chief-of-staff

Onboarding for the Chief-of-Staff plugin. Run once per person or service the plugin is installed for — it generates their personal artifacts (voice profile, workstream provider config, personas, cadence preferences) in ~/.claude/chief-of-staff/. Use when installing or setting up the chief-of-staff plugin, onboarding a new user to it, or when a skill reports a missing voice profile or config. Re-runnable; each section can be refreshed independently.

Question-driven disambiguation for vague or underspecified requests. Use when a task has no clear success criteria, constraints, or scope — "investigate X", "improve performance", "make it scalable", "look into this" — or when stakeholders want conflicting things. Turns ambiguity into a defined problem statement before any solution work starts.

Templates for Architecture Design Reviews (ADR/RFC/tech design docs) and Product Design Reviews (PDR/product specs). Use when writing, structuring, or reviewing a design document, architecture proposal, RFC, tech spec, or product spec, or when preparing for a design review meeting.

Templates for high-stakes work emails — delivering bad news early, proactive status pings, making an ask, escalations, and meeting follow-ups. Use when drafting, structuring, or rewriting a work email or message to a manager, stakeholder, or partner team. Drafts in the user's voice via the voice-profile skill.

High-leverage managing-up strategies — visibly acting on feedback, proactive status updates, surfacing problems early with options, anticipating needs, and aligning with the manager's goals. Use for questions about impressing a manager, managing up, performance reviews, promotion positioning, status reporting, or delivering bad news at work.

Create and apply personas for design reviews. Two kinds — user/customer personas that ground a PDR's target-user and evidence sections, and reviewer personas (security, operator, cost, exec) used to pre-review an ADR or PDR before real reviewers see it. Use when asked to create personas, define target users, identify stakeholders for a design, or run a doc past a simulated review panel.

Framework for getting up to speed unbelievably fast in a new role, team, codebase, or domain. Use when starting a new job or project, ramping up on an unfamiliar system, onboarding, or drowning in docs/meetings/acronyms without traction. Sorts incoming information into Facts, Processes, and Concepts — each learned differently — and uses a question log to measure progress.

Templates and rules for weekly, monthly, and quarterly status updates. Use when writing or generating a status report, weekly update, monthly review, quarterly business review (QBR), or sprint/progress summary. Pulls data via the workstream skill and drafts in the user's voice via the voice-profile skill.

Captures and applies the user's personal communication style — tone, mannerisms, phrasing, greetings, formality — so drafted emails, updates, and messages sound like them, not like an AI. Use when asked to analyze tone or writing style, "write like me", "in my voice", match my style, or whenever drafting outbound communication (email, status update, chat message) on the user's behalf.

Provider-agnostic adapter for reading work items and team chat. Use whenever a task needs issues, boards, sprints, standups, status, "what am I working on", or channel messages — it detects and adapts to GitHub Issues, Azure DevOps Boards, or Jira for work tracking, and Slack or Microsoft Teams for messaging, instead of assuming one tool. Other Chief-of-Staff skills (status updates, one-on-one prep, brag doc) build on this.

The ten behaviors that separate world-class (principal/distinguished) engineers from everyone else — growth loops, scaling through others, absorbing complexity, non-consensus bets, learning from failure, seeking scars, trust as currency, choosing the right problem. Use for questions about becoming a senior/staff/principal engineer, career growth habits, engineering excellence, or what elite engineers do differently.