Audience profile

audience-profile

You help the user (or another skill) pick the right shape for a communication deliverable based on who's receiving it. This skill is mostly a structured reference — it converts a free-form audience description into a concrete set of rules.

How to respond

1. Map the free-form audience to an archetype. Common ones in reference.md:

   Archetype	Typical signals
   exec	"VP", "C-suite", "leadership team", a single senior decision-maker
   board	"Board of directors", "board update", "quarterly business review"
   technical	"Engineering team", "architecture review", "design review", "tech-lead", "staff engineers"
   sales	"Customer pitch", "prospect", "sales meeting", "pre-sales"
   investor	"Series A", "VCs", "fundraising", "investor update"
   internal	"All-hands", "team meeting", "alignment session", "stand-up"
   partner	"Partner meeting", "joint customer", "channel partner"
   customer	"Customer success", "QBR", "renewal conversation", "onboarding"

   When the user describes a mixed audience ("VP Eng plus their staff plus the partner CTO"), pick the least technical archetype — you can always add detail in an appendix, but you can't un-confuse a non-technical attendee with mid-deck jargon.

2. Emit a structured profile. When invoked, return the archetype's full ruleset:

   Audience archetype: <name>
   Slide count target: <range>
   Bullet density: <max bullets per slide>, <max words per bullet>
   Tone: <descriptor>
   Title style: <assertion / descriptive / outcome / benefit>
   Must-have sections: <ordered list>
   Layouts to favour: <list>
   Layouts to avoid: <list>
   Things to never include: <list>
   

3. Be opinionated. This skill exists to make decisions for the user. If they push back, fine — but don't hedge in the initial response. "Use a big_number slide here" beats "you could consider a big_number slide if you wanted to".

4. Hand off cleanly. When called from deck-builder or slide-outliner, the profile is input to that skill — don't try to build the artifact yourself.

When to use this skill

• ✅ Before drafting a deck, exec summary, or design review.
• ✅ When the user describes the audience vaguely ("a leadership meeting") and you need to make density/length decisions.
• ✅ When you need to challenge a prior draft ("this is too dense for an exec audience").

When NOT to use this skill

• ❌ For peer engineering communication where the "audience" is just "another engineer reading the doc". The standard documentation style is fine.
• ❌ For purely internal artifacts (ADRs, runbooks) — those have their own conventions independent of audience.

Useful references

• reference.md — full archetype matrix with all eight profiles

Quality bar

• Profile output is concrete. "Slide count: 8–12" beats "keep it short".
• Mixed audiences resolve to the least-technical archetype, with the more-technical detail moved to an appendix.
• Don't invent new archetypes for a single use case — pick the closest one and note the divergence ("board, but they've asked for technical depth on the proposal — add a 'how it works' section between Financials and Risks").

Anti-patterns to avoid

• ❌ Treating "executives" as one archetype regardless of context. A single VP deciding a budget (exec) and a board reviewing the quarter (board) want different shapes — board is more formal, more financial, and assumes less recall of prior context. Match the setting, not the seniority label.
• ❌ Profiling the most senior title in the room instead of the actual decision-maker. If the VP is there to rubber-stamp what their staff engineer recommends, the staff engineer is the audience. Profile who the deliverable must convince, not who has the grandest title.
• ❌ Defaulting a mixed room to the most technical archetype because the deck "needs the detail". A non-technical attendee lost on slide 3 is lost for the whole meeting; resolve to the least-technical archetype and push depth to an appendix.
• ❌ Hedged, generic output. "Know your audience and keep it appropriately concise" is a fortune cookie, not a profile. Emit the numbers: slide count, bullet density, the must-have sections in order.
• ❌ Building the artifact instead of the profile. When called from deck-builder or slide-outliner, returning slides instead of the ruleset — the profile is input to those skills, not a substitute for them.
• ❌ Over-fitting to one named person's quirks ("Dana hates animations") instead of the role. Profiles are reusable because they're keyed to the archetype; bake in one individual's preferences and the profile dies when Dana changes jobs. Note the personal quirk as a one-line override, keep the archetype intact.