Heavybit Skills
Operators have been sharing what they know in the Heavybit Library for more than ten years, in talks, podcasts, and articles. Heavybit Skills turns the strategies they used at companies like Slack, Databricks, and Stripe into instructions your agent can work from, whether you're on your positioning and messaging, your launch, or your first enterprise deal.
Crucible, Heavybit's MCP server, offers every skill. Connect your agent, sign in free with Google or GitHub, and bring it whatever you're working on this week. You still do the work, with their experience behind you the whole way.
What a skill is
A skill is a set of working instructions your agent loads when you need it, built from the strategies operators shared in the Heavybit Library. It guides the work and you still do it. Heavybit reads and approves every skill before it ships, and keeps updating skills as new content enters the Library. Skills are plain text, so you or your agent can read any skill in full before acting on it. Your agent decides how to apply a skill, so check its work; if a skill gets something wrong, ask your agent to report it or email platform@heavybit.com.
Connect your agent
- Add the endpoint below to your harness: Claude Code, Codex, Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, or another that supports MCP.
- Sign in to your Heavybit account with Google or GitHub when your agent asks. It's free, and your first sign-in creates the account.
- Tell your agent what you're working on. It finds the right skill, or you can ask for one by name.
MCP endpointhttps://crucible.heavybit.com/mcp
Collections
5 skills
AI products
Skills for evaluating and monitoring systems whose output changes from run to run, structuring the team that ships them, and governing an AI product responsibly. Built from what operators at Humanloop, Honeycomb, Smol AI, Deepchecks, and PlayerZero shared in the Heavybit Library.
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5 skills
Sales and pricing
Skills for setting prices and packaging, getting enterprise-ready, building partnerships, and handing sales from the founders to your first sales team. Built from what operators at LaunchDarkly, HashiCorp, PagerDuty, Segment, and Algolia shared in the Heavybit Library.
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8 skills
Marketing and launch
Find the words that reach the people you're building for, then launch, build content and demand programs, and pick a growth motion, whether self-serve or a category of your own. Operators from GitHub, Postman, Figma, Netlify, and Play Bigger shared the strategies behind these skills.
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3 skills
Developer relations and community
Skills for running a developer relations program, building a community developers come back to, and designing onboarding and documentation that get someone to a working first use. From operators at Twilio, Google Cloud, MongoDB, Apollo GraphQL, and ReadMe.
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11 skills
Product and engineering
Start with product discovery and your first buyer persona, then structure the team, design an API developers adopt, and run reliability from on-call to incident reviews. Customer success, testing, data teams, video infrastructure, and Kubernetes are here too, from operators at Honeycomb, Datadog, LaunchDarkly, Stripe, and Mux.
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6 skills
Security and compliance
Skills for deciding what to secure first, building a compliance program enterprise customers accept, preparing for a breach before it happens, and securing your cloud infrastructure and your software supply chain. Built from what operators at HashiCorp, Snyk, Splunk, HackerOne, and Chainguard shared in the Heavybit Library.
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4 skills
Open source
Choose a license, turn adoption into revenue, grow one product into an ecosystem, and keep developers' trust through an acquisition or a governance change. Operators from GitLab, dbt Labs, HashiCorp, Zapier, and Auth0 shared what worked for them.
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3 skills
Founder leadership
Skills for writing to your board and your team so decisions get made, working through the founder's shift from building to running the company, and thinking about what your product does once it's in the world. From operators at Harrison Metal, PostHog, Acompli, Honeycomb, and Thoughtworks.
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Every skill
AI products5 skills
- Agentic EngineeringHow teams build software when AI coding agents write the code: directing agents, what code review and validation become when code is nearly free, durable systems with disposable code, orchestrating many agents, keeping them safe inside an organization, and how roles change. Drawn from practitioners at HumanLayer, Sentry, Honeycomb, Google DeepMind, and others.
- Agent InfrastructureThe runtime substrate for AI agents: the machine an agent runs on, sandboxes and isolation, agent memory and learning, durable execution and harness design, and the performance and cost of running agents. Drawn from practitioners at exe.dev, Daytona, Letta, Glean, and others.
- AI Product OperationsThe emerging operational discipline for AI in production. Covers the guardrails, metrics, and team structures that differ from classic software: reasoning systems, evaluation frameworks, prompt engineering workflows, and scaling AI products reliably. Drawn from practitioners at Smol AI, Humanloop, Remyx AI, and others.
- AI ObservabilityContinuous validation and production monitoring for AI systems. Covers the unique challenges of observing non-deterministic outputs, bridging technical and business metrics, and connecting observability data to code and user experience. Drawn from practitioners at Deepchecks, PlayerZero, and others.
- AI Governance & Responsible AIGovernance frameworks, ethical principles, and practical safeguards for building and deploying AI products responsibly. Covers bias detection, prompt injection security, trust architecture, regulatory compliance, and the organizational structures needed for responsible AI. Drawn from practitioners at Humanloop, Equality AI, Deepchecks, and others.
Sales and pricing5 skills
- Sales Organization BuildingHow to build your first sales team, transition from founder-led sales, and sell into technical buyers. Drawn from practitioners at LaunchDarkly, HashiCorp, PagerDuty, Segment, Algolia, and others who've scaled sales orgs from zero to enterprise.
- Enterprise ReadinessThe playbook for making developer products enterprise-ready: deployment models, SSO, compliance, SLAs, support tiers, and navigating the shift from bottoms-up adoption to top-down deals. Drawn from practitioners at HashiCorp, LaunchDarkly, Snyk, and others.
- Pricing & PackagingFrameworks for designing pricing models, tiers, and packaging for developer-focused SaaS. Covers value-based pricing, Good/Better/Best structures, usage metering, open core packaging, and when to change your pricing. Drawn from practitioners at Honeycomb, PagerDuty, Segment, and others.
- Partnerships & Business DevelopmentHow to evaluate, prioritize, and build partnerships at early-stage startups: from co-marketing to deep integrations. Covers partner strategy, ecosystem timing, and navigating the tension between partnership opportunity and startup focus. Drawn from practitioners at Stripe, Segment, Zapier, and others.
- Founder Sales TransitionWhen and how to hand off sales from the founding team. Covers timing the first sales hire, designing onboarding, structuring compensation, and avoiding the common mistakes that stall the transition. Drawn from practitioners at LaunchDarkly, HashiCorp, Algolia, and others.
Marketing and launch8 skills
- AI Developer Tools GTMLessons from launching and marketing AI-powered developer tools. Covers go-to-market strategy for AI products, messaging for technical audiences, beta program design, adoption curves, and navigating trust and compliance concerns unique to AI. Drawn from practitioners at Humanloop, Smol AI, and others.
- Self-Serve & PLG GTMFrameworks for building self-serve and product-led growth motions. Covers freemium design, bottom-up adoption, converting free users to paid, PLG pricing, community-driven growth, and understanding when PLG is and isn't the right model. Drawn from practitioners at GitHub, Netlify, Postman, and others.
- Messaging & PositioningHow to craft, test, and roll out messaging frameworks and positioning for developer-focused products. Covers positioning statements, competitive differentiation, message testing, and aligning messaging across sales, marketing, and product. Drawn from practitioners at Algolia, Netlify, PagerDuty, and others.
- Product Marketing for DevelopersHow product marketing works in developer-focused companies: from funnels and launches to customer obsession. Covers launch strategy, PMM team structure, developer marketing funnels, and applying customer research as a product marketing discipline. Drawn from practitioners at GitHub, Postman, Figma, and others.
- Content Marketing StrategyHow to build and execute content strategies that drive growth for developer-focused companies. Covers SEO-driven growth, product-led content, editorial operations, content measurement, and deciding between in-house and agency models. Drawn from practitioners at DigitalOcean, Netlify, Algolia, and others.
- Lead Generation & Marketing OpsBuilding efficient lead generation pipelines and marketing operations at developer tools and B2B SaaS companies. Covers lead scoring, marketing automation, account-based marketing, marketing stack selection, and aligning sales and marketing metrics. Drawn from practitioners at LaunchDarkly, Segment, and others.
- Category DesignFrameworks for creating, positioning, and dominating new market categories. Covers category naming, building narrative, structuring investor pitches, ecosystem positioning, and the difference between competing in a category versus creating one. Drawn from the authors of Play Bigger and practitioners at Gainsight, Drift, and others.
- Vertical SaaS StrategyStrategies for building and scaling software companies focused on specific industry verticals. Covers compound startup models, network effects, vertical pricing and monetization, professional services as go-to-market, building for non-technical users, and platform expansion within verticals. Drawn from practitioners at Procore, ServiceTitan, Remote, and others.
Developer relations and community3 skills
- DevRel StrategyHow to structure, run, and measure developer relations programs. Covers DevRel org design, engagement tactics, aligning DevRel with business goals, measuring impact, building technical onboarding, and scaling community efforts. Drawn from practitioners at Twilio, Google Cloud, MongoDB, Apollo GraphQL, and others.
- Developer CommunitiesHow to build, measure, and scale developer communities that create real business value. Covers community strategy, engagement models, community health metrics, champion programs, and balancing community interests with business goals. Drawn from practitioners at Twilio, MongoDB, DigitalOcean, and others.
- Developer Onboarding & DocumentationFrameworks for developer onboarding design, documentation strategy, and using technical content to drive adoption. Covers getting-started experiences, API documentation, onboarding measurement, documentation as a growth lever, and building docs teams. Drawn from practitioners at ReadMe, Netlify, Stripe, and others.
Product and engineering11 skills
- Product DiscoveryFrameworks for product discovery in developer tools: design partners, user research, personas, competitive analysis, and building for developer flow. Covers customer interview techniques, discovery processes, evaluating feature requests, and knowing when to pivot. Drawn from practitioners at LaunchDarkly, Honeycomb, and others.
- Product Team StructureFrameworks for structuring product teams around triads (PM, Design, Engineering), integrating design into engineering-first organizations, and prioritizing work using effort-versus-impact methods. Drawn from practitioners at Stripe, Figma, LaunchDarkly, and others.
- Engineering Culture & Remote TeamsHow to build engineering culture at scale and manage remote or hybrid teams. Covers documentation as culture, managing technical debt, hiring and onboarding remote engineers, async communication, and compensation for distributed teams. Drawn from practitioners at GitLab, CircleCI, Honeycomb, and others.
- Customer Success & OnboardingHow to build customer success programs and optimize onboarding for retention at developer-focused companies. Covers CS org design, health scores, sales-to-CS handoffs, sponsor changes, and scaling CS operations from startup to growth stage. Drawn from practitioners at Gainsight, LaunchDarkly, and others.
- Observability & Incident ResponseThe practice of operational reliability: instrumentation, monitoring, SLO setup, incident response, on-call design, and day-to-day reliability operations. Covers alerting strategies, error budgets, incident management processes, and blameless postmortems. Drawn from practitioners at Honeycomb, Datadog, PagerDuty, and others.
- Resilience EngineeringThe organizational side of reliability: learning from incidents, sociotechnical analysis, chaos engineering philosophy, and the limits of purely technical approaches. Covers incident analysis methods, safety culture, adaptive capacity, and building organizations that learn from failure. Drawn from practitioners at Netflix, Stripe, Honeycomb, Jeli, and others.
- API DesignBuilding APIs developers love. Covers versioning, backwards compatibility, documentation, extensibility, developer experience, and treating API design as a product problem. Drawn from practitioners at Stripe, GitHub, Postman, Auth0, ReadMe, and others.
- QA & Testing EngineeringMoving testing left, owning quality as a team, and validating software where it matters most. Covers testing culture, CI/CD integration, production testing, test architecture, and building testing systems that catch failures before users do. Drawn from practitioners at Kosli, CircleCI, and Ministry of Testing.
- Data Team LeadershipBuilding and scaling data teams that drive business decisions. Covers analytics org structure, north star metrics, experimentation culture, and moving teams from service requests to strategic partnership. Drawn from practitioners at dbt Labs, Amplify Partners, and others.
- Video InfrastructureBuilding and scaling modern video infrastructure: adaptive streaming, low-latency delivery, player architecture, real-time communication, codec strategy, and authenticity workflows. Drawn from practitioners at Mux, Cloudflare, and others.
- Kubernetes & Cloud NativeKubernetes and cloud-native architecture, platforms, and operations. Covers GitOps, service mesh, observability, security, chaos engineering, developer experience, and scaling patterns. Drawn from practitioners at Google, AWS, Red Hat, CNCF, Honeycomb, and others.
Security and compliance6 skills
- Security Program FoundationsHow to start and scale a security program at a startup: what to prioritize, where security sits in the org, how to build security culture, and when to hire a CISO. Drawn from practitioners at HashiCorp, Snyk, HackerOne, and others.
- Security Compliance ProgramBuilding a compliance program that satisfies enterprise customers and scales across frameworks. Covers SOC 2, ISO 27001, vendor security assessments, trust documentation, and GRC strategy. Drawn from practitioners at Vanta, Snyk, Everlaw, and others.
- Security Incident ResponsePreparing for, managing, and recovering from security incidents: breaches, attacker compromise, data exposure, and regulatory response. Covers incident response plans, breach communications, regulatory obligations, and forensics coordination. Drawn from practitioners at HackerOne, Splunk, and others.
- Cloud Infrastructure SecurityPractical cloud security controls for startups building on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Covers secure cloud environments, identity and access management, infrastructure-as-code, remote access strategies, and encryption decisions. Drawn from practitioners at HashiCorp, Datadog, and others.
- DevSecOps PracticesEmbedding security into the software development lifecycle. Covers shift-left security, security in CI/CD pipelines, vulnerability management, application security strategy, and building security-aware engineering teams. Drawn from practitioners at Snyk, GitHub, CircleCI, and others.
- Software Supply Chain SecuritySecuring the software supply chain from code signing to distribution. Covers provenance, dependency tracking, container image hardening, open source risk management, and the gap between corporate security tooling and open source ecosystems. Drawn from practitioners at Chainguard, Snyk, and others.
Open source4 skills
- Monetizing Open SourceHow to turn open source adoption and community into sustainable commercial revenue. Covers pricing models, packaging strategies, open core frameworks, the free-to-paid conversion, dual licensing, and managing community expectations through monetization changes. Drawn from practitioners at GitLab, dbt Labs, HashiCorp, and others.
- Open Source LicensingUnderstanding open source licenses, governance, and strategic considerations for OSS businesses. Covers permissive vs. copyleft vs. BSL, open source business models, software supply chain implications, and the evolving regulatory landscape. Drawn from practitioners at HashiCorp, CNCF, and others.
- DevTool to Ecosystem & Category CreationHow to evolve from a single developer tool to a developer ecosystem and create new categories. Covers platform strategy, ecosystem development, partnership timing, category creation, and the transition from standalone product to multi-product platform. Drawn from practitioners at Zapier, Auth0, Stripe, and others.
- Developer TrustHow to build and maintain developer trust through transparency, authentic community engagement, and careful communication: especially during transitions like acquisitions, enterprise expansion, or open source governance changes. Drawn from practitioners at GitHub, GitLab, Snyk, and others.
Founder leadership3 skills
- Executive CommunicationClear, structured business communication using the Minto Pyramid Principle and SCQA method. Covers executive summaries, business emails, memos, presentations, and board communications that are decisive and action-oriented. Drawn from practitioners at Harrison Metal, Heavybit, and others.
- Founder & CEO LeadershipThe operational and interpersonal skills technical founders need as they scale from builder to CEO. Covers board management, co-founder dynamics, crisis communication, executive decision-making, managing through downturns, and culture scaling. Drawn from practitioners at PostHog, Acompli, LaunchDarkly, and others.
- Tech Ethics & Responsible EngineeringBuilding with eyes open to unintended consequences. Covers the gap between engineering intent and real-world outcomes, responsible AI considerations, inclusive design, and the organizational practices that help teams anticipate harm before shipping. Drawn from practitioners at BBC Radio 4, Code for America, Thoughtworks, and others.