Claude Skills by jeffreytse

Use when a rule, standard, or process you have established is visibly violated by someone with significant personal relationship, exceptional talent, or high status — where the temptation to make an exception is strongest and the cost of making it is highest

Use when entering a negotiation, sales conversation, or persuasion effort where the other party's stated position may not reflect what they actually need — discover the underlying interest before presenting your proposal

Use when solving a hard problem, stress-testing a plan, or identifying risks by reasoning backwards from failure instead of forwards from goals.

Use when designing a product, evaluating product-market fit, or investigating why customers switch to or away from a solution — to understand what functional, social, and emotional progress customers are trying to make, independent of your existing product framing.

Use when the competitive outcome — a sale, a hire, a partnership, a policy decision — is controlled by a single decision-maker or gatekeeper, and engaging the broader organisation is slower and more expensive than influencing the key person directly

Use when seeking durable market authority without direct confrontation — to control or heavily influence the existing source of legitimacy in a market (standards body, regulatory definition, platform API, analyst category) so that competitors must conform to your terms while appearing to follow a neutral authority

Use when trying to produce durable change in an organization, market, or system and a first intervention (a number, rate, or threshold) failed to stick — classify what type of lever you're actually pulling (parameter, rule, information flow, goal, or paradigm), since parameter adjustments are the most commonly attempted intervention and, per systems theory, generally the least effective at producing change that lasts.

Use when cascading organizational objectives down through management layers, replacing task/activity supervision with outcome-based autonomy, structuring a manager-employee objective-setting conversation, or deciding between MBO, OKRs, and KPI-only management. E.g. "how do we align goals across levels without micromanaging", "my manager checks my hours not my results", "how should objectives flow from company strategy down to individual work"

Use when no established market exists for what you are building, or when you want to redefine an existing market on your own terms — to invent the category before competing for it, becoming the reference rather than a competitor

Use when allocating resources, credit, funding, or attention across people or projects with genuinely similar underlying merit — or when trying to break into a field where early visibility disproportionately determines future opportunity — because existing visible status attracts further resources and credit at a rate disproportionate to any actual merit differential, compounding small early advantages into large later ones.

Use when structuring a problem, organizing findings, or building an analysis where you need to ensure no gaps and no overlaps in your categories.

Use when a tempting but off-mission opportunity appears mid-execution — a quick win, an inbound request, an easy side-project — and pursuing it would cost time or focus on the actual primary objective. E.g. "should I take this on right now", "this looks easy, why not just do it too", "we're getting pulled in a different direction"

Use when facing an aggressive opening demand, threat, hostile objection, or competitive move — to determine whether to respond immediately or wait out the initial emotional peak before engaging, because the timing of your response determines whether you negotiate from the opponent's emotional frame or your own

Use when designing a competitive strategy, pricing policy, auction, contract, or negotiation where multiple rational parties make interdependent decisions — to identify stable strategy combinations, predict where unstable strategies will drift, and design rules that make your desired outcome the equilibrium.

Use when building long-term relationships, networks, or organizational loyalty — to give help, information, introductions, and resources without explicit expectation of return, because non-transactional generosity creates more durable social capital than tracked exchanges

Use when managing a high-stakes live conversation where you need to control information flow — negotiation, sales, intelligence gathering, or any dialogue where you must draw out the other party's true position without prematurely telegraphing your own

Use when facing a long list of causes, customers, defects, tasks, or inputs with unknown relative impact — before allocating effort evenly across all of them, measure which small subset accounts for the majority of the outcome, and concentrate resources on that subset first, because impact is reliably concentrated rather than evenly distributed across causes.

Use when you hold a position, initiative, or advantage that is still producing positive results — to identify whether you are at or approaching the optimal stopping point, and exit before the peak rather than after, because the signals that tell you to stop typically arrive after the best exit moment has passed

Use when assessing a complex, ambiguous organization, conflict, product, or strategic situation you are embedded in — deliberately gather multiple, structurally different vantage points (varying role, distance, and angle) before concluding you understand its true shape, because any single viewpoint, including your own carefully-reasoned one, only ever reveals a partial cross-section.

Use when participating in someone else's ecosystem or platform — to enter as a value-adding participant, become indispensable to the ecosystem's participants, and gradually shift the power dynamic until the platform depends on you rather than you on it

Use when an urgent problem has a fast "fix" available — before adopting it, check whether the fix's relief mechanism is the same channel that will make the underlying problem worse and require a larger dose of the same fix next time, versus an ordinary cost/benefit tradeoff where the cost is separate from the relief.

Use when you are a crisis contributor whose exceptional capability made you indispensable during an emergency — to recognise that the same capability which made you irreplaceable during the crisis becomes a structural threat to the principal once the crisis resolves, and to navigate the transition before the principal acts rather than after

Use when engaging with any organization — customer, partner, regulator, acquirer, or internal — to map actual decision authority and influence separately from the formal org chart, because nominal titles and actual power routinely diverge, and strategies built on formal hierarchy fail when the real decision-makers are elsewhere

Use when a plan is finalized but not yet launched, to surface failure modes the team hasn't acknowledged before commitment is locked in.

Use when uncertain about hidden opposition, competitive response, regulatory posture, or customer reaction before committing to a major strategic move — to design a low-cost probe that reveals the real landscape before full resource commitment

Use when facing a stated problem and about to move straight to generating solutions — pause and explicitly challenge whether the problem as framed is the right problem, since the frame (not the quality of the proposed solution) determines the entire solution space, and a wrong or too-narrow frame guarantees a suboptimal fix no matter how well it is executed.

Use when facing a stronger, better-resourced incumbent in an active, ongoing competitive struggle — not a single defeat already suffered — where a quick decisive confrontation favors the incumbent; instead trade ground for time in an opening phase, mobilize broad, distributed, sustained resistance to shift the balance of resources and will over years, then transition to open offensive once that balance has genuinely shifted.

Use when designing a product line with a durable base unit and a proprietary recurring consumable or complement — deciding whether to price the base unit near or below cost to drive high-margin recurring sales, rather than pricing every unit for standalone profit.

Use when you need to attract an extraordinary person — a key hire, co-founder, advisor, or critical partner — who has alternatives, won't respond to standard incentives, and screens candidates by how much they genuinely understand and need them

Use when estimating the cost, duration, or probability of success of a project, initiative, or decision you are personally involved in — replace or check your case-specific intuitive estimate against the actual outcome distribution of a class of comparable past cases, because direct involvement systematically biases estimation toward optimism in a way outside data does not.

Use when you need to discover another party's true position, interest, or timeline and direct questioning would produce diplomatic or socially expected answers rather than genuine disclosure

Use when competing for contested territory against a stronger opponent who outguns you in direct confrontation — to relieve pressure on the primary front by creating a genuine crisis at the opponent's rear or home base

Use when a strategy or major organizational change isn't gaining traction despite being sound on paper — auditing whether structure, systems, shared values, skills, style, and staff are all aligned with the new strategy rather than still calibrated to the old one.

Use when structuring a business recommendation, analysis, or proposal — to ensure every argument moves clearly from observable fact (Sky) through logical interpretation (Rain) to a specific recommended action (Umbrella), eliminating ambiguity about what decision is being requested.

Use when a competitor's apparent strength is sustained by a specific underlying resource, relationship, or capability — to attack the source directly rather than competing against its surface manifestations

Use when operating in competitive environments where revealing your intentions, timing, or concentration point would allow the opponent to pre-empt, counter-concentrate, or deny you the element of surprise

Use when facing severe competitive defeat — forced exit, punishing terms, or subjugation by a stronger opponent — where survival requires accepting humiliation in the short term, to systematically rebuild capability over years while maintaining the motivation and discipline for eventual reversal

Use when planning a campaign, product launch, or competitive push — to build strategic potential before committing, combine direct and indirect forces simultaneously, and strike at the moment of maximum advantage rather than at the earliest opportunity

Use when preserving something of high strategic value requires giving up something of lower value, or when offering something valuable will attract something of greater value in return — to make deliberate, asymmetric trades rather than defending everything equally

Use when a subordinate power base — a regional division, a family-controlled business unit, an equity bloc — is dangerous not because of one person's individual power but because of a standing structure that lets power concentrate and compound across generations or cycles; design a genuinely fair, generous-looking rule that mandates division at each succession point, so concentration fragments by design over time without any single confrontation.

Use when deciding whether to continue a project, relationship, purchase, or course of action that has already consumed significant time, money, or effort — before weighing that prior investment as a reason to continue, because money, time, and effort already spent cannot be recovered by any future decision and are irrelevant to which future choice is actually best.

Use when managing a portfolio of initiatives, products, teams, or investments — to identify areas generating surplus above their optimal level and actively redirect those resources to deficit areas, because the human default (pile more into what's already working) destroys portfolio balance and long-term sustainability

Use when assessing a business, product, team, or initiative before a strategic decision — to systematically surface internal capabilities and external conditions, then derive concrete strategic options rather than an unactionable list.

Use when a problem keeps recurring despite fixes, when a team is reacting to events without understanding why they happen, or when a decision needs structural rather than symptomatic treatment.

Use when circumstances change mid-engagement and tactics must adapt — diagnosing which of the nine strategic situations you occupy, applying the situation-specific response, and avoiding the five commander faults that cause strategic failure

Use when negotiating and direct requests or arguments aren't surfacing the other party's real position — mirror their last few words to prompt elaboration, label the emotion you observe without asking if it's true, ask calibrated how/what questions instead of making demands, frame the cost of disagreement in loss terms, and invoke fairness explicitly, because these specific tactics draw out information and cooperation that direct questioning and argument do not.

Use when direct recruiting for a specific type of talent or partner is failing — to make a single visible, costly, and seemingly disproportionate investment in a specific instance of what you want to attract, demonstrating credibly to the market that you are willing to pay for that category, and letting the signal do the recruiting that direct outreach cannot

Use when choosing where to compete or commit resources — to classify the competitive terrain, avoid fighting on ground that advantages the opponent, and create or occupy terrain that structurally favours your position

Use when designing governance, organizational policy, or team operating standards — to publish rules explicitly, permanently, and publicly before situations arise, so that enforcement is predictable and independent of the enforcer's discretion

Use when improving a system, product, process, or decision framework — to identify and remove non-essential elements, fragilities, and complexity rather than adding features or capabilities, because subtraction produces more durable improvement than addition