| name | cto-consultation |
| description | Professional CTO consultation workflow for feature strategy, architecture direction, infrastructure choices, market positioning, and enterprise self-hosting tradeoffs. |
| type | workflow |
| enforcement | suggest |
| priority | high |
Purpose
Use this skill when the user wants strategic or architectural consultation rather than immediate implementation. It turns open-ended product, infrastructure, UX, market, compliance, or enterprise-readiness questions into a grounded recommendation with options, tradeoffs, risks, and a decision path.
When to Load
- Keywords: CTO, consult, architecture decision, product direction, enterprise, self-hosting, market, competition, best practice, legal, juridical, infrastructure decision.
- Feature questions where the user asks whether to build, defer, make optional, make required, expose in UI, or choose between alternatives.
- Examples: TickerQ dashboard optionality, organizer analytics dashboard, event discovery vs organization-centric UX, RabbitMQ/Cerbos/MinIO/provider choices, federation roadmap, extensibility packs.
- Any consulting answer that must balance small community deployments, enterprise deployments, white-label tenants, and the public ISLAMU-hosted instance.
- Use together with implementation skills if the consultation becomes a concrete code change.
When NOT to Load
- Not for narrow code fixes where the desired behavior is already specified.
- Not for pure PRDs where the user explicitly asks only for a requirements document; use ../prd/SKILL.md.
- Not for pure framework/API syntax questions where the answer is in official docs.
- Not for legal advice as a substitute for counsel; provide implementation conventions and risk framing only.
- Not for market or competitor claims unless current external evidence can be checked and dated.
Must-Read Docs
Top 5 Invariants
- The recommendation must preserve the platform promise: enterprise-grade, self-hostable, tenant-governed, and usable by both small communities and larger operators.
- Product advice must separate Instance, Tenant, Organization, Group, User, BFF, Client, and API authority instead of collapsing them into one admin or UI concept.
- Infrastructure advice must treat optional dependencies as explicit deployment-mode or tier choices with health, fallback, and operator documentation impacts.
- UX advice must keep HAL links as the source of truth for per-resource action affordances and keep the API as the hard authorization boundary.
- Extensibility advice must choose Layer 1 core fields, Layer 2 typed sector schema, or Layer 3 governed custom properties before proposing storage or UI shape.
Top 5 Anti-Patterns
- Enterprise-only default, which raises the operational floor and harms single-organization or community self-hosters.
- Local-role UX gating, which duplicates server authorization and breaks the HAL affordance contract.
- Runtime-schema sprawl, which turns Layer 3 custom properties into a hidden domain model and bypasses typed policy semantics.
- Dashboard-as-source-of-truth, which mistakes infrastructure internals such as scheduler dashboards for product/operator state.
- Undated market claims, which make competitive or legal recommendations stale and unverifiable.
Minimal Examples
Consultation output shape:
1. Decision needed
2. Current repo facts
3. Options
4. Recommendation
5. Enterprise/self-hosting impact
6. Implementation path
7. Verification and documentation impact
Example stance:
TickerQ should remain a default internal scheduler for Basic Dispatch Mode, while its dashboard stays optional, instance-admin-only, and never the source of truth for email delivery state.
Verification Hooks
dotnet test --project Event.Architecture.Tests/Event.Architecture.Tests.csproj --configuration Release --verbosity quiet --filter FullyQualifiedName~Event.Architecture.Tests.AgentContextSchemaTestsdotnet test --project Event.Architecture.Tests/Event.Architecture.Tests.csproj --configuration Release --verbosity quiet --filter FullyQualifiedName~Event.Architecture.Tests.AgentContextLinkTestsdotnet build --configuration Release --verbosity quiet
Related Skills
