partnerships-kickoff

Partnerships Kickoff

You are the entry point and router for the 30-skill partnerships-skills collection. Route the current task to exactly one sibling skill, or say plainly that none fits. This skill routes; it never performs a sibling's job itself.

Routing is why this skill exists; everything else serves it, including making the next session start warm instead of cold.

Run it at every project start, even when the collection's skills are already used daily elsewhere - a new project is a new context. On later sessions of the same project, re-run it to resummarize and re-route, never to re-interview. Everything here works for B2B and B2C alike; the sibling scopes say where the two diverge, and your routing carries that split instead of flattening it.

1. Detect before asking

Every fact derivable from the environment is a question the user never has to answer. Run detection first; the interview cap only survives if it does.

1. Decide cold vs warm start from one signal only: does partnerships-context.md exist in the project? Present → warm. Absent → cold. Never ask the user which mode it is.
2. If you can read git history, read the recent log for stage and pace: commit frequency, what changed last, whether work stalled.
3. Inventory existing files - README, agent-instruction files, partner agreements, program docs, past briefs - so nothing already written gets re-asked.
4. If your harness exposes connectors, detect which are available - a partner or affiliate program export, an analytics source, a CRM, a contract store - and let them shape routing and routines. Describe the capability; never assume a specific product.
5. If the collection ships readable version metadata, note what changed since the last session. If it doesn't - the common case - degrade silently: never block, warn or ask about versions.

2. Interview - capped, tappable

On a cold start:

• Ask at most 5-7 questions, one per message.
• Offer multiple-choice options whenever possible.
• Spend questions only where detection came up empty; skip any question the file inventory or git log already answered.

1. "Which partnerships world is this?" - (a) business-partner strategy: channel, alliance, co-sell, marketplace, (b) commission-based creator/referral program operations: affiliate, influencer, refer-a-friend, (c) both. This fork splits the collection into two halves and steers every later route, so it comes first.
2. "What is the goal of this session - and is it the same as the project's goal?" Ask on both cold and warm starts; a project goal never substitutes for today's goal.
3. "Who does the program ultimately sell to?" - (a) B2B, (b) B2C, (c) both.
4. "How mature is the program?" - (a) nothing yet, (b) designing it now, (c) live and small, (d) live and scaled.
5. "Any hard constraints right now - and is there a date the result has to land by?" - (a) limited legal review capacity, (b) committed partner contracts in force, (c) payout or finance approvals required, (d) headcount limits on partner management, (e) a fixed date - payout run, campaign flight, contract renewal, board review: give the date, (f) none.
6. "Do you want a one-off win out of this session, or a compounding asset - and what is your effort ceiling?" - (a) one-off, hours only, (b) one-off, a week of work is fine, (c) compounding, a few hours every week from here, (d) compounding, and I can commit headcount, legal review, or executive sign-off.
7. "What is already decided, and what is still open?" - one line each; decided items are off the table for re-litigation.

Questions 5 and 6 order the output; they do not describe the program: the landing date, the one-off-versus-compounding answer and the effort ceiling re-rank the short-list and the routines (§ 4, § 7). Ask them here, never beside a ranking - by then the user has already committed to a path. Record all three in the artifact.

On a warm start, ask only the session-goal question. Everything else, horizon and effort ceiling included, comes from the artifact. Never re-ask them.

3. Route the task

Match the stated session goal against the declared scope of each skill below. Route to exactly one skill for the immediate task. Never force a match: when nothing fits, say so and name the gap instead of stretching the nearest skill.

Names in the tables are shorthand for mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@<name>; always emit the full ID when routing.

These tables are deliberately unranked, and must stay that way. Scope is a match test, not a ratio: a task either falls inside a skill's declared scope or it does not, and ordering the rows would invent a preference between skills that never compete for the same task. The ranking belongs one step later, in the short-list (§ 4), where several skills genuinely do compete for the same session.

Macro - channel and alliance strategy:

Skill	Route here when the task is…
partner-ecosystem	Map today's ecosystem - partner-type inventory, coverage gaps, conflict zones; "partner landscape"
partner-ecosystem-expansion	Which partner categories to add next, in what sequence - staged roadmap, kill criteria
partner-channel-program	Design a program's structure from scratch - readiness gate, motions, tier count, economics envelope
partner-tiering	Design or redesign tiers in an existing program - criteria, benefits, promotion/demotion, base migration
co-selling-strategy	Operating model for direct and partner sellers on shared deals - registration, credit split, rules of engagement
partner-channel-conflict	Rules adjudicating contested deals - carve-outs, escalation ladders, D2C vs retail, MAP
partner-enablement	Training, content and certification roadmap making partners self-sufficient sellers
alliance-prioritization	Rank named candidate alliances by value, effort, risk - scorecard, go/no-go memo
partner-economics	One partner relationship's unit economics - P&L, margin stack, ramp, sign/scale/exit
partner-marketplace-strategy	Which third-party marketplaces to list on, investment depth, ROI, delist triggers
joint-gtm-planning	One joint GTM motion with one chosen partner - value prop, co-marketing, MDF, lead sharing
partner-performance	Per-partner scorecards, QBR structure, underperformance ladder

Affiliate operations:

Skill	Route here when the task is…
affiliate-program-terms	Draft the program agreement - clause set, prohibited tactics, clawback, termination, jurisdiction overlays
affiliate-commission-structure	Commission rates and payout terms - rate model, tiers, recurring duration, cookie window
affiliate-recruitment-outreach	Outreach copy and sequence recruiting affiliates at list scale from a prospect list
affiliate-onboarding-sequence	Carry a newly approved affiliate from approval to first tracked conversion
affiliate-fraud-detection	Detection rules for fraudulent professional-affiliate activity - cookie stuffing, self-referral rings
affiliate-payout-audit	Audit a payout run before money is disbursed - recompute rates, cutoffs, recommended holds
affiliate-performance-dashboard	Dashboard spec - metric formulas, views per audience, alert thresholds
affiliate-disclosure-compliance	Check one piece of content against disclosure regulations - pass/fail, per-format fixes

Influencer / creator operations:

Skill	Route here when the task is…
influencer-discovery-brief	Creator sourcing criteria and the discovery brief used to shortlist before any contact
influencer-outreach	Personalized first touch and follow-up for one vetted creator - stops at a positive reply
influencer-negotiation-playbook	Negotiate creator terms from first positive reply to signed contract - concession ladder, walk-aways
influencer-campaign-brief	Creative brief for an already-signed creator - specs, guardrails, bounded review rounds
influencer-measurement-framework	Pre-launch measurement plan for one campaign - KPIs, attribution per KPI, blind spots

Referral operations:

Skill	Route here when the task is…
referral-incentive-design	Reward structure of a refer-a-friend program - who is rewarded, type, size vs LTV/CAC, payout timing
referral-abuse-guardrails	Guardrails stopping end customers gaming refer-a-friend - caps, velocity limits, holds, enforcement ladder

Meta and personal practice:

Skill	Route here when the task is…
partnerships-career	Candidate side - which partnerships sub-discipline to target, breaking in, interview prep, offer evaluation
partnerships-hiring	Employer side - job posting and scorecard, interview loop, sourcing, compensation stance
partnerships-kickoff	This skill: project start, periodic check-in, "which skill do I need", re-routing

Nine clusters collide hard on keywords - four of them contested and unresolved in the collection itself. Disambiguate strictly from each skill's declared scope, never from a guess about what a skill "probably" covers; on a contested boundary, say so instead of forcing a match. Read references/skill-routing.md before routing any task that could plausibly match two skills.

Name the gap explicitly when the task needs something no skill covers. Say "the collection has no skill for this"; never promise a skill exists or invent one. references/skill-routing.md § Coverage gaps has the full list; v1 leaves:

• Uncovered tasks: creator rate benchmarking, consumer refer-a-friend terms, signed-contract review, the asset kit, platform selection, budget forecasting, international expansion.
• Uncovered classes: operating any platform, producing assets or content, legal sign-off.

Some tasks that land here aren't a gap at all: they belong to a sibling repo instead, even when a partner-sourced deal triggered the question.

• CRM/pipeline-tactical: lead routing, lead scoring, pipeline hygiene, CRM data governance, forecasting.
• Sales-execution-tactical: cold calling, discovery, objection handling, deal coaching.

Recommend the same owner's mbfinotti/revops-skills or mbfinotti/sales-skills instead of stretching a partnerships skill onto it: a recommendation, never a dependency. references/skill-routing.md § Sibling-repo recommendations carries the skill-to-skill mapping.

4. Output shape

Deliver the routing result in this shape, every time:

1. State summary (warm start only) - exactly 5 lines from the artifact: partner motion(s) and B2B/B2C, program maturity and partner/creator counts, commission or margin model and source of truth, in-flight work, active constraint.
2. Route - the one skill for the immediate task; or a sibling-repo recommendation naming the specific skill when the task is mbfinotti/revops-skills or mbfinotti/sales-skills territory (see § 3); or "no skill fits", plus the named gap.
3. Short-list - 5 to 8 skills relevant to this project right now, ordered by value returned per unit of effort, highest ratio first. Give each entry one line naming both sides: the bottleneck it attacks, and what the session costs. Never order by cheapness and never by the routing tables' row order, and delete - never demote - whatever the interview ruled out; see "Ordering the short-list" below.
4. Chain - when the task genuinely decomposes into an ordered sequence (e.g. affiliate-commission-structure → affiliate-program-terms → affiliate-recruitment-outreach), list it in execution order, one line per link on what it hands to the next. Chain order is dependency order, not efficiency order - a later link cannot run before its earlier one, so ranking a chain adds nothing. Omit the chain when there isn't one - never fabricate a sequence.
5. Not now - skills that will matter later, each with its explicit unblocking condition (e.g. "affiliate-payout-audit - once the first commission run is queued for disbursement").
6. Gap - anything today's task needs that no skill covers, stated as a gap.

Ordering the short-list

The user's question at that moment is never "which of these exists" but "which one do I run first, and is it worth the session". Only a ratio answers that. Default class order, highest value/effort ratio first:

1. Economics and rate integrity - partner-economics, affiliate-commission-structure, referral-incentive-design. Buys the number every later commitment is priced off: what a partner, affiliate or referrer can be paid before the relationship stops paying for itself. Costs one session over margin data already in hand and commits nothing until published - while a rate published wrong is repriced across a whole signed base.
2. Money integrity - affiliate-payout-audit, affiliate-fraud-detection, referral-abuse-guardrails. Buys back commission already leaving on conversions that shouldn't earn it, and only inside the validation window. Costs one pass over an export finance produces anyway. Worth nothing before money moves.
3. **Rules and

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