Reset my inherited team's priorities and decide what to stop
Reviews all work in flight against goals and capacity, recommends what to keep, pause, or stop, and drafts the messages.
The prompt
Help me review everything my inherited team is working on, and decide what to keep, change, and stop. This is step 4 of the 'Take over an existing team' pack; paste the themes from step 2 if you have them.
Team goals or mandate: [WHAT WE'RE MEANT TO DELIVER]
Current work in flight: [LIST projects, recurring work, and requests, with owner and status]
Team capacity: [people and rough availability]
What my boss and stakeholders care about most: [PRIORITIES]
Known pain points: [e.g. "too many projects at once", "nobody owns reporting"]
Step 2 output (optional): [PASTE]
Work through:
1. A table of all work: link to goals (strong / weak / none), value, effort remaining, risk of stopping, and a recommendation (keep, change, pause, stop, hand off).
2. A capacity check comparing total work with available time, showing how overloaded we are.
3. Ownership gaps or overlaps to fix.
4. A short list of top priorities for the next 90 days.
5. Who to tell about anything we stop or pause, with a short, respectful message to them.
6. How to involve the team in these decisions so changes feel shared, not imposed.
Flag any change that could break a commitment made by the previous manager, so I can check before cancelling it.
Highlighted [brackets] are blanks to replace with your own details.
Fill in the blanks and use this promptMore Leadership & Management prompts
What to fill in
- WHAT WE'RE MEANT TO DELIVER
- people and rough availability
- PRIORITIES
- e.g. "too many projects at once", "nobody owns reporting"
- PASTE
How this prompt is built
This prompt follows the RTF structure (Role, Task, Format). RTF tells the model who to be, what to do and what shape the answer should take. It is the quickest structure that still gives noticeably better results than a bare request.
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- Present my plan for an inherited team to my managerA candid written update and slide outline on what you've learned, your 90-day plan, measures of progress, and what you need.
- Resolve a conflict between team membersA fair approach to diagnosing and mediating conflict between people.