Writes project stakeholder updates readable in under 60 seconds - honest RAG status, decisions made, explicit asks with owners and dates, next milestones - tiered to the audience. Use when someone asks "write my weekly project update", "how do I tell stakeholders we're at risk", "draft a status email for leadership", or "my updates get ignored, fix the format". Do NOT use for aggregating many teams' statuses into one engineering-wide report - use eng-status-rollup instead. For monthly investor letters with metrics and asks to VCs, use investor-update-writer; for customer-facing incident status, use status-page-update.
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name: Stakeholder Update
description: Writes project stakeholder updates readable in under 60 seconds - honest RAG status, decisions made, explicit asks with owners and dates, next milestones - tiered to the audience. Use when someone asks "write my weekly project update", "how do I tell stakeholders we're at risk", "draft a status email for leadership", or "my updates get ignored, fix the format". Do NOT use for aggregating many teams' statuses into one engineering-wide report - use eng-status-rollup instead. For monthly investor letters with metrics and asks to VCs, use investor-update-writer; for customer-facing incident status, use status-page-update.
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# Stakeholder Update
Stakeholders are busy and skim. A good update answers their questions before they ask them, in under 60 seconds of reading. The costly failure is the buried blocker: the ask that sat in paragraph four for three weeks, unread, until the project went red and the stakeholder's first question was "why am I hearing this now?"
## Inputs to collect
1. Audience tier (see below) - this decides length and vocabulary before anything else.
2. Honest status: on track, at risk, or off track - and the one thing driving that call.
3. Decisions made since the last update, with who made them.
4. Asks: what is needed, from whom, by when. If there are none, confirm that is really true.
5. Next 2-3 milestones with target dates.
6. Cadence and send time - same day, same time, every time.
## Audience tiering
One project, different updates. Write the core once, then tier it; sending the team-tier update to executives is how updates stop being read.
- **Executive tier** (sponsors, VPs): status line + one sentence of context + asks only. 60 seconds max, under 100 words. They act on exactly two things: the RAG signal and the asks. Cut decisions and milestones to links unless a decision needs their sign-off.
- **Peer tier** (adjacent leads, PMs, dependent teams): the full four-section format below, core under 150 words. They need decisions (which may affect them) and milestones (which they schedule against).
- **Team tier** (the working group): the four sections plus the Details block - metrics, links, technical context. This is the source document the other two tiers are cut from, never the other way around.… load the full skill through Skill Me