eol-stakeholder-sequence

name	eol-stakeholder-sequence
argument-hint	[product being sunset, and who already knows]
description	Plan who to talk to about a sunset, in what order, and what each conversation must cover. Use when an EOL decision is made and you want the landmines found before the announcement.
intent	Plan the order and content of stakeholder conversations for an EOL decision. Encodes the hard-won lesson that EOL engagement has a specific sequence — legal exposure first, financial impact second, then revenue-facing teams, then customer-facing teams — and that getting the order wrong means discovering landmines after the announcement instead of before.
type	component
theme	eol-transition
best_for	["Sequencing EOL conversations so each one informs the next","Knowing what to ask for and what to commit to at every stop","Finding the objection that would have blown up six months after the announcement"]
scenarios	["We're retiring a product and I don't know who to talk to first or what to bring them","Last sunset blew up because Sales had promised things we didn't know about — sequence this one properly"]
estimated_time	20-35 min

EOL Stakeholder Sequence

Purpose

Plan the order of EOL conversations, and what each one must cover. The output is a sequenced list of stops — each with what you need from them, what you owe to them, the red flags to listen for, and what the conversation must produce.

EOL is not a broadcast. It is a series of conversations where each one informs the next, and each one surfaces something the last one missed. Sequenced well, the awkward discoveries happen in a conference room. Sequenced badly, they happen in public, after the announcement, in front of customers.

Input

Works best with: The product being sunset and who already knows about it.

Also useful: Scale (customers, revenue, contracts), whether channel partners or regulators are involved, and any political sensitivities, strained relationships, or past surprises worth planning around.

Anything supplied with the invocation itself — text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an appended ARGUMENTS: line — counts as answers already given. Use it and skip whatever it covers; don't re-ask.

Arriving empty-handed? That works too. The skill asks up to three questions — what's being sunset and who knows, how big the blast radius is, and whether there's history to plan around — then builds the sequence. Political sensitivities are optional; the sequence works without them and sharpens with them.

Example invocations:

• Sequence the stakeholder conversations for retiring our legacy reporting module.
• Who do I talk to, in what order, about sunsetting a hardware line with 8 resellers?

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Key Concepts

The Sequencing Principle

Talk to the people who can kill the plan before you talk to the people who have to execute it.

Each conversation should inform the next. Legal exposure first, because a contract term can end the discussion. Financial impact second, because it sizes everything downstream. Then revenue-facing teams, then customer-facing teams, then the technical teams who will carry it out.

Get this backwards — brief Support first, Legal last — and you will have told forty people about a plan that a single contract clause invalidates.

Right-Size the Sequence

Not all EOLs play out the same. Most land in the middle:

	Level 1 — Light	Level 2 — Standard	Level 3 — Heavy