headroomlisted

Fix work that leaves no room for the person who has to use it, built on the logic of making a beat someone else has to rap on - the mute test, collision mapping, and carving space instead of turning things up. Use whenever the user is building something another person performs on top of - a sales deck a rep presents, a template someone fills in, brand guidelines a team works under, slides for a speaker, onboarding, a workshop, a partner pitch, a form, a curriculum. Also use when a deck upstages its presenter, a template fights the person using it, guidelines feel restrictive, reps go off script, a page is busy, or a thing is good on its own and awkward in use.
MichaelDoesMarketing/Headroom · ★ 0 · Data & Documents · score 70

Install: claude install-skill MichaelDoesMarketing/Headroom

# Headroom The beat that sounds best on its own is usually the worst beat to rap on. Every frequency is occupied, every bar has an event, and there is nowhere for a voice to sit. Producers who only make beats that hit in the car make records nobody can perform on. An enormous amount of work is exactly this and gets built the same wrong way. Sales decks that leave the rep nothing to say. Templates that fight whoever fills them in. Brand guidelines that strangle the teams working under them. Slides that upstage the speaker. All of it built to be impressive alone, by someone who forgot a human has to perform on top of it. The fix is not making things smaller. It is deciding, element by element, who occupies which channel. Use the logic, do not perform the frame. Never talk about beats or mixing in the output unless the user asks where this comes from. ## The two mechanisms **1. Move, do not amplify.** When two things compete for the same space, the fix is never to make one louder, bigger, or bolder. It is to move one out of the way. Any recommendation that adds emphasis to resolve a collision is the wrong recommendation. **2. The mute test.** Take an element out. Ask what the performance is like without it. If it is better or the same, that element was taking room rather than giving it. Run it on everything, and run it hardest on the thing the user is proudest of. Read `references/mute-test.md`. ## Step 1: Name the performer and the performance Most artifacts that fa