Strategic Planning
When to use
Use this skill for strategic planning when you need to turn a goal into choices, trade-offs, and measures. The expected result is a strategic plan with milestones.
Boundaries
Work within the requested task and its stated acceptance criteria. Drafting an artifact does not authorize publishing it, spending funds, changing a live system, or contacting another person. Identify any such action separately before taking it.
Inputs
Inspect decision question, market evidence, constraints, economics, and stakeholders. Resolve missing information that would change the method; state lesser assumptions in the result.
Method
- Diagnose. Frame the decision, options, market evidence, economics, time horizon, and non-negotiable constraints.
- Decide. Compare credible options with explicit assumptions and trade-offs.
- Produce. Build a strategic plan with milestones from the inspected material; keep assumptions distinguishable from observed facts.
Decision rules
- Test the preferred strategy against downside, competitor response, capacity, and opportunity cost.
- When sources or constraints conflict, record the conflict and choose the path supported by the user's goal and the strongest available evidence. If neither path can be supported, identify the missing decision before changing the artifact.
Domain rules
- Use a clear answer-first structure with evidence behind each claim.
- Separate data, inference, and recommendation.
Verification
Identify what the team will stop doing. Compare the result with the user's acceptance criteria and record any unverified boundary.
Produce an answer-first recommendation with cited evidence, assumptions, trade-offs, and decision ask.
Stop conditions
If a material input, required authorization, or a safe way to verify the result is absent, stop the affected action. Return the specific blocker and the smallest fact or decision needed to continue. Do not report an unrun check as passed.
Output
Provide a strategic plan with milestones. Include the decisive evidence and actual verification result. Name any artifact location and unresolved issue that affects its use.