# What Is the Strategy-Red-Team Skill and How Does It Perform Adversarial Stress-Testing?

> Discover the strategy-red-team skill for product plans. Learn how it stress-tests assumptions to reveal and rank failure modes, ensuring robust development.

- Repository: [Pawel Huryn/pm-skills](https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills)
- Tags: deep-dive
- Published: 2026-06-27

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**The strategy-red-team skill is a built-in PM-Skills tool that adversarially stress-tests product plans by attacking their load-bearing assumptions to surface concrete failure modes and rank them by impact, likelihood, and cheapness-to-test.**

The **strategy-red-team** skill is a first-class capability in the [phuryn/pm-skills](https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills) repository designed to help product managers rigorously validate strategic documents. Unlike generic risk checklists, this tool programmatically adopts the mindset of a hostile adversary to identify which assumptions must hold true for your plan to succeed, then systematically attempts to break them. By integrating this skill into your workflow via the `/red-team-prd` command, you convert speculative planning into an evidence-based validation process.

## How the Strategy-Red-Team Skill Works

The adversarial stress-testing workflow is defined in [`pm-execution/skills/strategy-red-team/SKILL.md`](https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills/blob/main/pm-execution/skills/strategy-red-team/SKILL.md) and follows a disciplined five-step process that mirrors professional red-team exercises.

### Extract Load-Bearing Assumptions

The skill first parses your document to distinguish between **load-bearing assumptions** (claims that must be true for the plan to succeed) and cosmetic assertions. It ignores fluff and focuses exclusively on the structural supports of your strategy.

### Steel-Man and Attack

Rather than constructing straw-man arguments, the skill **steel-mans** each claim—stating the strongest possible justification for it—then deliberately attacks that robust version. This ensures the stress-test targets the most defensible version of your logic, not a weak mischaracterization.

### Write Falsifiable Failure Modes

Each identified risk is expressed as a concrete, testable statement following the format: **"Fails if…"**. This makes every assumption falsifiable and eliminates vague "might happen" language from the output.

### Rank by Risk Score

Assumptions are ranked using the product of **impact × likelihood × cheapness-to-test**. The highest-ranked items represent the most dangerous risks that are also easiest to validate, ensuring you prioritize experiments that provide the highest signal-to-cost ratio.

### Deliver Actionable Kill Criteria

For each top kill-assumption, the skill returns four specific fields:
- **Fails if** – The precise condition that invalidates the assumption
- **Evidence to get this week** – The data or conversation needed to confirm or kill it
- **Kill criterion** – The threshold at which to abandon or revise the plan
- **Cheapest test** – The smallest experiment that validates the hypothesis

## Where to Find the Implementation

The strategy-red-team capability is implemented across three key locations in the repository:

- **Skill definition**: [`pm-execution/skills/strategy-red-team/SKILL.md`](https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills/blob/main/pm-execution/skills/strategy-red-team/SKILL.md) contains the detailed instructions, constraints, and output formatting rules that govern the adversarial analysis.
- **Command wrapper**: [`pm-execution/commands/red-team-prd.md`](https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills/blob/main/pm-execution/commands/red-team-prd.md) defines the user-facing `/red-team-prd` command that invokes the skill.
- **Repository index**: The root [`README.md`](https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills/blob/main/README.md) lists the skill as a first-class capability: "`strategy-red-team` — Adversarial stress-test of a plan".

## How to Use the Red-Team-PRD Command

The `/red-team-prd` command provides a seamless interface to the strategy-red-team skill. You can invoke it with a full document, a one-line hypothesis, or by referencing your current context.

```markdown

# Example 1 – Red-team a full PRD

/red-team-prd
Paste your product requirements document (or upload a file)

# Example 2 – Red-team a strategic hypothesis

/red-team-prd Prioritize AI onboarding — activation is our bottleneck

# Example 3 – Use current document context

/red-team-prd the current doc

```

When executed, the system loads the supplied text, executes the strategy-red-team skill, and returns a formatted report. For example, analyzing the hypothesis "Prioritize AI onboarding — activation is our bottleneck" produces:

```markdown

## Red-Team: Prioritize AI onboarding — activation is our bottleneck

### Top Kill‑Assumptions (ranked)

- **Claim:** Activation is the primary constraint on growth
  - **Fails if:** Activation metrics stay flat despite increased spend
  - **Evidence to get this week:** Run a 48‑hour AB test on a new onboarding flow
  - **Kill criterion:** < 5 % lift in activation over baseline
  - **Cheapest test:** Deploy a feature flag and measure activation lift

### What's Well‑Reasoned

... (explicitly states what the plan already supports)

### What I Couldn't Assess

... (gaps where the doc lacked data)

```

The skill enforces strict discipline: it never fabricates risks, explicitly marks what is well-reasoned versus uncertain, and avoids generic risk lists. The output is optimized for screenshot-sharing and includes optional prompts for converting kill-assumptions into experiments.

## Summary

- The **strategy-red-team** skill is located in [`pm-execution/skills/strategy-red-team/SKILL.md`](https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills/blob/main/pm-execution/skills/strategy-red-team/SKILL.md) and invoked via the `/red-team-prd` command defined in [`pm-execution/commands/red-team-prd.md`](https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills/blob/main/pm-execution/commands/red-team-prd.md).
- It performs **adversarial stress-testing** by steel-manning and then attacking load-bearing assumptions rather than cosmetic claims.
- Risks are ranked by **impact × likelihood × cheapness-to-test**, prioritizing high-danger, low-cost validations.
- Output includes falsifiable **"Fails if"** statements, **kill criteria**, and **cheapest tests** to guide immediate validation.
- The skill explicitly distinguishes between well-reasoned claims and gaps it cannot assess, ensuring no hallucinated risks enter the analysis.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What makes the strategy-red-team skill different from a standard risk analysis?

The strategy-red-team skill in [`pm-execution/skills/strategy-red-team/SKILL.md`](https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills/blob/main/pm-execution/skills/strategy-red-team/SKILL.md) specifically targets **load-bearing assumptions** rather than surface-level risks, and it requires every risk to be expressed as a falsifiable "Fails if" statement. Unlike generic risk matrices, it ranks threats by the product of impact, likelihood, and cheapness-to-test, ensuring you tackle the most dangerous assumptions that are cheapest to validate first.

### How does the skill determine which assumptions to test first?

According to the skill specification, the ranking algorithm multiplies **impact × likelihood × cheapness-to-test**. This formula prioritizes assumptions that would catastrophically break your plan if wrong, are likely to be false, and can be tested with minimal resources. The highest-ranked items appear at the top of your kill-assumption report with specific "Evidence to get this week" recommendations.

### Can I use the strategy-red-team skill on documents other than PRDs?

Yes. While the command is named `/red-team-prd`, the strategy-red-team skill accepts any strategic document, roadmap, or even one-line hypotheses. The [`README.md`](https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills/blob/main/README.md) describes it broadly as an "Adversarial stress-test of a plan," and the command wrapper in [`pm-execution/commands/red-team-prd.md`](https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills/blob/main/pm-execution/commands/red-team-prd.md) supports text inputs ranging from full documents to brief strategic statements.

### What file contains the detailed instructions for the red-team analysis?

The complete behavioral specification, including the five-step workflow and output formatting rules, resides in **[`pm-execution/skills/strategy-red-team/SKILL.md`](https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills/blob/main/pm-execution/skills/strategy-red-team/SKILL.md)**. This file instructs the AI to steel-man claims, write concrete failure modes, and structure responses with specific fields like "Kill criterion" and "Cheapest test."