Take Over a Customer Engagement

Steps

1. 1

   Establish the authoritative scope and current state

   Locate latest approved contract/SOW, plan, customer success goals, primary contacts, account ownership, project status and system boundaries. Prioritize signed or current records above stale slides and secondhand summaries. Assemble a compact timeline of key events, outcomes, commitments and changes, each citing a source and date. Use account-context when available to accelerate retrieval, then verify its key claims against underlying sources. Gate: the incoming owner can distinguish binding commitments from outdated assumptions.

   Skills anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins · sales/skills/account-context · github

   Expected outputs
2. 2

   Audit promises, decisions and operational exposure

   Reconcile meeting notes, CRM, issue tracker and messages for open promises, missed dates, customer concerns, unresolved risks, product dependencies, renewal dates and security/permission constraints. Identify any customer-facing position that contradicts signed scope. Separate confirmed obligations, reported obligations and undocumented assertions. Prioritize by potential customer impact and time sensitivity. Gate: critical unresolved promises and material exposures are identified without silently accepting unsupported status reports.

   Expected outputs
3. 3

   Test the picture with people who know the work

   Where available, interview former owner, delivery lead, support/engineering partners and customer sponsor with focused discrepancy questions. Ask what changed recently, where commitments are disputed, who can approve changes, which operational workaround is essential, and what would surprise a newcomer. Capture dissent and protect confidential internal assessments from inappropriate external disclosure. If no former owner is reachable, specify the evidence still needed instead of inventing a confident narrative. Gate: material contradictions have been resolved or labeled for explicit confirmation.

   Expected outputs
4. 4

   Check readiness to operate safely

   Verify practical access, escalation routes, meeting cadence, reporting obligations, customer-specific runbooks and unresolved incidents. Distinguish an accessible system from permission to operate it. Simulate or inspect the immediate next routine action without changing production or contacting the customer unnecessarily. Identify an emergency fallback if a critical owner is absent. Gate: the new owner can execute the next normal responsibility safely or knows the exact blocker.

   Expected outputs
5. 5

   Reestablish priorities and customer confidence

   Develop a short prioritized plan: what must be fixed first, the next contractual or value milestone, decisions needed, and communication appropriate to the customer's expectations. If a customer introduction or alignment meeting is authorized, use it to confirm facts rather than reopen settled decisions. Record the customer's corrections and only make promises within delegated authority. End once the new owner has a trustworthy basis for action and has openly identified remaining uncertainty. Gate: ownership is operationally credible, not merely transferred on an org chart.

   Expected outputs