strategic-build_skill

Overview

This skill helps teams distinguish strategic work from tactical busy-work using Shreyas Doshi’s LNO and Three Levels frameworks plus Marty Cagan’s empowered-team principles. It guides decision-making on what to build, when to abstract, and when to say no. Use it to prevent product theater, avoid feature-factory traps, and prioritize work that compounds over time.

How this skill works

The skill inspects proposed work through three lenses: LNO (Leverage, Neutral, Overhead) to classify impact; Three Levels (Impact, Execution, Optics) to ensure the "why" is clear before the "how"; and a pre-mortem to surface failure risks. It also checks team framing—feature vs problem—to promote empowered teams. Outputs are clear recommendations: prioritize, pause to define, redesign, or skip.

When to use it

• Deciding whether to build a new component or abstraction
• Choosing between quick fixes and long-term investments
• Evaluating feature requests from stakeholders
• Making architectural or cross-team decisions
• Preventing premature optimization or product theater

Best practices

• Aim for ~70% Leverage, 20% Neutral, 10% Overhead across work
• Always validate Level 1 (impact and success metric) before Level 2 (execution)
• Run a quick pre-mortem for major bets to identify top risks and mitigations
• Build shared abstractions only after ~3 real use cases to avoid premature refactoring
• Reframe feature requests into user problems and measure outcomes, not velocity

Example use cases

• Assess whether to refactor a UI component into a design system entry
• Decide if a proposed API endpoint merits full investment based on expected reuse
• Prioritize roadmap items by LNO classification and business outcome
• Run a pre-mortem before committing to an ML-driven feature to reveal data and latency risks
• Shift a feature team to an empowered-team approach by reframing roadmap goals as outcomes