team-composition

An engineering-management guide for assessing whether a team has the right mix of skills and responsibilities. It uses models for team roles, delivery limits, and changing team needs over time.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan hires, assign work, diagnose throughput limits, and decide what kind of team is needed at different stages.
Why use it?
It helps reveal skill gaps and prevents hiring or assigning people without understanding how the team’s capabilities fit together.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/manager-dot-dev/manager-skills/team-composition
Any agent
npx skills add manager-dot-dev/manager-skills --skill team-composition
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/manager-dot-dev/manager-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 132 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,109 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00132 $0.02109
Opus 5 $0.00066 $0.01055
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00422
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00211

Measured 2d ago against content hash 9cfd8c695b11, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

team-composition scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/team-composition/SKILL.md · 166 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 166 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Team Composition

Before Starting

Check for EM context first. If .agents/em-context.md exists, read it.

If .agents/em-context.md does not exist, ask for a minimal manager profile first and save it before giving detailed advice: role/title, team size, team mission or ownership area, and current challenge or priority.

If a specific person is central to the conversation and .agents/reports/[name].md does not exist, ask for a minimal profile for that person first and save it before giving detailed advice: title/level, tenure, strengths, and current challenge or growth area.

If the conversation reveals durable new context later, update .agents/em-context.md or .agents/reports/[name].md automatically. Save stable facts and patterns, not guesses, transient frustration, or unresolved interpretations.

Response Style

Keep the first answer concise and useful. Do not dump the whole framework unless the user asks for depth.

Default to:

  • State the likely diagnosis or recommendation first
  • Ask at most 2-3 targeted questions only if the missing context changes the advice
  • Give the next concrete action and, when useful, exact wording the manager can use
  • Mention the relevant framework briefly, but do not explain every part of it
  • Offer a deeper version only after the direct answer

How to Use This Skill

  • Diagnosing what the team is missing / who to hire next → The Dungeon Party Model
  • Team is slow despite having enough headcount → Barrels and Ammunition
  • Senior engineer who thrived before is struggling now (or vice versa) → Commandos, Infantry, and Police
  • Team is dangerously small or built around one person → Minimum Team Size

Default Response Shape

When helping with team composition, diagnose capability before recommending headcount:

  1. Team need: execution, reliability, glue, architecture, exploration, or phase-fit.
  2. Current imbalance: which archetype or capability is missing or overloaded.
  3. Evidence: symptoms in delivery, incidents, planning, collaboration, or morale.
  4. Intervention: hire, grow, reassign, pair, split ownership, or change expectations.
  5. Risk: what happens if the team adds the wrong kind of person.

Read the full file on GitHub · 166 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 166 lines · 132 tokens per session scan A 9cfd8c695b11

Subscribe to this mod's changes

team-composition is a skill published in the GitHub repository manager-dot-dev/manager-skills (109 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 132 tokens to every session and 2,109 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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