Why this skill exists
Every internal announcement needs the same four artifacts: an email for the chain of command, a Teams post for the floor, an FAQ for the worried, and a slide for the next all-hands. Writing them is half a day of saying one thing four ways — and the versions drift. The email says March 1, the FAQ says “early March,” and three weeks of “wait, which date is it?” threads follow. Inconsistency, not tone, is what makes an announcement land badly.
This skill fixes drift at the root: the brief becomes a numbered fact sheet, and every sentence in every artifact must trace to a numbered fact. One source of truth, four renderings, and an explicit consistency check before anything is delivered.
The second design choice matters just as much: the FAQ is forbidden from answering questions the brief doesn’t answer. LLMs are catastrophically good at writing plausible FAQ answers — “typically, affected employees will be notified within two weeks” — that nobody authorized and nobody can stand behind. Here, a gap gets the question written anyway and the answer “[NEEDS INPUT: what’s required from whom]”. That turns the FAQ draft into a checklist of decisions your leadership hasn’t made yet, which is frequently the most valuable artifact in the pack.
What it does, step by step
- Digests your brief into a numbered fact sheet — what, when, who, why, required action, contact — plus a gap list. You confirm before a word gets written.
- Produces all four artifacts from the confirmed facts: a 150-word exec email with a subject line that states the change; a 100-word Teams post with the action and date bolded; an 8–15 question FAQ that includes the uncomfortable questions (Does this affect my role? Why now?); a single slide with an assertion title and no images.
- Runs a consistency check — identical dates, identical terms, identical action across all four — and reports anything that appears in some artifacts but not others.
- Delivers everything as drafts: email in your Drafts folder, Teams post as a text file, FAQ as .docx, slide as .pptx, all in one OneDrive folder — with a consolidated [NEEDS INPUT] list and a suggested send order. You send. It never does.
Install (60 seconds)
- Download the SKILL.md above.
- In OneDrive, create the folder
/Documents/Cowork/skills/comms-pack/. - Drop SKILL.md inside — “Announcement Comms Pack” appears as a chip in Cowork’s side panel.
- Say: “Build the comms pack for [your brief].”
Make it yours (5 minutes, recommended)
- The artifact set — need a customer-facing variant or an intranet article instead of the slide? Edit Step 2. The fact-sheet discipline carries over to any artifact you add.
- The banned-words list — ours kills “excited to announce” and “journey”. Add your org’s own tells.
- The FAQ’s uncomfortable questions — seed it with the questions your last announcement actually got in the comments. That history is the best FAQ generator there is.
- Word budgets — 150 for the email is deliberate. Executives who want more context can read the FAQ; that’s what it’s for.
Failure modes we’ve already handled
| What goes wrong | How the skill handles it |
|---|---|
| The four artifacts disagree on the date | Mandatory consistency check against the numbered fact sheet before delivery |
| The FAQ invents plausible, unauthorized answers | Hard rule: answers only from the brief; gaps become [NEEDS INPUT] items |
| It posts to the channel before legal has seen the email | Nothing sends, posts, or shares — all four artifacts are drafts until you act |
| Bad news gets quietly sanded down | Facts may be flagged as awkward, never softened or omitted |
| The brief contradicts itself and Cowork picks a side | It stops and asks instead |
The bigger idea
A comms pack is really a test of whether the announcement is ready. If the fact sheet has gaps and the FAQ is full of [NEEDS INPUT], the problem isn’t the writing — the decision isn’t finished. This skill makes that visible in twenty minutes instead of discovering it in the comment thread. Drafting got cheap; deciding didn’t. Tools like this make sure nobody confuses the two.