Claude Skills by jeffreytse

Use when relying on a third-party vendor or supplier for a critical product, service, or data-handling function — establishing an ongoing program to assess and monitor that vendor's operational, security, financial, and compliance risk, rather than evaluating the vendor once at contract signing and never revisiting the assessment.

Use when facilitating a recurring business review meeting to assess operational performance, address blockers, and align leadership on priorities

Use when documenting a repeatable operational procedure that on-call engineers or operators must execute under pressure

Use when negotiating a price and a single opening offer plus ad hoc counters isn't converging efficiently — set a target price, open with an anchor around 65% of it, make three further offers at roughly 85%, 95%, and a final non-round number at target, using a calibrated question between each offer and shrinking increments each time, because this signals a genuine limit that a round-number final offer does not.

Use when you have received information from a party that has motivation to mislead you — to verify claims under adversarial conditions using designed tests, inconsistency detection, and independent corroboration rather than accepting stated information at face value

Use when expanding sequentially against multiple competitors or markets — to ally with distant actors who would otherwise rescue your near targets, neutralising their intervention before you attack, so that each near target falls without outside reinforcement

Use when choosing a growth strategy for a product or business — deciding among market penetration, market development, product development, or diversification based on whether the move targets existing or new products and existing or new markets.

Use when competing with limited resources against a stronger opponent across multiple simultaneous contests — deliberately sacrificing the unwinnable match to concentrate strength where it produces a winning majority

Use when managing a portfolio of products, business units, or initiatives — classifying each by market growth rate and relative market share to decide where to invest, hold, harvest, or divest rather than funding every unit at the same level.

Use when your strategic goal is blocked by an operational limit that the entire industry has accepted as fixed — to identify that specific constraint, verify it is genuinely the binding limit, and invest to solve it as an engineering problem, gaining durable structural advantage over competitors who have optimised around it rather than through it

Use when building early-stage credibility to attract investors, customers, or partners — to strategically deploy genuine associations, endorsements, and early relationships to signal capability and scale that you have not yet built directly

Use when you need to attack a target — competitor, policy, incumbent — that you cannot attack directly due to political, legal, reputational, or resource constraints, by enlisting third parties with their own genuine aligned interest

Use when taking over an inherited system, process, or organization — or when evaluating a proposed change to a working system — to establish whether you understand why each element exists before making any modifications

Use when entering a high-stakes interaction — board meeting, negotiation opening, crisis briefing, new executive role introduction — where the authority frame will be set in the first minutes and you need to establish it deliberately rather than let others set it

Use when a team or individual is hedging — preserving a comfortable exit rather than committing fully to the objective — to deliberately create an irreversible position that removes the retreat option and forces total effort, because humans perform significantly better when escape is impossible than when a tolerable fallback exists

Use when planning a major competitive move — to pre-emptively secure distribution, talent, supply, regulatory, or ecosystem position so that when you strike, the opponent's countermoves are already foreclosed

Use when rivals are fighting each other or exhausting themselves through overreach, and the most valuable action is deliberate non-engagement — to pre-position while they deplete each other, then enter when the winner is weakened

Use when you are in a growth or capability-building phase where a dominant incumbent would act to suppress, acquire, or preemptively compete against you if they became aware of your development trajectory — to proactively manage your visibility and apparent capability level so that the dominant player does not perceive you as a threat until you are positioned to withstand their response

Use when a venture, campaign, or leader has just won decisively — closed the acquisition, achieved market dominance, ended the crisis, unified the territory — to deliberately diagnose that the offense-phase playbook which produced the win is not the playbook the consolidation phase requires, and switch operating models at the transition point rather than continuing the winning approach into governance.

Use when designing behavioral feedback systems — performance management, compliance mechanisms, software quality loops, or habit formation — to ensure consequences are clear, certain, and swift, because certainty and timing determine behavior modification more than magnitude

Use when a more powerful actor has already announced a decision you need to reverse — to enumerate what that decision costs them in terms of their own stated goals, rather than expressing opposition, so they reconsider against their own framework without triggering ego-defensive rejection

Use when assessing organizational risk exposure — to map how cascade failures propagate through implicit network proximity, shared infrastructure, and correlated dependencies, because organizations that assess only direct relationships systematically underestimate their exposure to others' failures

Use when preparing to announce a major organizational change, reform program, or new commitment — when the audience has reason to doubt that announced commitments will be honored — to make a visible demonstration of follow-through before the main announcement

Use when a competitor is distracted by an internal or external crisis that has left key positions temporarily undefended — to pre-position in advance and move decisively into undefended territory when the crisis window opens

Use when your organization receives external criticism, complaints, or negative feedback — to institutionalize collection and learning from adverse signals rather than defending against or suppressing them, because negative feedback is the highest-signal intelligence available about product and policy failures, and organizations that suppress criticism lose the information that would have prevented their most serious failures

Use when customer or partner adoption at scale requires removing upfront barriers — to offer genuine value freely, let switching costs accumulate naturally, then shift to monetisation once the dependency is established

Use when assigning people to high-stakes roles — to match the specific capability profile the role actually requires against what each candidate specifically has, rather than deploying overall excellence or seniority as a proxy for fit, because mismatching specific capability profiles to specific role requirements produces catastrophic failure even with exceptional overall talent

Use when in a weak or vulnerable position that cannot be immediately strengthened — to project credible strength and signal the cost of engagement so that opponents reconsider attacking while you rebuild actual capability

Use when deciding how to respond to someone who has wronged you or treated you well — respond to a wrong with proportionate fairness (neither indiscriminate forgiveness that erodes accountability nor escalating retaliation that compounds the conflict), and respond to genuine kindness with kindness in kind, rather than applying the same response regardless of how you were actually treated.

Use when predicting or accelerating how a new product, technology, policy, or behavior will spread through a population — classifying the target population into adopter categories and diagnosing an innovation's relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability, to identify what's actually slowing adoption rather than assuming awareness or price alone explain it.

Use when a target population isn't adopting a digital product, service, or program and the cause isn't obvious — diagnose which of four independent access barriers (motivational, physical/material, skills, or usage) is actually blocking adoption before designing an intervention, rather than defaulting to "we need more devices" or "we need more marketing."

Use when a dormant or discredited asset — brand, regulatory license, platform, entity, or abandoned standard — retains residual value that can serve as a vehicle for something new, enabling access, legitimacy, or market entry that would be slower or more expensive to build from scratch

Use when you detect early warning signals — technical debt accumulating, customer relationship cooling, team friction forming, process degrading — to intervene while the problem is still small and cheap, because intervention cost increases nonlinearly with delay

Use when a company's investment decisions — R&D spending, long-term infrastructure, maintenance — are being evaluated against their effect on the next quarterly earnings report, before letting that pressure cut or delay a genuinely positive-long-term-value investment, because quarterly-earnings pressure is a well-documented, specific cause of real value-destroying underinvestment, not just a vague complaint about "short-term thinking."

Use when planning a competitive campaign to ensure the means of winning do not destroy what you are competing for — avoiding pyrrhic victories, preserving resources for follow-on engagements, and using proportionate force at each stage

Use when deciding whether to pioneer a new product category or market first, or deliberately let competitors validate it before entering with superior execution — per Duan Yongping's 敢为天下后 ("dare to follow, not pioneer") principle.

Use when assessing, developing, or hiring for leadership capability — to evaluate a leader against the five virtues that Sun Tzu identifies as determinants of strategic success and diagnose which virtue deficits are causing organisational or competitive failures

Use when preparing for any competitive engagement — product launch, market entry, negotiation, or campaign — to audit your position across the five strategic dimensions before committing resources

Use when evaluating a strategy or major initiative — to categorize major external forces as tailwinds (working with you) or headwinds (requiring you to overcome), and systematically prefer strategies that work WITH dominant forces rather than against them

Use when outmatched overall but able to choose where to engage — concentrating all available resources on the opponent's weakest or most exposed point while avoiding their strength, maintaining initiative, and remaining formless to prevent counter-concentration

Use when a subordinate or peer has accumulated dangerous concentrated power — a general with personal loyalty of troops, a co-founder with an entrenched board bloc, a division head with an independent power base — and a direct confrontation or purge risks open conflict, defection, or reputational damage; instead make voluntary relinquishment of that power more attractive than keeping it, through wealth, status, and security.

Use when communicating a vision, pitch, or call to action and the audience isn't moved despite the content being factually clear — restructure the message to lead with Why (the belief or purpose driving the work), then How (the specific approach that makes it distinct), then What (the product or action itself), because audiences respond to and remember purpose-led communication more than feature-led communication, even when the underlying facts are identical.

Use when choosing what to measure for a KPI, OKR, ML training objective, or SLO — or when a metric that once tracked real performance keeps rising while the underlying outcome doesn't — to diagnose or prevent the specific mechanism by which a measure degrades once people optimize directly against it.

Use when a current position is deteriorating or no longer worth defending — to exit cleanly while preserving key assets, reputation, and relationships for the next engagement, rather than fighting to exhaustion or withdrawing in disarray

Use when an audience isn't ready to engage directly with the actual goal you need them to reach — a lesson, a behavior change, a product adoption — but does have a specific, concrete want of their own; use that existing want, unmodified, as the literal entry point to get them moving, then execute a planned, disclosed transition to the real objective once engagement is secured, rather than trying to motivate them with the deeper goal directly from the start.

Use when you have the power to enforce compliance but enforcement without genuine buy-in will fail over time — to win voluntary commitment from a resistant counterpart through repeated demonstration and release, rather than coercion

Use when you have made a prior public commitment that has become costly to honour — to honour it visibly and completely, using the demonstrated trustworthiness to build moral authority with your own organisation and observing third parties, because the reputation for keeping commitments under cost cannot be acquired any other way and is worth more than the short-term gain from breaking the commitment

Use when facing a group of pre-committed objectors in a high-stakes setting — board meeting, investor Q&A, regulatory hearing, buying committee, or resistant town hall — where collective opposition would defeat your proposal unless each objector's position is individually dismantled before the group

Use when direct confrontation with a stronger or entrenched opponent would be costly, slow, or unwinnable — to win by undermining their strategy, dependencies, or position rather than attacking their strength directly

Use when you've gathered a substantial body of research or data and are about to write up or present it — stop gathering, cluster the findings by underlying pattern rather than by source or chronology, and repeatedly ask "so what does this mean for the decision" until you reach a small number of specific, actionable insights, because a large volume of correctly-gathered information produces no better decision until it has been compressed into insight.