Claude Skills by jeffreytse

Use when managing a portfolio of early-stage investments — reserving significant capital for follow-on investment in the clearest-performing companies rather than spreading the initial investment evenly or holding follow-on capital back proportionally.

Use when structuring a venture capital firm's investment mandate — building the capability to invest in a portfolio company across its entire lifecycle from seed through pre-IPO and beyond, rather than confining the firm to a single stage, so the strongest companies can be backed continuously without forcing a founder to rebuild investor relationships and re-pitch the business at every new round.

Use when a validated problem is ready to move into building — deciding what minimum viable product to build first, what to measure to test whether it actually solves the problem, and whether to pivot or persevere — bridging the gap between problem-validation interviews and post-launch growth experimentation.

Use when entering or investing in a new geographic market with an existing successful business model — adapting the model to local consumer behavior, regulatory environment, and competitive dynamics rather than directly porting the original model unchanged.

Use when evaluating an early-stage investment opportunity — screening for a genuinely large addressable market first, before assessing team or product quality, since even excellent execution in a small market caps the achievable outcome, while a large market can produce an outsized result even from imperfect execution.

Use when evaluating a technically ambitious, high-uncertainty breakthrough technology investment — accepting a much higher individual-investment failure rate than standard venture investing in exchange for the possibility of a genuinely transformative, category-defining outcome most investors wouldn't accept the technical risk to pursue.

Use when evaluating an investment in an unproven category or business model that the prevailing market consensus actively doubts or dismisses — betting on the category and founder ahead of any price or market validation signal, based on independently-formed conviction rather than following consensus.

Use when evaluating a startup investment opportunity — assessing the founder's execution capability, adaptability, and long-term vision as the primary signal, since a business plan will likely change while founder quality is the more durable predictor of outcome.

Use when computing or auditing a business's unit-level profitability including CAC, LTV, payback period, and contribution margin

Use when launching a new product, entering a new market, or planning the commercialization approach for a startup or new business unit

Use when validating a startup idea, product hypothesis, or new feature by conducting structured interviews with target customers before building

Use when creating a business plan for a startup, new venture, loan application, or investor pitch requiring a formal written document

Use when comparing very differently-titled roles for compensation banding, leveling, or organizational design — score each role's inherent Know-How (knowledge, skills, experience required), Problem Solving (complexity and freedom of thinking, scored as a percentage of Know-How), and Accountability (freedom to act and magnitude of impact), because job titles and informal seniority perceptions vary inconsistently across departments and don't provide a comparable basis on their own.

Use when building or redesigning a salary band structure, total rewards framework, or compensation philosophy for an organization

Use when creating or improving a new employee onboarding program, first-day experience, or ramp plan for a role or organization

Use when building or redesigning an employee performance review process, evaluation framework, or feedback cadence for an organization

Use when conducting or designing an exit interview process for departing employees to capture retention insights

Use when creating or improving a job posting, role description, or position specification to attract qualified candidates

Use when a manager's team is experiencing a significant organizational change — restructuring, strategy shift, leadership change, layoffs, or major process transition — and needs leadership that maintains team stability, preserves trust, and converts uncertainty into direction.

Use when a manager wants to shift their default interaction style from advice-giving to question-asking — so that direct reports build self-sufficiency rather than dependence, and the manager's time is freed from problems the team can solve themselves.

Use when building or assessing a team, decision process, or organizational culture where you need genuine diverse thinking to surface before commitment — not after — and where the risk is false consensus rather than open conflict

Use when many people request your scarce time, mentorship, or expertise and you cannot evaluate their genuine commitment level from a conversation alone — require a specific, costly, objectively verifiable unit of self-directed output (a set number of completed attempts) before engaging, because genuine commitment is what a conversation cannot reliably reveal but a completed, verifiable body of work can.

Use when a manager needs to lead a project or initiative that depends on team members or stakeholders they do not formally manage — to build voluntary cooperation, alignment, and momentum across organizational boundaries through influence rather than authority.

Use when managing a team where members work in different locations, time zones, or on hybrid schedules — to adapt management practices so remote members have equal access to information, relationships, and advancement opportunities as in-office members.

Use when building or leading a team, organization, or system — to create the conditions, remove the obstacles, and design the structures that let people execute with high autonomy, rather than directing through control, because the best leaders are barely visible in their teams' day-to-day success

Use when leading a team and outcomes are falling short — to apply the principle that the leader owns every result, including failures caused by team members, as the non-negotiable foundation for improving performance and building trust.

Use when a manager wants to help a direct report solve a problem, develop a skill, or reach a goal through structured questioning rather than advice-giving — because telling people answers builds dependency while coaching builds self-sufficiency.

Use when a manager wants to proactively retain top-performing direct reports — because high performers have the most options to leave and require active, differentiated management attention to stay engaged and challenged.

Use when a manager wants to design work, roles, or conditions that sustain employee motivation over the long term — by understanding what drives internal engagement rather than relying primarily on compensation, perks, or external incentives.

Use when deciding how to allocate a manager's or leader's limited time across competing activities — before defaulting to whatever is most urgent, estimate each candidate activity's leverage (how many people's output it affects, for how long, and whether it requires your specific position), because a manager's actual output is the output of the organization under their influence, not their own individual task completion.

Use when making any talent selection, promotion, or recommendation decision — to test your evaluation against the reversed-relationship check, because evaluator relationship bias systematically corrupts talent decisions even in well-intentioned evaluators, and merit discipline must be applied at the moment of judgment, not only in structural process design

Use when a significant decision is being made based on a slide presentation — require a structured, written narrative document (full sentences and paragraphs, not bullet points) instead, and have the room read it silently before any discussion, because slide formats systematically let weak analysis and unsupported claims pass unchallenged in a way that full-sentence prose does not.

Use when someone wants to advance their career or capture opportunities by staying alert to situational openings and deliberately cultivating relationships with sponsors — people who actively advocate, not just mentors who advise. E.g. "I have a mentor but I'm not getting considered for big things", "how do I get noticed", "everyone else hears about openings before I do"

Use when designing a promotion process or deciding whether to promote someone based on strong current-role performance — explicitly test whether the skills that made them successful there are the same skills the next level requires, because promotion systems that reward current-role performance alone systematically promote people into roles where those skills no longer apply, until they land in a role they cannot perform well.

Use when trying to gain access to a senior leader or "big name" during a period of rapid technological or generational change — identify the specific new domain (a technology, platform, or cultural shift) that person doesn't understand but fears being left behind on, position yourself as someone who genuinely does understand it, and make that specific expertise visible to them, rather than making a general, undifferentiated ask for mentorship or attention.

Use when a manager needs to determine how much direction vs. support to give a specific direct report on a specific task — because the same management approach applied uniformly produces over-management of high performers and under-support of developing employees.

Use when someone asks you a specific question, or when you're tempted to offer advice, opinion, or evaluation nobody asked for — answer exactly the scope of what was asked and no more, and don't volunteer advice or judgment unprompted, because unsolicited or over-scoped advice is systematically discounted and can generate resentment, regardless of its quality.

Use when a manager is new to a team, has experienced a trust breach, or wants to deliberately strengthen the trust foundation of their management relationships — because trust determines whether employees share real problems, follow direction with confidence, and engage fully.

Use when a manager needs to build an effective working relationship with their own manager, secure resources or decisions for their team, or influence organizational priorities without formal authority over the outcome.

Use when deciding what to post on a personal social feed reaching distant contacts, senior figures, or a broad network — post rarely, and only content that gives the viewer genuine value (a specific insight, a distilled takeaway from a book or talk) rather than personal-life updates or generic greetings, because frequent low-value posts read as noise to anyone not already close to you, while distant contacts register credibility only from content that is useful to them.

Use when talking with a junior colleague, mentee, source, or interviewee and you want them to open up and share more — visibly write down what they say, regardless of whether you find it useful or agree with it, because the physical act of recording their words is a costly, hard-to-fake attention signal that measurably increases willingness to keep talking, independent of any verbal encouragement you also give.

Use when a manager wants to create a team environment where people from different backgrounds have equitable access to voice, visibility, advancement opportunities, and meaningful work — beyond just having diverse representation on the team.

Use when a team leader wants to assess and improve the degree to which team members feel safe to speak up, admit mistakes, ask questions, and disagree — because psychological safety is the strongest predictor of team learning and high performance.

Use when a manager needs to transfer ownership of a task or responsibility to a direct report — to clarify scope, authority, and success criteria upfront so the work transfers completely rather than bouncing back.

Use when a family-owned business needs governance structures addressing the specific tension between family dynamics and business decision-making — establishing a family council separate from the operating board, a written family charter or constitution, and defined succession criteria, rather than relying on informal family relationships to substitute for genuine governance structure.

Use when building or overhauling a hiring process for a role to reduce bias and improve quality-of-hire

Use when designing, restructuring, or evaluating an organization's reporting hierarchy, team topology, or division of responsibilities

Use when your professional network has grown beyond what you can maintain through memory and ad hoc contact alone — assign each contact an explicit tier based on their value and depth of relationship, set a minimum contact frequency per tier, and actively schedule touchpoints against that cadence, because unmanaged personal networks default to contacting only whoever is currently top-of-mind, silently losing valuable but infrequently-encountered relationships.

Use when a manager wants to intentionally shape the values, behaviors, and working patterns that define how their team operates — going beyond written norms to embed culture through rituals, stories, symbols, and leader modeling.

Use when a team's meetings feel like the wrong type of conversation for the decisions being made, when meetings are too frequent or too infrequent, or when team members feel their time is wasted — to design the right meeting types, cadences, and facilitation practices for how the team actually works.