Narrative decision memo writer

What it does

It routes your request to one of three forms. A decision narrative fits a strategy, spending or staffing choice. A PR/FAQ fits a new product or service, written backwards from the customer's gain to the hard questions. A short brief fits a narrow question with little context. It adds the one sentence on why it chose that form. This copy is under the MIT licence (the LICENSE.md file in this item), written by Magnus Hedemark.

What goes in and out

You give it

• The reader and the person who will decide.
• The decision to make and the deadline.
• Your evidence, with where it came from.
• The options, including doing nothing.
• Known costs and limits (optional).
• Your own draft to revise (optional).
• Source text (optional)
• Document (optional)

You get

• A decision memo or short brief in connected prose.
• A one-sentence reason for the form it chose.
• A list of assumptions and evidence gaps.
• A small test with an owner and review date, when evidence is thin.
• A review plan with the decision owner and the questions to settle.
• Sections you can expect: summary, options, costs, risks, gaps and review plan.

How the task works

• Choose the right form. Respect the requested document and reader. Use only the structure and length the decision needs.
• Build the argument. Compare real alternatives, the current baseline, costs, risks, assumptions, and what evidence could change the call.
• Revise for the reader. Improve the reasoning and connected prose. Keep important limits in the main text and preserve the writer's voice.
• Plan review and closure. Name the decision owner and review questions. Do not claim approval, sending, or an exact page count without evidence.

Full instructions

• Download the skill folder. Your AI needs to read its reference and template files. Or paste the instructions into a chat.
• Tell your AI the reader, the decision owner and the deadline. A good first message puts it all in one go, for example "Memo for the leadership team. Owner is the head of operations. Decision needed by Friday. Should we move support to a new help desk tool? My evidence is below."
• Paste your evidence and options. Say which are facts and which are guesses.
• Read the form choice first. Ask for a different form if it misses.
• Check the gaps list. Fill what you can, or keep the proposed test.
• Ask for the review plan, then send the memo yourself. The skill does not send or schedule anything.
• Once the decision is made, file the memo where your team keeps decisions, and put the review date from the plan in your calendar. If the decision is later reversed, add a short note to the memo saying what changed and why.

Full instruction file

Amazon Memo

Help a reader understand a problem, challenge the reasoning, and make or record a decision. Narrative means connected reasoning in prose, not decorative storytelling. Amazon's conventions are a useful starting point; respect the receiving team's own written culture. These are original scaffolds, not official Amazon templates.

Before you start

Use the material below to do this job. If facts or tool access are missing, explain what you can finish and what must wait.

What you need (use your own material or the linked skill):

• Your question (yours): the decision or problem, and what a good outcome looks like.

Makes it better (optional):

• Source text (yours): a long source in full: an article, a video or talk transcript, or notes from a book, with its title, author and link.
• A document (yours): a finished document, such as a Word file, a PDF or a page of notes.

How to start:

1. Look first. Use what they've already attached, pasted or put in their about-me note. In a coding assistant with file access, look in the project too for these by name.
2. Check what's missing. Look for your question, source text, a document. They can attach files, paste the details, or share a file path your assistant can read. Ask only for missing facts that change the result. If they ask you to start with what they have, complete the parts you can and mark the gaps.
3. Do the job. Follow the skill below with the facts and tools you have. Mark each gap with MISSING: where it belongs and never invent a fact to fill it.

Tools that do this best:

• A chat AI that can read the bundled reference files: Use the supplied references and templates for the chosen task. Scripts are optional unless that task specifically needs them.

When not to use

• Use the Decision record writer for durable architecture decisions and the Incident postmortem writer for incident analysis. Add an executive cover memo only when useful; retain the underlying artifact's structure and evidence.
• Use the Incident runbook writer or the Developer docs writer for instructions and runbooks. General manuscript craft and rendered office files are out of scope for this skill.
• When the missing work is understanding the problem or testing demand, do that research first. A polished memo cannot supply that evidence.
• (AI Blocks note: the original named its own repo's skills here, such as adr-authoring, incident-learning, technical-documentation, writers-helper, documents, product-discovery and product-methodology. We replaced them with the AI Blocks items above, since those skills are not on this site.)

Workflow

1. Establish the reading contract. Identify the reader, decision or learning goal, decision owner, deadline, known local conventions, and meeting length or async window. Use supplied context before asking. If a missing detail changes the recommendation, ask one focused question; otherwise state a reasonable assumption and draft. Do not turn intake into an interview by default.
2. Choose and explain the form in one sentence. Respect an explicitly requested artifact; explain a mismatch and offer a better fit without silently substituting. Use the routing table below. Read form and length guidance when choosing between forms, planning pages, or adapting to another organization.
3. Build the argument before polishing. State the customer or stakeholder problem, relevant baseline, credible alternatives (including continuing as-is), proposed mechanism, costs, risks, uncertainty, and what decision is needed. Separate observed facts, assumptions, forecasts, and invented illustration. Keep citations near claims; identify missing denominators, dates, costs, or sources instead of inventing them. Preserve contradictory findings and explain what they change. With sparse evidence, propose a bounded test or conditional decision rather than a confident rollout. For a test, specify proposed scope, duration or review date, owner, and outcome evidence to inspect. Label unsupplied dates and thresholds as proposals; do not leave the checkpoint as an indefinite request for more evidence.
4. Draft for this audience. Load only the selected template. Use paragraphs to connect evidence to consequences. Use headings, compact tables, lists, charts, and appendices when they reduce reader effort; do not turn slides into bullet walls. Define specialist terms for unfamiliar readers and retain precise terms for experts. Keep decision-critical caveats in the body. Templates are starting points; omit irrelevant headings and add what the decision actually needs.
5. Revise for human reading. Read the revision tests for every draft or revision. Run the argument, evidence, paragraph, and read-aloud passes. Preserve the writer's voice and legitimate technical language. Revise actual reasoning and sentences; do not use banned-word lists, fixed sentence lengths, made-up readability scores, or synonym swapping as a substitute for judgment.
6. Design review and closure. For a meeting or async review, read reading and decision practices. Name the decision owner, reading arrangement, questions to resolve, and where the outcome will live. Allow dissent; do not manufacture consensus. Writing a memo does not authorize sending it, publishing it, or scheduling a meeting.

Form routing

Non-negotiable distinctions

• Six pages is a ceiling, not a requirement. Amazon's 2024 shareholder letter is reported to describe a maximum six-page narrative (the link is in references/sources.md; check it before you quote it); do not pad two pages of substance to six. Local rules may differ. No universal font, word count, or heading sequence is established here.
• A press release is not the whole PR/FAQ. The future release states customer value; customer and internal FAQs test the proposal. Mark all imagined quotes and future claims as hypothetical. Never present them as testimony or shipped capability.
• Page estimates are not pagination. Markdown cannot prove a rendered page count. If actual compliance matters, declare paper size, font, margins, spacing and appendix treatment, then render and inspect. Never shrink type or move essential risks out of the body to make the count fit. Label unrendered lengths as estimates.
• Recommendations are not corporate rules. Read sources and claim boundaries when explaining provenance or making claims about a company's practices. Attribute practitioner guidance. Independent written cultures are not presumed Amazon adoptions.
• Persuasiveness must preserve truth. If asked to make a weak case sound certain, strengthen the reasoning and state the gaps. Do not inflate demand, suppress counterevidence, invent numbers, or conceal uncertainty.

Supporting material

Read synthetic worked examples when the user needs an illustration or the draft suffers from inflated claims or abstract prose. Every example is invented and generic. Do not reuse personal, client, interview, or confidential material in public examples.

Completion and exit conditions

Deliver the requested draft or revision, a brief form rationale when relevant, material assumptions and evidence gaps, and the review/decision arrangement if requested. Report actual pagination status honestly. For a revision, briefly explain the substantive changes rather than claiming an objective style score.

Stop when the artifact supports its stated reading and decision goal. If evidence cannot support the requested conclusion, deliver a qualified draft or an evidence request with the consequence for the decision. After two non-converging revision passes, name the unresolved audience or argument choice instead of endlessly polishing.

After this

When you've handed it back, suggest what they could do next in one short question. It's a suggestion: if they're done, that's fine. Offer these, and say they can type their own:

• The Weekly status update writer. It takes the document. If they pick one and that skill is added here, carry straight on with what you just made. If not, give the link and say what to bring.