Skill pack curator

Skill Pack Curator

A pack is not a dump of related skills. It is a curated operating system for one persona or one workflow, where every member earns its place, the members route to each other, and the whole covers the job end to end. The costly mistake this prevents: shipping a "collection" - ten adjacent skills with no sequence, no cross-links, and no reason to buy the bundle over any one member.

Inputs to collect

1. The persona or workflow, in one sentence: "This pack is for [persona] who need to [job]."
2. The existing catalog - which candidate members already exist versus need creating.
3. The methodology, if any, the pack encodes (a named framework, a book, a practitioner playbook).

Persona packs vs workflow packs

A persona pack serves one role across many task types ("Engineering Manager Toolkit"). A workflow pack covers one end-to-end workflow ("Database Migration Workflow"). Choose one mode and hold it; mixing both makes membership decisions arbitrary. Default: vertical/industry packs are persona packs; process packs are workflow packs.

Operating procedure

1. Write the persona sentence and the end-to-end job map: every stage the persona moves through, in order (e.g. for a gym owner: know the math → build the offer → fill it → sell it → keep them → scale). The job map is the pack skeleton; members exist to cover stages.

2. Slot candidates against the map. For each stage, name the skill that covers it - existing catalog skill (reuse), existing skill needing uplift, or a gap needing creation. A stage with no skill is a coverage hole; a skill covering no stage is a cut candidate.

3. Enforce the overlap budget. No two members should fire on the same prompt more than roughly one time in five. Test with each member's positive trigger scenarios: if another member would also fire on more than one in five, merge them or cut the weaker. Coordinated handoffs (one skill's deliverable feeds the next) are not overlap - they are the point.

4. Size the pack. Minimum 3 members (below that it is one skill with sections), maximum 12 (above that, split), sweet spot 5-9. Never pad to hit a number: a weak member taxes the pack's credibility more than a gap does.

5. Design the connective tissue - what makes a pack worth more than its members:

   • An install sequence with reasoning: which skill first and why ("install gym-money-model first; every other skill spends money and this one says whether the spend pays").
   • Cross-links by plain slug mention in each member's body, routing at the natural handoff ("if conversion is under 40 percent, go to closer-sales-script").
   • One worked example threaded through every member - the same example business, project, or person throughout, so the skills visibly compose.
   • Shared thresholds: a number defined in one skill (a target, a rule) is cited identically by the others, never contradicted.

6. Write the pack description. Tagline (90 chars max) names the audience and the outcome: "For gym owners: fill, sell, and scale using the money-model playbook." Description sells when to reach for the pack and what running it end-to-end produces - never a contents list.

Deliverable

A pack manifest: persona sentence, job map, the member list annotated reuse / uplift / create with each member's one-line trigger, the install sequence with reasoning, the cross-link plan (which member routes to which, at what condition), the worked example that threads through, and the tagline + description.

Do NOT

• Do not admit a skill because it is good - admit it because the persona hits that stage of the job. Off-persona members belong in another pack.
• Do not ship members that do not reference each other; an unlinked pack is a discount bundle, not a product.
• Do not let two members define the same threshold differently; shared numbers are defined once and cited.
• Do not pad to a target size, and do not span two personas because both are adjacent - split instead.
• Do not grade or rewrite member quality here; route finished composition to skill-auditor for the quality pass.

Quality bar

The composition is done when: every stage of the job map has exactly one owning member; install order is stated and justified; every member cross-links at least one other at a concrete handoff condition; one worked example appears in every member; no overlap pair exceeds the budget; and the tagline names audience + outcome in under 90 chars.