all-hands-deck

All Hands Deck Skill

The all-hands serves the widest audience in the company — new hires and executives, engineers and sales, the anxious and the checked-out — and decks built for any single altitude lose the rest: pure strategy bores the floor, pure metrics baffle the new, pure celebration reads as evasion in a hard quarter. The working structure mixes altitudes deliberately (the story everyone follows, the numbers that keep trust, the wins with names, the hard news handled straight), and treats the Q&A as a designed segment — because the questions people actually have determine what the meeting was about, whatever the slides said.

What This Skill Produces

• The segment structure — the recurring skeleton: the narrative open, numbers, wins-with-names, the focus segment, hard news when owed, Q&A
• The altitude rules — per segment: what the newest hire needs vs. what the veterans check
• The hard-news handling — straight, early, with the what-it-means-for-you answered before it's asked
• The Q&A mechanics — pre-submitted + live, the no-softball discipline, and the answer-or-commit rule

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• The month's material — the numbers, the wins, the news (including the uncomfortable); the deck is assembled from reality, and the temptation to skip the bad month is the trust-killer to resist
• The company's current mood — post-layoff, post-win, mid-uncertainty; the structure holds but the emphasis calibrates (anxious companies need the hard-news slide more prominent, not less)
• The metrics that recur — the same 4–6 every time ([kpi-tracker-design](../kpi-tracker-design/SKILL.md) discipline: trends visible, definitions stable), because rotating metrics read as narrative management
• The Q&A history — what got asked last time, what went unanswered; unanswered questions compound

Framework: The Structure Rules

1. Open with the story, one slide: the month in one narrative sentence ("we shipped the platform bet and paid for it in support load — here's both") — the frame everyone, at every altitude, carries through the numbers. Openings that jump to dashboards ask the floor to build their own narrative, and they build worse ones.
2. The same numbers, trended, every time: the recurring 4–6 metrics with their history visible ([data-slide-design](../data-slide-design/SKILL.md) rules) — consistency is the trust mechanism; a metric that vanishes the month it dipped teaches everyone to read absences. Down months get shown with the same prominence and one honest sentence of why.
3. Wins carry names, and names rotate: specific work by specific people ("the checkout rewrite — Ana, Jorge, and the platform team — cut latency 40%") — the recognition segment is half the meeting's retention value, and the rotation audit (who hasn't been named lately?) keeps it from becoming the same five people's highlight reel.
4. Hard news goes early and straight: the miss, the departure, the change — stated plainly in the deck's first half ([changelog-for-humans](../changelog-for-humans/SKILL.md) breaking-first logic), with the what-it-means-for-you slide answering the question every seat is silently asking. Bad news buried at slide 30, or worse left for Q&A extraction, converts one bad fact into a credibility debt.
5. Q&A is designed, not appended: pre-submitted questions (anonymous channel — the real ones need cover) mixed with live, the hardest pre-submitted question taken first (the signal that the segment is real), and the answer-or-commit rule: every question gets an answer or a named owner and date ("I don't know — [name] will post the answer by Friday"). The unanswered-question log is next month's open.

Output Format

All-Hands: [month] — [T] min

The Structure

| Segment | Content | Altitude notes | Min |

|---|---|---|---|

[Story open (1 slide) · Numbers (the standing 4–6, trended) · Wins (names, rotated) · Focus topic · Hard news (early, if owed) · Q&A (designed)]

Hard News Handling (when present)

[The plain statement · the what-it-means-for-you slide · placed at segment [early]]

Q&A Mechanics

[The anonymous pre-submit channel · hardest-first rule · answer-or-commit with owners · last month's open questions, answered]

Quality Checks

• [ ] The open is one narrative sentence, not a dashboard
• [ ] The metrics are the standing set, trended, shown in down months at full prominence
• [ ] Wins name people, and the rotation was checked
• [ ] Hard news appears early with the for-you slide
• [ ] Q&A takes the hardest pre-submitted question first, and last month's commits were honored

Anti-Patterns

• [ ] Do not rotate metrics by convenience — the vanishing-metric tell reads louder than any bad number
• [ ] Do not celebrate through a hard month — the floor already knows; festivity reads as distance
• [ ] Do not thank "the whole team" generically — names or it's wallpaper
• [ ] Do not soften Q&A by selection — cherry-picked softballs teach people to stop submitting
• [ ] Do not leave commits unhonored — one forgotten "we'll get back to you" discounts every future one