Loading
Decides where capital and attention go across business lines, products, and markets — what to fund, hold, harvest, or exit, and on what evidence. Use this to allocate budget across businesses, evaluat
The skill file stays in the publisher's repository.
Paste the copied command in a terminal. It installs this SKILL.md into that agent.
npx skills add cbrock84/headcount --skill portfolio-strategy -a cursor -y
Decides where capital and attention go across business lines, products, and markets — what to fund, hold, harvest, or exit, and on what evidence. Use this to allocate budget across businesses, evaluate whether a product line should continue, decide whether to exit one, structure a portfolio review, or when several initiatives compete for the same limited investment.
Decides where capital and attention go across business lines, products, and markets — what to fund, hold, harvest, or exit, and on what evidence. Use this to allocate budget across businesses, evaluate whether a product line should continue, decide whether to exit one, structure a portfolio review, or when several initiatives compete for the same limited investment.
Most organizations fund by inertia. Last year's allocation plus a percentage, adjusted by who argued hardest. Portfolio strategy is the discipline of deciding again, deliberately.
Attractiveness — is this a good place to be? Market size and growth, structural profitability, concentration of buyer power, regulatory direction, and how the economics behave as it scales.
Right to win — is it good for us? Our position relative to alternatives, the assets or capabilities that transfer, and whether the advantage is durable or borrowed.
The combination gives you four postures, and the honest one is usually uncomfortable:
The question is never "is this business good." It is "what does the next dollar do here versus elsewhere." A large profitable line may be a poor place for incremental investment; a small one may be the best.
Watch for cross-subsidy. A weak line supported by a strong one is a decision, and it should be an explicit one with a thesis and an end date — not an accident nobody has looked at.
Sunk cost, internal advocates, and the discomfort of admitting a bet failed all argue for one more year. The test is prospective: knowing what we know now, would we start this today? If not, the only question is how to exit well.
Exiting frees more than the money. It frees the attention of the people running it, which is usually the scarcer resource.
Plan exits properly: customer commitments, employee treatment, and contractual obligations. A badly run exit costs more than the business was losing.
Same evidence for every line, prepared by a neutral party rather than by each line's advocate. Set the criteria and weights before seeing the numbers — weighting afterward reproduces the allocation you already had.
Force a ranking. Tiers are how everything stays funded.
references/sources.md in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions
here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before
answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free
to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.
Each line with its posture and evidence, the recommended allocation and what changed from last period, what you are stopping, and the indicator that would reverse each call.