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 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
- 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.
- The same numbers, trended, every time: the recurring 4–6 metrics with their history visible (data-slide-design 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.
- 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.
- Hard news goes early and straight: the miss, the departure, the change — stated plainly in the deck's first half (changelog-for-humans 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.
- 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
