COO Advisor
Ongoing operations advice: find the real bottleneck, plan capacity from your own volumes, cut approval chains, and pilot process fixes.
Before & after
Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.
Operational cadence is critical for team execution. You'd want to establish regular planning cycles, probably quarterly for big goals and monthly for detailed work. Weekly check-ins help teams stay aligned. You'd include retrospectives to learn from what worked and what didn't. OKRs are a popular framework for setting quarterly goals. You'd also need processes for handling blockers and escalations. Communication channels should be clear. What's your team structure like?
QUARTERLY CADENCE: PLANNING CYCLE QUARTER KICKOFF (Day 1) Executive overview: Strategic priorities for Q, 30 min all-hands Department strategy alignment: Teams draft OKRs, 60 min per team Output: Draft Q OKRs (3-5 per team), posted by EOD WEEK 1: OKR FINALIZATION Cross-functional dependency mapping, catch conflicts Leadership review: Approve, iterate, finalize by Friday EOD All-hands confirmation: Teams confirm commitments WEEK 2-12: EXECUTION Weekly standups: Mondays 9am, 15 min per team Biweekly cross-functional sync: Wednesdays 2pm, resolve blockers Retro sprints: Every 2 weeks, document learnings WEEK 13: RETROSPECTIVE Full team retro: Thursday 10am, 90 min, assess OKR outcomes Debrief: What helped execution? What blocked progress? Lessons captured for next quarter planning CONTINUOUS CADENCE Monthly all-hands: First Friday of month, broader updates Monthly budget review: Finance + department leads, planning guardrails Incident response: On-call rotation for escalations OKR STRUCTURE EXAMPLE Key Result 1: Reduce onboarding time to under 2 days (from 5) Owner: People Ops Milestones: Week 3 (playbook draft), Week 7 (first test cohort), Week 11 (full rollout) Key Result 2: Launch API v2 with 80% adoption Owner: Engineering Milestones: Week 5 (docs ready), Week 9 (GA), Week 13 (migration complete)
About this skill
When everything slows down as you grow, the answer is rarely 'hire more people everywhere'. This advisor finds where work actually waits, sizes teams from your real volumes, and recommends the cheapest fix at the constraint first.
What it does
- Maps the process and measures where work waits, not how busy people look
- Finds the constraint using queue size, wait vs touch time, and utilization
- Fixes in order of cost: delegate approvals, fix inputs, limit work in progress, standardize, automate, then hire
- Builds capacity models from your own volumes and handle times, with ranges and hiring lead time
- Pilots process changes on one team with before and after measures
What you get
A quick answer for single questions, or a bottleneck diagnosis: flow, constraint with evidence, root cause, the one fix to make first, and how to measure it.
Best for
COOs, heads of operations, and founders at 20-500 person companies whose processes break every time headcount doubles.
SKILL.md preview
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name: coo-advisor
description: Ongoing COO-level operations advice for a scaling company - finding the real bottleneck in a process, capacity planning for teams and queues, handoffs and approval chains that slow work, operational metrics (throughput, lead time, backlog, SLA), scaling playbooks, and piloting process changes before rolling them out. Use when the user asks "why is everything taking longer as we grow?", "how many people do we need in support/ops/onboarding?", "where is the bottleneck?", "our process breaks every time we double", "we need to fix onboarding time", or "what should ops own?".
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# COO Advisor
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