All-Hands Writer

---
name: all-hands-writer
description: Use when writing an all-hands script or deck outline. Triggers on "all-hands", "company meeting", "town hall", "team update meeting".
---

# All-Hands Writer

The default all-hands fails because it's a corporate update wrapped in forced positivity. Employees can tell. The good ones treat the team as adults — share the real KPIs, name what's not working, and connect work to outcome.

## Required inputs

1. **Frequency** — weekly / monthly / quarterly (changes depth)
2. **Last period's plan** — what did you say you'd do?
3. **What actually happened** — wins, misses, surprises
4. **KPIs** — revenue, retention, key product metric, hiring
5. **Focus areas** for the next period — 2-3 max
6. **The 1 thing you want the team to walk out remembering**

If "the 1 thing" is missing, push back. An all-hands without a takeaway is just a meeting.

## Structure (30-45 min meeting)

### 1. Opening (3 min)
- Open with the headline — good or bad. No "thanks for joining everyone, I see lots of new faces."
- 1-2 sentence frame for the meeting: "Here's what we're covering, here's what I want you to walk out with."

### 2. KPIs (5-10 min)
- Show the same metrics every time. Consistency builds trust.
- Lead with the headline metric, in context: "ARR is $1.2M, up 22% QoQ. Plan was $1.4M. Here's why we missed."
- For misses: own them, don't blame
- For wins: be specific about what drove them, not generic

### 3. What we said we'd do vs what we did (5 min)
This is the section most all-hands skip. It builds CEO credibility over time.
- 3-5 commitments from last period
- For each: did we hit it? Why or why not?

### 4. Highlights (5 min)
- 2-3 wins, with the people behind them
- Call out specific contributors by name — this is high-leverage
- Customer wins: name the customer if you can

### 5. Lowlights (3 min)
- 1-2 things not working
- Honest, with what you're doing about it
- Doesn't have to be doom — but pretending everything is fine kills credibility

### 6. Focus for next period (5-10 min)
- 2-3 priorities, no more
- For each: what does success look like, who's leading
- Connect to company-level outcomes (revenue, retention, market)

### 7. Asks of the team (3 min)
- Specific. "Help us close 3 enterprise pilots — refer your network" beats "everyone hustle"
- Hiring asks: who we're looking for, refer

### 8. Q&A (10 min)
- Take live questions
- If you don't know, say so
- Take "anonymous" questions seriously — those are the ones the room is actually thinking

## Anti-patterns

- "Team, we're crushing it" — empty
- Reading bullets off slides verbatim — the meeting becomes a podcast at 1.5x
- Burying lowlights — team finds out anyway, trust erodes
- 60-slide deck — kills attention; 10-15 slides max
- Calling out leadership by title repeatedly — comes across as performative
- "Thanks to everyone for their hard work" — meaningless filler; thank specific people for specific things

## Tone calibration

### Strong quarter
- Lead with the win, then the work that made it
- Don't oversell — team will model your calibration
- Spend more time on what's next than what just happened

### Mixed quarter
- Lead with the headline metric in context
- Be honest about what missed and why
- Don't manufacture wins to soften the misses

### Tough quarter (layoffs, miss, public setback)
- Acknowledge the situation directly in the first 60 seconds
- Don't perform empathy — be specific about what's hard and what's being done
- Reaffirm the strategy or change it explicitly — don't drift

## Output format

Provide:
1. **Speaker script** — what the founder actually says, paragraph form
2. **Slide outline** (if requested) — 10-15 slides max, bullet titles only
3. **Q&A prep** — top 5 questions employees will ask + how to answer them

End with the bolded "1 thing I want you to walk out with" sentence — that's the line worth rehearsing.