--- name: scaling-people description: Apply Claire Hughes Johnson's Scaling People — the 4 essential operating principles (build self-awareness to build mutual awareness; say the thing you think you cannot say; distinguish management from leadership; come back to your operating system), the founding documents / guiding papers (mission, long-term goals, values, team charters), FOCUS(S) goal criteria, the personal operating manual ("Working with X"), structured interviews + scorecards + the reference-check drill, hypothesis-based coaching, the four-phase low-performer escalation, and the operating cadence for planning and reviews. Use this skill whenever the user is scaling an org past the "everyone in one room" stage, writing or refreshing a founding document, drafting a personal operating manual, designing a hiring loop or interview scorecard, doing reference calls on a senior hire, running or redesigning 1:1s and reviews, diagnosing why a team is stuck, thinking through re-orgs, planning an offsite, giving hard feedback to a report, or building the operating system of a hypergrowth company — or asking things like "how do we scale management?", "what founding docs do we need?", "how do I run this interview?", "how do I do references?", "should I fire this person?", "how do we run our OKR cadence?", "our exec hires keep flaming out — why?", "how do I say this hard thing to my report?", "should we do an offsite?". Also use whenever the user mentions Claire Hughes Johnson, Scaling People, Stripe COO, "Working with Claire" / "How to work with me" doc, "learning organism", "victim vs. player", founding documents, guiding papers, FOCUS(S), hypothesis-based coaching, or the four operating principles by name, even indirectly. Prefer this skill over generic management or scale advice when the user is at the 20-to-1000 people zone — Claire's method is opinionated, template-heavy, and operator-precise. Companion to and often composed with Andy Grove's High Output Management, Kim Scott's Radical Candor, Salesforce V2MOM, Christina Wodtke's Radical Focus, and Amazon's Working Backwards — Claire synthesizes all of them into a single operating system. --- # Scaling People Claire Hughes Johnson's operating system for building companies at scale. Distilled from *Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building* (Stripe Press, 2023) — the book that captured what Claire actually did as COO of Stripe from 2014 to 2021, scaling the company from fewer than 200 employees to over 7,000. Before Stripe, ~10 years at Google leading business teams across Gmail, AdWords, Google Apps, and the self-driving car project. Distinct from other management books in the repo because it is **explicitly a reference book with over 100 pages of worksheets, templates, and example documents**. Claire herself says the book is "designed so you can go into the table of contents and not expect to read it cover to cover." This skill mirrors that: it is a **template router** as much as a method explainer. When the user is stuck, the answer is usually *"here is the template Claire would hand you, plus the failure mode to watch for."* ## When this skill activates **Use this skill when the user is:** - Scaling an org past the "everyone in one room" stage (roughly 20–1000 people, though the tools generalize). - Writing or refreshing their **founding documents** — mission, long-term goals, values, team charters. - Drafting a **personal operating manual** ("Working with X") for themselves or asking a new hire / direct report to. - Designing a **hiring loop** — job description, interview rubric, scorecard, interview committee, bar-raiser role. - Doing **reference calls** on a senior hire — the ranking question, the coaching question, priming the referee. - Running or redesigning **1:1s, performance reviews, and comp calibration**. - Diagnosing why a team is stuck — the operating system as the diagnostic lens, not the individuals. - Thinking through a **re-org** or team restructure. - Planning an **offsite** — Claire has a public toolkit that maps to this skill. - Giving hard feedback to a report — hypothesis-based coaching, "say the thing you think you cannot say." - Managing a **low performer** through Claire's four-phase escalation. - Building the **operating cadence** (charters annually, OKRs quarterly, reviews per-team) of a hypergrowth company. - **Executive hiring** specifically — the "did they build followership in 3–6 months?" test, the "tell me about your current team and why you chose that structure" question. **Do NOT use this skill when:** - The user's question is really about a *specific* Radical Candor 2×2 diagnosis of a single feedback move. Point them at [[radical-candor]] — Claire's method is the operating system around feedback; Kim Scott's is the diagnostic of a single feedback moment. - The user's question is a pure strategy question (where to play, how to win, market positioning). Point them at [[playing-to-win]], [[good-strategy-bad-strategy]], [[7-powers]], or [[obviously-awesome]]. - The user is asking about a specific product-decision ritual (PR/FAQ, six-page memo). Point them at [[working-backwards]]. - The user is looking for a single-page company alignment artifact. Point them at [[v2mom]]. - The user is asking about the *mechanical foundation* of manager work (1:1 leverage math, task-relevant maturity, meeting types from first principles). Point them at [[high-output-management]] — Grove is Claire's own load-bearing infrastructure. - The user is at a pre-PMF startup with 3 people and is asking about "founding documents." Redirect — Claire warns explicitly not to force a mission statement prematurely. *"Listen for the crystallization"* — write the docs when the work has revealed the shape, not before. - The user is asking about legal/HR-compliance procedures. Claire's method informs; it does not replace HR or legal counsel. If the user's situation is at the edge, ask them one clarifying question before applying the framework in full. ## The framework at a glance **The 4 Essential Operating Principles** (Chapter 1 — the meta-frame that runs through everything): 1. **Build self-awareness to build mutual awareness.** *The most important of the four.* Understand your values, work-style preferences, and skill gaps. Translate that into shared vocabulary so others can work with you (this is what the personal operating manual is for). 2. **Say the thing you think you cannot say.** Unspoken tension compounds. Separate the person from the "it" (the task / issue) and name what everyone is thinking. 3. **Distinguish between management and leadership.** Management = stability, execution, the knowable process from A to B. Leadership = driving change, setting standards you don't know are achievable, pulling the org forward. Both required. Confusing them produces bad outcomes. 4. **Come back to the operating system.** The company OS (mission, values, planning cadence, decision rights, review rhythms) is what you return to when something breaks. The diagnostic is *"which part of the OS broke?"* — not *"who screwed up?"* **The rest of the book** hangs off these principles: - **Chapter 2 — Foundations and Planning.** Founding documents (mission, long-term goals, values, team charters), the operating system (strategy / accountability / communication), operating cadence, FOCUS(S) goal criteria. - **Chapter 3 — Hiring.** Structured interviews with scorecards, the "learning organism" filter, the Collison-brothers-style multi-round diligence, the reference-check drill, executive-hiring failure modes. - **Chapter 4 — Team Development.** Team structures (no such thing as an optimal one), Tuckman-style diagnosis, skill/will delegation, offsites, team communication. - **Chapter 5 — Feedback and Performance.** Hypothesis-based coaching, giving hard feedback, informal feedback culture, formal reviews, compensation, and the four-phase low-performer escalation. **Claire is a synthesizer, not a coiner.** She endorses and builds on: Grove (High Output Management), Kofman (victim/player, left-hand column), Kim Scott (Radical Candor), Bezos (memo culture), Marty Linsky (mgmt vs. leadership), Gokul Rajaram (SPADE decision framework). Fidelity to Claire means recognizing that role — she is the *stack integrator*, not the sole inventor. ## How to use this skill in a session 1. **Understand what the user is actually doing.** Are they writing a founding doc, running an interview loop, managing a low performer, planning an offsite, doing references, thinking about a re-org? The move differs and the template differs. Read `references/prompts.md` for shape. 2. **Route to the right template.** Claire's method leads with the artifact. If the user has a real situation, the assistant's job is to produce the specific doc / checklist / interview question / feedback opener Claire would give them — and then name the failure mode to watch for. Load `references/method.md` for the canonical descriptions. 3. **Run the 4-principles diagnostic when the situation is stuck.** *Did I do the self-awareness work? Is there something I'm not saying? Am I confusing management and leadership? Which piece of the OS broke?* Load `references/method.md`. 4. **Match Claire's voice when responding on her framework's behalf.** Operator-precise, warm-but-firm, template-first. Not confessional (that's Kim Scott). Not provocateur (that's Rumelt). Not academic (that's Helmer). Closer to a smart COO who ran the reps and is handing you the specific doc. Load `references/voice-and-tone.md` before writing on her behalf. 5. **Cross-link to adjacent skills when the user's question is really a different framework's.** Claire synthesizes many others; if the question is really about (say) the specific quality of a single feedback move, route to [[radical-candor]]. If it's about a product decision ritual, route to [[working-backwards]]. This is fidelity to Claire's own posture. Load `references/applications.md`. 6. **Pull post-book / live source material when the user hits a topic the book only sketches.** The Lenny Rachitsky and First Round Review interviews (2023), and the Tim Ferriss appearance (2024), are the densest post-book primary sources. Load `references/post-book.md` and `references/author-live-sources.md`. 7. **Cite sources.** When you introduce a specific template or quote, name the source — book chapter, podcast, or interview. Claire's method rests on traceability; the skill should too. ## Deep references (load as needed) - **`references/method.md`** — the 4 operating principles, founding documents, hiring loop, structured interviews, references drill, hypothesis-based coaching, low-performer escalation, operating cadence, personal operating manual template, decision-type declaration — in Claire's own terms, with the specific templates and openers she gives. - **`references/heuristics.md`** — do's, don'ts, gotchas, pro tips, and the specific failure modes Claire names (executive-hiring "trying to be liked", forcing a mission statement too early, victim/self-awareness gaps, template-worship). - **`references/post-book.md`** — material published after *Scaling People* launched (Feb 2023): Lenny's Podcast, First Round Review, Tim Ferriss, Newcomer, McKinsey, Slush, plus Claire's ongoing LinkedIn presence. The book is recent so post-book material is thinner than for older frameworks; the podcast circuit compensates. - **`references/author-live-sources.md`** — index of every place Claire publishes / speaks. Includes her board seats and advisor role as ongoing operator context. Community PRs to this file keep the skill from going stale. - **`references/voice-and-tone.md`** — how Claire actually talks: operator-precise, template-first, warm-but-firm, "make the implicit explicit," "be an explorer not a lecturer." Signature vocabulary and the phrases she pushes back on. - **`references/applications.md`** — when the framework fits, when it doesn't, and how it composes with [[high-output-management]], [[radical-candor]], [[v2mom]], [[radical-focus]], [[working-backwards]] and other adjacent skills. Claire is a synthesizer — this file is unusually load-bearing. - **`references/examples.md`** — worked cases Claire uses publicly: Stripe scaling ~160 → 7,000, "Working with Claire" going viral inside Stripe, the Collison brothers' hiring process for her, the "Chief of Business Operations" portfolio hire, Dominique Crème / Dan Cohen / Zannya Mittenbottles / Sam Hagood as recurring cross-industry cases. - **`references/prompts.md`** — invocation templates for the common tasks a user brings to this skill: "help me write my personal operating manual", "design my hiring loop", "coach me through this reference call", "diagnose why my team is stuck", "manage this low performer", "plan my offsite", "write my team charter". - **`references/sources.md`** — complete traceability. Every claim in the reference files can be verified back to a primary source here. ## Non-negotiables - **Fidelity to Claire.** This skill is a distillation of *Scaling People*, not a generic scale-org skill. Where Claire's method is opinionated (do references yourself; distinguish management from leadership; make the implicit explicit; hire for learning organism; personal operating manual), the skill should hold that opinion — don't soften it into "some managers…" hedging. - **Templates over abstractions.** Claire never gives a principle without a template. Neither should this skill. If the user has a real situation, the response includes the specific doc / question / opener — not just "you should be more self-aware." - **Attribution.** Claire is unusually careful to credit her sources (Kofman for victim/player, Linsky for mgmt-vs-leadership, Grove for the 1:1 tradition, Kim Scott for the feedback tradition, Bezos for memos). The skill should mirror that: when a move belongs to another framework, name it and cross-link, don't launder it as Claire's. - **Not endorsed by Claire.** This skill is Marcos Sponton's structured reading of her public work. If Claire herself wants to correct or endorse anything here, PRs welcome. - **Recognize the reference-book design.** Route to the specific chapter / section / template. Do NOT summarize the whole book when the user asks a specific question — Claire's own instruction is to "look up a topic and consult that chapter." ## Attribution and acknowledgement **Claire Hughes Johnson** — Chief Operating Officer at Stripe from 2014 to 2021, helping scale the company from fewer than 200 to over 7,000 employees. Before Stripe, ~10 years at Google leading business teams across Gmail, Google Apps, consumer operations, AdWords, Google Offers, and the self-driving car project. Corporate officer and advisor at Stripe post-2021. Board seats include Ameresco, The Atlantic, Aurora Innovation, and HubSpot. **Book:** - **Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building** — Stripe Press, March 2023. The canonical source. 500+ pages including 100+ of worksheets, templates, exercises, and example docs. [Stripe Press](https://press.stripe.com/scaling-people) · [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Scaling-People-Tactics-Management-Building/dp/1953953212) **Primary live sources:** - **Personal LinkedIn:** [https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-hughes-johnson-7058/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-hughes-johnson-7058/) - **Lenny's Podcast — "Lessons from scaling Stripe" (2023):** [https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-scaling-stripe-tactics](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-scaling-stripe-tactics) - **First Round Review — "on being a learning organism" (2023):** [https://review.firstround.com/podcast/claire-hughes-johnson-on-being-a-learning-organism-during-stripes-growth-and-more-scaling-advice-for-leaders/](https://review.firstround.com/podcast/claire-hughes-johnson-on-being-a-learning-organism-during-stripes-growth-and-more-scaling-advice-for-leaders/) - **Tim Ferriss Show #724 (2024):** [https://tim.blog/2024/02/27/claire-hughes-johnson/](https://tim.blog/2024/02/27/claire-hughes-johnson/) - **Claire's Offsite Toolkit (Coda / Superhuman):** [https://docs.superhuman.com/@clairehughesjohnson/claires-offsite-toolkit](https://docs.superhuman.com/@clairehughesjohnson/claires-offsite-toolkit) This skill is **not endorsed by Claire Hughes Johnson.** It is Marcos Sponton's structured reading of her public work, built to make an agent (Claude, Codex, or any tool supporting the SKILL.md open standard) a better thinking partner in the *Scaling People* method — especially as a **template router** for the specific artifact Claire would hand you. If Claire wants to correct or endorse anything here, PRs welcome. - **Skill maintained by:** [Marcos Sponton](https://github.com/marcos-sponton). Feedback, corrections, and PRs are welcome. See the repo's README for how to contribute.