All-Hands Deck Builder

---
name: all-hands-deck-builder
description: Use when building an internal all-hands or company-wide update deck. Triggers on "all-hands deck", "town hall deck", "company update deck", "internal all-hands".
---

# All-Hands Deck Builder

The default all-hands is corporate theater: leadership shares a polished view, employees nod, the real conversation happens in Slack DMs afterward. A good all-hands deck inverts this — leadership is honest, employees ask hard questions, and the real conversation happens IN the room.

## Required inputs

1. **Audience size + format** — fully remote / hybrid / in-person, how many people
2. **Time budget** — total minutes, including Q&A (Q&A should be 25-30%)
3. **Wins worth highlighting** (3-5 specific, named teams)
4. **Metrics update** — including the ones that aren't great
5. **Focus areas** for the next quarter (max 3)
6. **What's on people's minds** — rumors, recent changes, anxieties to address
7. **Asks of the team** — what leadership needs from them this quarter

If the user only has wins and no honest acknowledgment of the hard stuff, push back: "Employees know what's happening. Pretending they don't is what destroys trust."

## Slide-by-slide structure (12-18 slides)

- **Slide 1 — Title**: Quarter / month, date. Skip the inspirational quote.
- **Slide 2 — Agenda**: 4-5 sections, time budget per section. Q&A explicitly on it.
- **Slide 3 — What's on people's minds**: Address the 1-2 elephant-in-the-room things UP FRONT. Don't wait for Q&A.
- **Slide 4 — How we did this period**: KPIs honestly. Don't lead with vanity.
- **Slide 5-6 — Wins**: 3-5 specific wins. Name the people / teams responsible. Specific impact.
- **Slide 7 — What didn't work**: 1-2 honest misses with cause analysis. No "challenges" euphemism.
- **Slide 8 — Customer / user moment**: One specific story. A user, a customer, a moment that shows why the work matters.
- **Slide 9-10 — Strategy / focus for next period**: 3 priorities, max. Each one with a "why this, why now."
- **Slide 11 — What we need from you**: Specific. "We need engineering to ship X by Y" / "We need GTM to focus on Z segment."
- **Slide 12 — Hiring / team updates**: New hires welcomed by name. Departures acknowledged honestly (without violating privacy).
- **Slide 13 — People moments**: Promotions, work anniversaries, kudos. Brief.
- **Slide 14 — Q&A**: Open the floor. Pre-collected questions if you have them. Live mic too.
- **Slide 15 — Closing**: One sentence. Not a pep talk. What's the one thing you want them to remember?

## Narrative principles

- **Address the hard stuff on slide 3, not in the Q&A.** If you make people ask, they will — but they'll lose trust in the meantime.
- **Specifics over slogans.** "We hit $X" beats "we're crushing it." "We missed by 12% because of Y" beats "headwinds."
- **Name people.** Wins have owners. Mention them.
- **Q&A is real.** If the questions are pre-screened to softballs, employees know — and the meeting is dead.

## Anti-patterns (strip these)

- "We're a family" / "we're crushing it" / "amazing quarter" — performative
- Hiding misses in slide 22 of 28 — employees notice the structure
- 30 slides for a 30-min meeting — you're not getting through them
- Q&A as a 5-minute afterthought — that's a presentation, not an all-hands
- Inspirational quote on slide 1 — every employee groans

## Output

1. The slide-by-slide outline as markdown
2. A python-pptx script generating the .pptx in 16:9 with the company's color and a presentation-friendly template
3. A "speaker notes" section for the slides where tone matters most (slide 3, slide 7, the closing)
4. A pre-collected Q&A section template the comms team can fill in before the meeting

CEO and comms lead refine the deck in Google Slides or PowerPoint. python-pptx output is the structured starting point.