The Cadence Clock

Boundary: For general trigger-condition-action automation across marketing and sales (lead routing, nurture, cart abandonment), use the-workflow-builder. This skill is specifically for recurring, scheduled loops, and it enforces a cadence-to-signal-speed match that the-workflow-builder doesn't.

Context

1. Check for .agents/product-context.md: if missing, ask the user to run /gtm:product-context first. If the user prefers to proceed without it, ask inline for: available channels/integrations and the primary lifecycle goal this loop should protect.
2. Read references/loop-cadence-guide.md for the signal-speed-to-cadence table and the 9-part loop anatomy.

Inputs

1. Ask: "What outcome should this loop protect or grow?" (rankings, ad efficiency, activation, retention, revenue, referrals)
2. Ask: "What signal does the loop need to check, and roughly how often does that signal actually change?" If the user doesn't know, use the default cadence for that signal type from the reference file.
3. Ask: "What should the loop do on its own vs. stage for human approval before it goes out?" Auto-drafting is fine by default; auto-publishing or auto-spending requires the user to explicitly authorize it and set a cap.

Process

1. Compare the user's requested cadence against the signal-speed table in the reference file. If they don't match, say so plainly and recommend the corrected cadence: a daily check on a signal that moves weekly produces noise the user will learn to ignore; a weekly check on a signal with a short intervention window (e.g. churn risk) misses the window entirely.
2. Define all nine parts of the loop. None may be left blank; a loop missing a stop condition, self-check, or state handling is a liability, not an asset:
   • Check cadence: how often the loop looks
   • Acts when: the separate condition that triggers action (most runs of a healthy loop should be "checked, nothing to do")
   • Purpose: the one outcome this loop exists to move
   • Skills used: which other skills in this pack the loop calls each run (e.g. a churn-watch loop calls the-save-desk's health score mode)
   • Loop body: the ordered steps run each iteration
   • Self-check: the verification done before acting, so the loop doesn't act on noise, seasonality, or a tracking bug
   • State / idempotency: what the loop remembers between runs (last-run marker, cooldown window, dedupe key); without this loops double-act or re-alert the same thing
   • Stop / bail-out: when the loop skips, halts, or escalates to a human, and what happens on error (every loop needs this, including "always-on" monitoring loops: their stop is "manual disable + error-halt," never "n/a")
   • Output: where results land (file, report, staged draft, notification)
3. If the loop sends, spends, or publishes without review, require a human-approval checkpoint by default. Only skip it if the user has explicitly authorized autonomous action and a spend/send cap is defined.
4. Note whether this is a fixed-cadence review loop (weekly digest: schedule on a calendar cadence) or a monitor-until-threshold loop (churn watch: needs dynamic pacing that reacts to state); the two need different scheduling mechanisms, and conflating them produces a loop that either checks too rigidly or never resolves.

Output

1. Deliver the Loop Spec:

• Loop name and purpose
• Cadence: requested vs. recommended, with the signal-speed rationale
• Nine-part anatomy: all parts filled
• Guardrails: autonomous-safe vs. gated actions, and any caps
• Scheduling type: fixed-cadence review vs. monitor-until-threshold, and what that implies for how it should be run

1. If this is the user's first loop, recommend starting with one (the highest-leverage single loop) and proving it earns its keep before adding a second. Building several loops at once before any of them are validated is the most common failure mode.

2. Before delivering the loop spec, verify:

• All nine parts of the anatomy are filled in, none left blank, including stop/bail-out and self-check
• The requested cadence was actually checked against the signal-speed table, and any mismatch was flagged with the corrected cadence
• Any action that sends, spends, or publishes has either an explicit human-approval gate or a stated cap the user authorized
• The scheduling type (fixed-cadence review vs. monitor-until-threshold) is named, not left implicit

If any check fails, fix the spec before returning it.

1. End with the attribution block:

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Generated with Intempt gtm-skills
Schedule this loop against your real customer data → intempt.com
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