Update to ThoughtfulBits Skills

{
  "description": "Deep audit of B2B SaaS board decks before they go to the board. Builds a claim ledger, tests whether the pre-read stands alone and states a clear strategy spine, reconciles metrics and assumptions across slides, explains results with credible evidence, shows plan-vs-actual accountability, presents competition and risks honestly, makes cash and runway math explicit, and gives the board decision-ready asks. Use whenever a board deck, board update, board pre-read, annual plan or budget, financing deck, or special-topic board materials need a deep audit, review, or pressure-test before sending — even if the user only says 'take a look at my board deck' or attaches board materials as .pptx, .pdf, .md, or .docx. For a quick gut check — 'what will the board think', 'does this make sense' — use board-feedback. Not for product plans or roadmaps (product-plan-feedback), features or PRDs (product-feature-feedback), or fundraising and investor updates unless they are explicitly board materials.",
  "included_files": [
    {
      "relative_path": "agents/openai.yaml",
      "size_in_bytes": 216
    }
  ],
  "name": "board-deck-audit",
  "skill_md_contents": "---\nname: board-deck-audit\ndescription: \"Deep audit of B2B SaaS board decks before they go to the board. Builds a claim ledger, tests whether the pre-read stands alone and states a clear strategy spine, reconciles metrics and assumptions across slides, explains results with credible evidence, shows plan-vs-actual accountability, presents competition and risks honestly, makes cash and runway math explicit, and gives the board decision-ready asks. Use whenever a board deck, board update, board pre-read, annual plan or budget, financing deck, or special-topic board materials need a deep audit, review, or pressure-test before sending — even if the user only says 'take a look at my board deck' or attaches board materials as .pptx, .pdf, .md, or .docx. For a quick gut check — 'what will the board think', 'does this make sense' — use board-feedback. Not for product plans or roadmaps (product-plan-feedback), features or PRDs (product-feature-feedback), or fundraising and investor updates unless they are explicitly board materials.\"\n---\n\n# Board Deck Audit\n\nAct as the last tough, constructive reader before the board sees the deck. Review substance rather than polish: what happened, why it happened, what management believes, what it will do next, and what the board is being asked to decide.\n\nThe review should increase trust and improve the meeting. Find material gaps without manufacturing criticism, distinguish facts from hypotheses, and give management an actionable path to fix each important issue. This is the deep pass — a full structured audit with a claim ledger and reconciliation tables; when the user only wants a quick director's reaction, the board-feedback skill covers that.\n\n## 1. Read the complete evidence set\n\nRead the whole deck before drafting the review, including appendices and speaker notes.\n\n- **PPTX:** render every slide, inspect charts and tables visually, and extract slide text and speaker notes. Do not rely on text extraction alone.\n- **PDF:** inspect rendered pages as well as extracted text so chart labels, footnotes, layout, and visual contradictions are not missed.\n- **DOCX, Markdown, or pasted text:** read the complete document and any referenced appendices supplied with it.\n\nFor charts and tables, check the title, axes, units, time periods, denominators, labels, footnotes, and stated takeaway. Flag a headline that the visual evidence does not support.\n\nRecord which comparison materials are actually available: the prior board deck, approved plan or budget, latest forecast, prior commitments or minutes, and any supporting model. If an artifact is unavailable, label the corresponding check **not verifiable from the supplied materials**. Do not infer selective disclosure or a broken commitment from a missing comparison source.\n\nClassify the meeting from the content and apply the matching emphasis:\n\n| Meeting | Required emphasis |\n| --- | --- |\n| Quarterly update | Results vs. plan, causes, changed outlook, prior commitments, risks, cash, and decisions/help |\n| Annual plan or budget | Prior-year lessons, strategic choices, operating assumptions, resource allocation, scenarios, decision triggers, and approvals |\n| Financing | Cash need and timing, runway reconciliation, milestones, financing alternatives and tradeoffs, downside case, and requested authorization |\n| Special topic | The decision or discussion to enable, evidence, alternatives, tradeoffs, risks, recommendation, owner, and timing |\n\nPlain language and pre-read clarity apply to every meeting. Apply company-wide strategy, competition, cash, or functional-section checks only when the meeting needs them; a focused special-topic session should not fail for omitting unrelated company updates.\n\n## 2. Build a claim ledger before judging the deck\n\nCreate a working ledger of material claims before writing the review. For each claim, capture:\n\n- slide or section;\n- metric or factual claim, including period and denominator;\n- comparison to plan, forecast, prior period, or cohort;\n- evidence offered;\n- whether the stated cause is an observation, management hypothesis, validated cause, or unknown;\n- proposed action, owner, timing, and success measure;\n- any board decision or help request that depends on it.\n\nUse the ledger to reconcile the deck across slides. It is an internal reasoning aid; include it in the review only when the table itself would help management.\n\nGrade evidence consistently:\n\n- **Unsupported:** assertion, conviction, TAM, or remedy with no evidence tied to the claim.\n- **Anecdotal:** named examples or customer comments without enough breadth to establish prevalence.\n- **Quantified:** counts, cohorts, usage, win/loss, support, financial, or experiment data tied to the claim.\n- **Validated:** multiple credible signals or a designed test that materially rules out plausible alternatives.\n\nDo not turn correlation into causation. A quantified pattern can support a hypothesis without proving the cause.\n\n## 3. Run the substantive checks\n\n### Pre-read clarity and plain language\n\nEach slide should stand alone without a CEO voiceover and state the conclusion the reader should draw. Flag charts without takeaways, unlabeled tables, undefined periods or denominators, and conclusions hidden only in speaker notes.\n\nA phrase is empty jargon when it could appear unchanged in any company's deck. Quote material instances and replace them with the underlying claim when the deck supports one. Precise terms such as ARR, NRR, CAC, churn, burn, runway, pipeline coverage, win rate, and gross margin are useful, not jargon.\n\nDo not let copy cleanup dominate the review. When the underlying truth is missing, ask management to establish the claim before offering a confident rewrite.\n\n### Strategy spine and strategic coherence\n\nFor a general company update or annual plan, test whether the deck states a plain one-sentence strategy spine containing the customer pain and how the product solves it. Report one of three outcomes:\n\n1. The deck states a complete, credible sentence.\n2. The sentence can be assembled from the deck but should be stated explicitly.\n3. It cannot be assembled from the supplied content.\n\nTreat this sentence as a comprehension test, not as the whole strategy. Also ask whether the deck reveals meaningful choices: target customer, source of value, how the company expects to win, what it will not pursue, and how product, GTM, hiring, and budget choices reinforce those decisions. Flag sections that contradict the stated strategy.\n\n### Quantitative reconciliation\n\nRecalculate and cross-check material numbers using only the supplied evidence:\n\n- consistent periods, units, metric definitions, and denominators;\n- actual vs. plan, forecast, and prior period;\n- totals and percentages that reconcile to underlying rows or cohorts;\n- growth, new business, expansion, contraction, and churn claims that can coexist;\n- pipeline coverage, conversion, sales-cycle, and hiring assumptions behind a forecast;\n- cash balance, net burn, runway, planned hiring, known commitments, and financing timing;\n- budget, headcount, gross margin, and breakeven assumptions.\n\nShow the arithmetic when it exposes a material conflict. Do not silently import industry benchmarks or declare a metric good or bad against an external standard unless the user requested benchmarking and credible sources are available.\n\n### What, why, evidence, and response\n\nFor every material section, identify:\n\n- **What:** the result, trend, and comparison.\n- **Why:** the claimed driver.\n- **Evidence:** what supports that driver and its strength.\n- **Response:** what management will do, who owns it, when it will happen, and how the board will know it worked.\n\nCatch circular explanations, second symptoms posing as causes, passive mysteries such as \"macro headwinds,\" and remedies announced before diagnosis. Credit sections that provide a specific, evidence-backed cause.\n\nFor product plans and new bets, ask how many customers were studied, what was learned, what behavioral or commercial evidence supports the plan, and whether the planned investment is proportional to the evidence. A plan can be an explicit bet ahead of evidence, but the deck should label it that way and define the next proof point.\n\n### Accountability, forecasts, and risks\n\nCheck whether headline results are graded against the approved plan and whether the deck closes the loop on prior commitments when comparison materials are available. Watch for unexplained metric-definition changes or dropped metrics, but do not accuse management of metric games without the prior source.\n\nFor forward claims, identify the assumptions that must be true, leading indicators, downside scenario, mitigation, and the trigger for changing course. A forecast without falsifiable assumptions is an aspiration; a risk without an owner or response is merely disclosed, not managed.\n\n### Competitive reality\n\nLook for named competitors and alternatives, including the status quo and doing nothing; current competitor actions; head-to-head win/loss data; and reasons customers choose or reject the company. Cross-check competitive claims against win rate, sales-cycle, pricing, churn, and product evidence elsewhere in the deck.\n\n### Cash clarity and decision readiness\n\nThe deck should make cash balance, burn, burn trend, runway, implied calendar date, planned commitments, and financing posture understandable without board arithmetic. Reconcile these numbers rather than accepting a stated runway at face value.\n\nSeparate board items into **decision**, **advice/discussion**, **help wanted**, and **FYI**. For each decision, require the question, management recommendation, alternatives considered, tradeoffs, supporting evidence, decision owner, and date. If the deck asks for approval without enough information to choose responsibly, mark the ask undecidable.\n\n## 4. Turn findings into useful recommendations\n\nEvery material finding should identify the source slide, quote or metric, why it matters to the board, and one of these action types:\n\n- **Deck edit:** the underlying truth is known; provide exact replacement language or a precise slide change.\n- **Analysis required:** name the missing data, segmentation, reconciliation, or test management must produce.\n- **Decision preparation:** specify the options, tradeoffs, recommendation, owner, or deadline needed to make an ask decidable.\n\nRank actions by board impact and trust risk:\n\n- **Must fix before sending:** could change a decision, hides a material risk, contains conflicting math, or undermines trust.\n- **Should improve:** materially improves understanding but does not block a responsible discussion.\n- **Prepare to answer:** can remain out of the pre-read if management has a credible, evidence-backed answer ready.\n\nState confidence when a finding depends on incomplete evidence. Do not invent the missing number, diagnosis, source, or management position.\n\n## 5. Write the review\n\nUse this structure, omitting only sections that genuinely do not apply:\n\n```markdown\n# Audit: [deck name] — [meeting type]\n\n## Verdict\n**Ready to send** / **Ready after small fixes** / **Needs revision before sending**\n[The one or two issues that determine the verdict.]\n\n## Board-level takeaways\n[Up to three conclusions a director should retain after reading.]\n\n## Strategy spine and coherence\n[The quoted or assembled sentence, its tier, and whether the operating choices align. Mark not applicable for a focused meeting when appropriate.]\n\n## Decision readiness\n| Ask | Type | Information available | What is missing | Verdict |\n\n## Material findings\n| Priority | Where | Finding and evidence | Why the board cares | Action type | Recommendation |\n\n## Quantitative reconciliation\n| Metric or claim | Check performed | Result |\n\n## Section review: what, why, evidence, response\n| Section | What | Why | Evidence strength | Response | Assessment |\n\n## Product plans and competitive reality\n[Include when applicable.]\n\n## Accountability, forecasts, risks, and cash\n[Include the available comparison sources and clearly label checks that are not verifiable.]\n\n## Plain-language edits\n| Where | The deck says | Say instead / question to answer first |\n\n## Questions the board will ask\n[The 3–5 hardest questions created by the material gaps.]\n\n## Actions before sending\n### Must fix before sending\n### Should improve\n### Prepare to answer\n```\n\nMake the verdict follow the substance:\n\n- Use **Needs revision before sending** when the board cannot responsibly decide, material math conflicts, bad news lacks a credible diagnosis, a material plan has no evidence or explicit test, or a general company deck lacks a coherent strategy spine.\n- Use **Ready after small fixes** when the remaining problems are bounded and do not change the meeting's core decisions.\n- Use **Ready to send** when the deck is candid, internally consistent, decision-ready, and appropriate for its meeting type. Do not manufacture findings to avoid this verdict.\n\nDeliver the review in the response. Do not create or save a review file unless the user explicitly asks for a file or names an output location.\n\nKeep the tone direct, specific, and on management's side: the sharpest honest friend of the company, not a prosecutor.\n"
}