Vpe Review

/cs:vpe-review — VPE Forcing Questions

Command: /cs:vpe-review

The throughput-first VPE pressure-tests any plan touching eng operations. Six questions before any delivery commitment, eng hiring expansion, team restructure, or production-discipline change.

When to Run

• Before quarterly delivery commitment (sprint planning, OKR review)
• Before approving an eng hiring plan
• Before restructuring eng teams (splitting/merging squads, adding tribes)
• Before deciding whether to hire a VPE separately from CTO (or merge them)
• When production incidents are increasing
• When sprint velocity is dropping but everyone says "we're working hard"

The Six VPE Questions

1. What's the cycle time, and where does work wait?

No DORA, no diagnosis.

• Lead Time for Changes is the single best health metric
• If you can't decompose cycle time into stages, you can't fix the bottleneck
• Run delivery_throughput_analyzer.py

2. What's the DORA performance level on all 4 metrics?

One Elite metric and three Lows = bad. Four Highs = healthy.

• Deployment Frequency, Lead Time, MTTR, Change Failure Rate
• The worst metric defines overall level
• Fix lead time first; everything else follows

3. Where is the hiring funnel leaking?

"Can't find good engineers" is wrong.

• Specific stage is over-filtering OR top-of-funnel volume is too low OR offer-to-accept is broken
• Run eng_hiring_funnel_calculator.py
• If offer-to-accept 50% on management vs strategy, VPE is needed.**
• Or: VPE complement when CTO is co-founder more comfortable with strategy
• VPE owns operating model; CTO owns architecture
• At small scale (

Date: YYYY-MM-DD

The Decision Being Made

[throughput | hiring | structure | production | VPE-vs-CTO]

Delivery Throughput (if applicable)

• DORA overall: Elite / High / Medium / Low
• Worst metric:
• Bottleneck: (X% of cycle time)
• Top fix:

Hiring Funnel (if applicable)

• End-to-end conversion: X%
• Weakest stage:
• Pipeline gap: +N candidates needed
• Top fix:

Team Structure (if applicable)

• Recommended:
• Manager trigger fired: yes/no
• Director trigger fired: yes/no
• Action:

Production Discipline (if applicable)

• Current maturity level: 1-5
• Next practice to add:
• SLO coverage: X / Y services

Verdict

🟢 SHIP | 🟡 SHARPEN | 🔴 BLOCK

Next Steps

[3 concrete actions]

## Routing

- `/cs:cto-review` — for architectural causes of throughput problems
- `/cs:chro-review` — for hiring funnel comp/leveling issues
- `/cs:cfo-review` — for cost-per-hire envelope and eng budget
- `/cs:ciso-review` — for production discipline + compliance overlap
- `/cs:decide` — log the verdict
- `/cs:freeze 30` — on multi-year hiring commitments

## Related

- Agent: [`cs-vpe-advisor`](../../agents/cs-vpe-advisor.md)
- Skill: [`vpe-advisor`](../../../skills/vpe-advisor/SKILL.md)
- Adjacent: `../../../../engineering/slo-architect/`, `../../../../engineering/feature-flags-architect/`, `../../../../engineering/chaos-engineering/`

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**Version:** 1.0.0

## Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

- **Author:** [AlexBramall](https://github.com/AlexBramall)
- **Source:** [AlexBramall/claude-code-skills](https://github.com/AlexBramall/claude-code-skills)
- **License:** MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.