office-hours
by alirezarezvanioffice-hours runs /cs:office-hours <topic> as a YC-style six-question founder interrogation before advice. Use it to clarify problem, customer, distribution, defensibility, capital, and founder fit before Strategic Planning, pivots, fundraising, or major product bets.
This skill scores 70/100, which means it is acceptable for directory listing as a focused founder-clarification workflow. Directory users should see it as a lightweight YC-style questioning skill that can help an agent avoid premature advice, but not as a fully supported strategy system with examples, templates, or external resources.
- Clear trigger and command syntax: `/cs:office-hours <topic>` is explicitly defined and tied to vague founder strategy questions or pre-brief clarification.
- Operationally simple workflow: it requires founders to answer six named areas before any advice, reducing premature generic recommendations.
- Useful fit guidance: the “When to Run” section lists concrete situations such as fundraising, pivots, major initiatives, and overconfident assumptions.
- No support files, examples, references, or install instructions are present, so users only have SKILL.md to judge and adopt it.
- The workflow appears limited to eliciting the six founder answers; repository evidence does not show much practical follow-through guidance for turning responses into decisions or outputs.
Overview of office-hours skill
What office-hours does
The office-hours skill is a founder strategy pressure-test for Claude-style skill environments. It runs a YC-inspired six-question interrogation before giving advice, forcing the user to clarify the problem, customer, distribution, defensibility, capital needs, and founder fit. Its main value is not generating a polished strategy answer immediately; it prevents premature strategy work when the underlying founder thinking is still vague.
Best fit for founders and strategic operators
Use the office-hours skill when a question sounds important but under-specified: “Should we pivot?”, “Should we raise now?”, “Can we grow faster?”, or “Is this new product worth building?” It is especially useful for founders, chiefs of staff, strategy leads, startup advisors, and C-level agents that need a repeatable intake step before Strategic Planning. The skill is lightweight: the repository path contains a single SKILL.md, so adoption depends on whether you want this exact interrogation workflow rather than a large toolkit.
What makes it different from a generic prompt
A normal prompt often lets the assistant jump into analysis too early. office-hours explicitly blocks advice until all six founder questions are answered in writing. That constraint is the differentiator: it turns the assistant into a forcing function, not a brainstorm partner. This is useful when the cost of a confident but shallow answer is high, such as fundraising timing, ICP changes, channel strategy, or major product bets.
When office-hours is the wrong tool
Do not install office-hours if you mainly need market research, financial modeling, legal review, customer interview synthesis, or a final board-ready memo. It is an upstream diagnostic skill. It helps decide whether a strategic topic is ready for deeper work; it does not replace the deeper work itself.
How to Use office-hours skill
office-hours install and files to inspect first
For a skills-based Claude setup, install from the repository source if your environment supports GitHub skill installation:
npx skills add alirezarezvani/claude-skills --skill office-hours
Then inspect the source file directly:
c-level-advisor/c-level-agents/skills/office-hours/SKILL.md
There are no visible helper scripts, references, resources, or README files in the skill folder, so SKILL.md is the operational source of truth. Before installing, read the command description and the six-question sequence to confirm it matches your advisory style.
How to call the skill in practice
The intended command shape is:
/cs:office-hours <topic>
Good topics are specific enough to interrogate but not already over-decided. For example:
/cs:office-hours Should we move upmarket from SMB to mid-market?/cs:office-hours Should we raise a seed extension before proving retention?/cs:office-hours Should we build an AI copilot for our existing workflow product?
Avoid vague topics such as /cs:office-hours growth or /cs:office-hours strategy. The skill can still ask clarifying questions, but the output is better when the initial topic names the decision, tradeoff, and business context.
Strong inputs for better office-hours usage
Before invoking office-hours, gather enough raw material to answer the six questions without inventing facts. Strong input includes customer quotes, one named ICP example, current acquisition channel, known competitors or substitutes, runway and capital constraints, and why this founder or team is suited to win.
A weak prompt says:
/cs:office-hours Should we launch a new product?
A stronger prompt says:
/cs:office-hours Should we launch a compliance automation product for Series B fintech companies? We have 12 customer calls, three buyers asked for audit evidence workflows, current sales are founder-led, runway is 10 months, and the team has prior compliance engineering experience.
This gives the skill enough context to pressure-test assumptions instead of spending the session defining the obvious.
Suggested workflow for Strategic Planning
Use office-hours before drafting a strategy brief, roadmap, fundraising narrative, or pivot memo. First, run the six-question interrogation. Second, answer each question in writing without asking for recommendations. Third, ask the assistant to identify weak answers, missing evidence, and assumptions. Only after that should you move into Strategic Planning outputs such as options, risks, milestones, or a decision memo. This preserves the skill’s core rule: clarity before advice.
office-hours skill FAQ
Is office-hours suitable for beginners?
Yes, if the beginner is willing to answer hard questions concretely. The office-hours skill does not require technical setup beyond a compatible skill installation workflow, but it does require disciplined thinking. Beginners may find it uncomfortable because it rejects vague founder claims like “everyone needs this” or “marketing comes later.”
How is office-hours different from asking Claude for startup advice?
Startup advice prompts often produce frameworks, suggestions, and encouraging next steps. office-hours is narrower and stricter. It asks for evidence before analysis, especially around customer reality and distribution. That makes it better for decision hygiene and worse for open-ended ideation.
Can office-hours be used outside startups?
Yes, but with adaptation. The six questions map best to startup decisions, yet they can help internal product teams, innovation groups, and strategic planning teams test whether an initiative has a real user, path to adoption, defensible edge, resourcing logic, and team fit. It is less useful for mature operational decisions where the customer, budget, and channel are already known.
What should I check before installing office-hours?
Check whether your agent environment supports slash-command-style skills and whether you want a single-purpose founder interrogation workflow. The repository evidence indicates a focused SKILL.md without extra scripts or reference assets. That is a benefit if you want simplicity, but a limitation if you expect templates, scoring rubrics, or automated research support.
How to Improve office-hours skill
Make office-hours answers evidence-based
The biggest improvement is to require evidence inside each answer. For the problem question, include customer language, not internal positioning. For the customer question, name a real buyer or user. For distribution, specify the first believable path to awareness, such as a search query, referral loop, sales motion, community, integration marketplace, or conference. Evidence turns office-hours from a discussion prompt into a decision filter.
Watch for common failure modes
The most common failure is answering with abstractions: “developers,” “enterprises,” “AI workflow,” “viral growth,” or “better UX.” Another failure is treating defensibility as a future feature list instead of explaining why a competitor cannot easily copy the advantage. A third is skipping capital reality: runway, hiring needs, sales cycle, and proof milestones often determine whether a strategy is feasible.
Iterate after the first interrogation
After the first office-hours run, do not immediately ask for the final recommendation. Ask for the weakest two answers, the riskiest assumption, and the missing customer proof. Then revise the six answers and run the topic again. This second pass is where the skill becomes valuable for Strategic Planning because the inputs are sharper and less founder-biased.
Extend office-hours without diluting it
If you customize the office-hours skill, preserve the “no advice before answers” rule. Useful extensions include a scoring rubric for each of the six questions, a red/yellow/green readiness summary, or a handoff prompt that turns validated answers into a strategy memo. Avoid adding broad startup coaching content directly into the interrogation step; that weakens the constraint that makes office-hours useful.