | Writing a blameless postmortem from timeline notes |
| 12 | Sprint Planning Breakdown | Breaking epics into well-scoped sprint tickets |
| 13 | Engineering Strategy One-Pager | Communicating what you're optimising for and why, in one page |
| 14 | Team Offsite Agenda | Planning a substantive team offsite that produces real decisions |
People Management - 16 prompts
The human side of leadership. Reviews, career conversations, hiring, and the difficult moments.
| # | Prompt | When to Use |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Performance Review Draft | Review cycle, synthesising a half or full year of work |
| 02 | One-on-One Prep | Before your weekly 1:1 with a direct report |
| 03 | Feedback Synthesis | Combining peer feedback into a coherent narrative |
| 04 | Career Ladder Draft | Creating or refining engineering level expectations |
| 05 | Job Description | Writing a compelling, specific job posting |
| 06 | Interview Rubric | Creating structured evaluation criteria for interviews |
| 07 | PIP Documentation | Drafting a fair, clear performance improvement plan |
| 08 | Promotion Case | Building a compelling case for a direct report's promotion |
| 09 | Team Health Survey Analysis | Finding patterns and actions from survey results |
| 10 | Onboarding Plan | Creating a structured first 30/60/90 days for a new hire |
| 11 | Skip-Level Meeting Prep | Preparing for 1:1s with your reports' reports |
| 12 | Difficult Conversation Prep | Structuring hard feedback or sensitive discussions |
| 13 | Manager README | Writing a working guide to yourself for your direct reports |
| 14 | Layoff Communication | Individual and team messaging for a workforce reduction |
| 15 | Team Values Workshop | Facilitating a session to define real, usable team values |
| 16 | Staff Engineer Scope Document | Defining what a staff engineer owns and how success is measured |
Incident Management - 12 prompts
The operational backbone of engineering reliability. From alert fires through to organisational learning.
| # | Prompt | When to Use |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Incident Commander Runbook | You're IC for a live incident and need a structured framework |
| 02 | Real-Time Status Page Update | Writing public status updates during an active incident |
| 03 | Customer Apology Email | Post-incident customer communication that rebuilds trust |
| 04 | War Room Facilitation Guide | Running an effective incident response call |
| 05 | On-Call Handoff | Handing off context at the start/end of an on-call rotation |
| 06 | Runbook Generator | Extracting operational knowledge into step-by-step runbooks |
| 07 | Incident Trend Analysis | Quarterly review of incident patterns and systemic issues |
| 08 | Remediation Tracker | Tracking postmortem action items to completion |
| 09 | Severity Classification Guide | Defining P0-P3 severity levels for your organisation |
| 10 | Game Day Plan | Planning a chaos engineering or incident simulation exercise |
| 11 | Escalation Policy Document | Defining who to call, when, and through what channel |
| 12 | Incident Readiness Review | Auditing preparedness before a launch or high-traffic event |
Architecture - 12 prompts
The technical decisions that shape your systems for years. Design, evaluate, document, and communicate architectural choices.
| # | Prompt | When to Use |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | System Design Document | Before building a new service or system |
| 02 | API Contract Design | Designing a new API (internal or external) |
| 03 | Scalability Assessment | Evaluating whether a system can handle growth |
| 04 | Data Model Design | Designing schemas for a new domain |
| 05 | Caching Strategy | Deciding what to cache, where, and how to invalidate |
| 06 | Observability Strategy | Designing monitoring, logging, and tracing for a system |
| 07 | SLO Definition | Setting Service Level Objectives for your services |
| 08 | Architecture Review Prep | Preparing to present a design for peer review |
| 09 | Dependency Mapping | Documenting service dependencies and blast radius |
| 10 | Technical Vision Document | Writing a long-term technical strategy for your area |
| 11 | Technology Radar | Evaluating and categorising technologies for your org |
| 12 | Database Selection Guide | Choosing the right database for a workload |
Hiring Pipelines - 12 prompts
The end-to-end process of finding, evaluating, and closing engineering candidates.
| # | Prompt | When to Use |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Hiring Plan | Planning headcount and roles for a quarter |
| 02 | Recruiter Kickoff Brief | Starting a search with a recruiter |
| 03 | Sourcing Outreach Message | Cold outreach to potential candidates |
| 04 | Phone Screen Script | 30-minute initial candidate screen |
| 05 | Take-Home Exercise Design | Creating a fair, well-scoped assessment |
| 06 | Interview Debrief Facilitation | Running a structured hiring decision meeting |
| 07 | Candidate Evaluation Summary | Synthesising interview feedback into a decision |
| 08 | Offer Justification | Building the case for a specific comp package |
| 09 | Candidate Closing Pitch | Selling the role to a finalist who's deliberating |
| 10 | Rejection Email | Delivering a respectful, useful no |
| 11 | Pipeline Analytics Review | Analysing funnel metrics to improve hiring |
| 12 | Interviewer Calibration Guide | Training interviewers for consistency |
Each file follows the same format:
## Situation - When to use it
## The Prompt - Copy-paste ready, with [PLACEHOLDERS]
## Example Input
## Example Output
## Tuning Notes
Agent-ready versions of the highest-leverage prompts — for when you want the agent to do the task, not just draft text. Each skill lives at skills/<category>/<name>/SKILL.md and follows a portable spec (folded trigger description, Inputs to gather, Steps, Output format, Boundaries, Chaining). See SKILL_TEMPLATE.md to contribute one.
Weekly Comms — 8 skills
| Skill | What it produces |
|---|---|
| exec-status-update | Synthesise messy team-lead updates into a crisp leadership update an exec reads in two minutes |
| team-weekly-summary | A Friday wrap-up for your own engineers: what shipped, what's stuck, what's next |
| stakeholder-project-update | Update non-engineering stakeholders on a project without jargon or false reassurance |
| cross-team-dependency-update | Surface cross-team blockers and handoffs collaboratively, with clear asks and owners |
| meeting-recap-action-items | Turn messy meeting notes into decisions and owned, dated action items |
| board-engineering-summary | Translate a quarter of engineering progress into board-level language and outcomes |
| engineering-newsletter | Turn raw updates into a company-wide newsletter product, design, and sales actually read |
| engineering-all-hands-agenda | A tight all-hands agenda that respects people's time and drives real discussion |
Planning — 14 skills
| Skill | What it produces |
|---|---|
| quarterly-roadmap | Goals, backlog, and tech debt into a defensible quarterly roadmap with an explicit not-doing list |
| rfc-outline | A proposed technical change into an RFC thorough enough to decide on |
| sprint-retro-summary | Raw retro feedback distilled into actionable themes with owners |
| tech-debt-prioritisation | A tech-debt list into a prioritised backlog that quantifies the cost of inaction |
| build-vs-buy-analysis | Building in-house vs buying, weighed on total cost and strategic fit |
| project-pre-mortem | Imagine the project failed, then work backward to the likeliest risks and mitigations |
| capacity-planning | Team bandwidth mapped against committed work using realistic, not theoretical, capacity |
| migration-plan | A System A → System B move phased for safety, with rollback at every step |
| okr-drafting | Vague goals into measurable team OKRs with real key results |
| architecture-decision-record | A technical decision captured so future engineers understand the why, not just the what |
| incident-postmortem | A blameless postmortem with systemic root cause and prioritised action items |
| sprint-planning-breakdown | An epic broken into independently deliverable, well-scoped sprint tickets |
| engineering-strategy-one-pager | What engineering is optimising for, and why, on one page |
| team-offsite-agenda | A substantive offsite that produces real decisions, not forced fun |
People Management — 17 skills
| Skill | What it produces |
|---|---|
| performance-review-draft | Scattered observations into a fair, evidence-based review |
| one-on-one-prep | A personalised 1:1 agenda mixing tactical check-ins with career growth |
| feedback-synthesis | Multi-reviewer feedback distilled into a coherent, fair narrative |
| career-ladder-draft | Engineering levels defined with clear, observable expectations |
| job-description | A JD that sells the role honestly and filters effectively |
| interview-rubric | Consistent, bias-resistant evaluation criteria across an interview loop |
| pip-documentation | A fair, evidence-based PIP draft (HR-reviewed) that gives a genuine chance to succeed |
| promotion-case | A case showing the person is already operating at the next level, with evidence |
| compensation-review | A proposed raise positioned against band and compa ratio, with approval flags surfaced |
| onboarding-plan | A 30/60/90 path to a new hire's first meaningful contribution |
| skip-level-meeting-prep | A skip-level that surfaces unfiltered signal and builds trust |
| difficult-conversation-prep | Talking points so hard feedback lands clearly and kindly |
| manager-readme | A head start for reports on your working style and expectations |
| layoff-communication | Coordinated, humane layoff communications for the individual and the team (legal-reviewed) |
| team-values-workshop | A workshop that produces real, usable working principles |
| staff-engineer-scope-doc | What a staff engineer owns, decides, and is measured on |
| team-health-survey-analysis | Survey themes connected to root causes and concrete actions |
Incident Management — 11 skills
| Skill | What it produces |
|---|---|
| incident-commander-runbook | A coordination playbook so anyone on rotation can run an incident calmly |
| severity-classification-guide | An unambiguous P0–P3 guide an engineer can apply at 3am in under a minute |
| war-room-facilitation-guide | A script and structure for the IC to run a live war room |
| on-call-handoff | Exactly what the incoming on-call needs to not be blindsided |
| runbook-generator | Tribal knowledge into a runbook any on-call can follow at 3am |
| incident-trend-analysis | The patterns individual postmortems miss across a quarter |
| remediation-tracker | Scattered postmortem action items tracked to completion with clear ownership |
| incident-stakeholder-comms | A short, plain-language incident update for execs with a committed next-update time |
| game-day-plan | An incident simulation realistic enough to surface real gaps |
| escalation-policy-document | A one-page reference that kills "who do I call next?" ambiguity |
| incident-readiness-review | An audit of whether the team can handle incidents before a high-risk event |
Architecture — 12 skills
| Skill | What it produces |
|---|---|
| system-design-document | A blueprint detailed enough that a senior engineer could build from it |
| api-contract-design | The API contract right before building, with versioning and errors from day one |
| scalability-assessment | Whether the architecture survives 5–10x load, and where the bottlenecks are |
| data-model-design | A schema designed for actual query patterns, not theoretical purity |
| caching-strategy | What to cache, where, how to invalidate, and what happens when the cache is down |
| observability-strategy | The information architecture to go from "it's broken" to "here's the line" fast |
| slo-definition | Reliability targets that are measurable, meaningful, and have an error-budget policy |
| architecture-review-prep | The design — and you — prepared for the tough questions reviewers will ask |
| dependency-mapping | Who depends on what, failure behaviour, and blast radius |
| technical-vision-document | An opinionated 12–24 month vision for where the architecture should head |
| technology-radar | Technologies sorted into Adopt / Trial / Assess / Hold with rationale |
| database-selection-guide | A datastore chosen from the workload, not the marketing |
Hiring Pipelines — 9 skills
| Skill | What it produces |
|---|---|
| hiring-plan | Goals, team, and budget into a defensible hiring plan |
| recruiter-kickoff-brief | The insider context a JD leaves out, handed to a recruiter |
| phone-screen-script | A 30-minute screen that assesses fit and sells the role |
| take-home-exercise-design | A take-home that shows real skill, completable in 2–3 hours, fairly scored |
| interview-debrief-facilitation | A debrief plan that forces an evidence-based, anchoring-resistant decision |
| candidate-evaluation-summary | All interview feedback synthesised into one evidence-based evaluation |
| offer-justification | Interview performance connected to a specific level and comp, defensibly |
| interviewer-calibration-guide | A hands-on session that aligns interviewers and reduces bias |
| pipeline-analytics-review | A diagnosis of where candidates are lost and whether to fix speed or quality |
Skills are plain markdown with a small YAML header, so any LLM agent can read them. Point your agent at the file and it works.
Claude Code
Add to your CLAUDE.md:
skillsDir: skills/
GitHub Copilot
Copy the relevant skill folder into .github/copilot-instructions/.
Cursor
Reference a skill inline via @skills/<name>/SKILL.md, or add the path to your .cursorrules.
Any agent
Point your agent at skills/<category>/<name>/SKILL.md — plain markdown with a small YAML header, readable by any LLM.
Stdlib-only Python helpers in tools/ — no third-party deps, no API keys, runnable under any agent:
| Command | Does |
|---|---|
python tools/skills_cli.py list | search | show | cat |
Browse and emit skills/prompts to stdout |
python tools/gen_manifest.py |
Regenerate manifest.json (machine-readable index) |
python tools/gen_crossmap.py |
Regenerate docs/prompt-skill-map.md |
python tools/gen_integrations.py |
Regenerate docs/INTEGRATIONS.md |
python tools/lint_skills.py |
Lint every SKILL.md against the spec |
python tools/check_repo.py |
Verify links, counts, and generated-doc freshness |
python tools/run_script_tests.py |
Run skill-script golden fixtures |
See docs/INTEGRATIONS.md for per-runtime setup and docs/VARIANTS.md for org-size tuning. CI runs the checks on every push and PR.
Both cover the same engineering-leadership tasks — they differ in how you use them:
prompts/is the companion resource for paste-and-fill workflows: copy the prompt, replace the[PLACEHOLDERS], and run it. Best when you want to drive the output yourself.skills/is for when you want the agent to act — gather the inputs (asking for what's missing instead of guessing), apply the structure, and produce the finished artifact, then offer the natural next step.
Not every prompt became a skill. Thin, transactional one-offs (rejection emails, outreach messages, celebration posts, single announcements) stay as prompts — a template beats an agent there. Substantial, multi-part artifacts became skills.
- V1: 36 prompts across comms, planning, and people management
- V2: Additional categories (incident management, architecture, hiring pipelines)
- V3: Agent-ready skill pack (69 skills, portable across Claude Code / Copilot / Cursor / any LLM)
- V3: Org-size variants convention (
docs/VARIANTS.md) — seeded on capacity-planning, rolling out across skills - V4: CLI to list/search/emit skills from the terminal (
tools/skills_cli.py) - V4: Machine-readable manifest, structure linter, and agnostic CI