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VP Engineering Advisor

Diagnoses delivery throughput, hiring funnel leaks, team structure, and on-call discipline for startups.

Source Download skill
Repository
alirezarezvani/claude-skills
Stars
29,149
Licence
MIT
Files
8 files

What it does

This skill gives the agent a structured playbook for the operational side of running an engineering team: measuring how fast code ships (DORA metrics and bottlenecks), finding where engineering hiring leaks candidates, recommending squad or tech-lead structures, and reviewing on-call and postmortem practices. Three included Python scripts do the arithmetic on numbers you supply, such as sprint metrics or funnel counts, and return a verdict. The skill is aimed at startup VPs of Engineering and founders without one, and it explicitly defers architecture decisions to a CTO-style role.

Great for

  • Startup founders or engineering managers whose sprint velocity or release frequency is slipping
  • Leaders who want a quick DORA-style read on deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR and change failure rate
  • Recruiting leads who want to see which stage of the hiring funnel loses the most candidates

Skip it if

  • Architecture or technology-choice decisions, which the skill says belong to a CTO role, not this one (wrong advice would be the cost)
  • Real incident response during a live outage; it is reference material, not an on-call tool
  • Individual performance evaluation or firing decisions, where a generic funnel or DORA heuristic could be unfair to a specific person

Try asking

  • “Our deploys dropped from weekly to monthly, here are our sprint metrics. Where is the bottleneck?”
  • “Our hiring funnel gave 480 applicants and 3 accepted offers this quarter. Which stage is leakiest?”
  • “We have 25 engineers, 3 EMs and no director. Should we add a tech-lead manager or restructure into squads?”
Step-by-step guide: how to use VP Engineering AdvisorInstall, first run, examples, tips and FAQs

Install in 3 steps

  1. 1

    Download the skill

    The ZIP contains the 8 original files, the MIT licence and an attribution note.

    vpe-advisor.zip
  2. 2

    Add it to your agent

    Claude Code (all projects)

    mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip vpe-advisor.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/

    Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)

    mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip vpe-advisor.zip -d .claude/skills/

    Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.

  3. 3

    Ask for the task

    No special command needed — the agent reads the skill's description and loads it when your request matches. Try one of the prompts above.

Get better results

  • Feed the scripts real numbers from your tracker or ATS rather than relying on the embedded samples, and state the period covered.
  • Treat the outputs as heuristics; the thresholds are generic benchmarks, so check them against your own context before acting.
  • Ask for the reasoning behind each recommendation so you can challenge the bottleneck or structure call with your team.

What's inside

  • references/delivery_throughput.md
  • references/eng_team_structure.md
  • references/engineering_hiring_funnel.md
  • references/production_discipline.md
  • scripts/delivery_throughput_analyzer.py
  • scripts/eng_hiring_funnel_calculator.py
  • scripts/eng_team_structure_designer.py
  • SKILL.md

Redistributed unmodified from alirezarezvani/claude-skills under the MIT licence. The assessment was drafted with AI from the skill's files on 2026-10-29. Skills can instruct your agent to run code — read SKILL.md and any scripts before installing.