Purpose
Turn an ambiguous "should we build, buy, or partner?" debate into a scored, defensible recommendation — weighing each pathway (organic build, acquisition, joint venture, commercial partnership) against time-to-capability, total cost, control, strategic importance, and execution risk, then specifying the deal structure and the conditions under which the recommendation would flip.
When to Use
Invoke this skill when the user asks to:
- Decide whether to build a new capability in-house or acquire it
- Evaluate acquisition vs. partnership vs. joint venture for entering a market
- Close a competitive or technology gap and choose the fastest defensible path
- Justify a build/buy/partner decision to the board or investment committee
- Compare a specific acquisition target against building the same capability organically
- Assess whether a strategic capability is core enough to own or peripheral enough to rent
Inputs Required
Before starting, collect:
- Capability gap: The specific capability, technology, market access, or asset the company lacks
- Strategic rationale: Why this matters now — the business goal it serves
- Strategic importance: Is this core to future differentiation, or an enabler/adjacency?
- Time pressure: When the capability is needed to matter (e.g., 6 months, 18 months, 3 years)
- Financial capacity: Available capital, appetite for dilution/debt, and rough budget envelope
- Internal starting point: What relevant talent, IP, or infrastructure already exists in-house
- Known options: Any specific acquisition targets, partners, or JV candidates already identified
If strategic importance or time pressure is missing, ask one clarifying question before proceeding — these two variables swing the recommendation more than any other.
Instructions
Step 1: Define the Capability Gap Precisely
Restate the gap in one sentence that separates the capability from the mechanism. Distinguish:
- What must be true for the strategy to succeed (the outcome)
- The capability required to make it true (talent, IP, market access, distribution, brand, regulatory position)
- The magnitude of the gap — is this a head start to catch up on, or net-new terrain?
Flag whether the gap is a core capability (source of durable differentiation — bias toward owning) or an enabler/adjacency (bias toward renting or partnering). This framing anchors the entire evaluation.
Step 2: Score Each Pathway Across 5 Criteria
Assess all four pathways — Make (organic build), Buy (acquisition), Partner (commercial partnership), JV (joint venture) — against these criteria. Score each 1–5 (5 = strongest on that dimension for this decision).
- Time-to-Capability: Realistic time to a working, at-scale capability. Build is slowest for net-new; acquisition is fastest but adds integration lag; partnership is fast to launch but capped in depth.
- Total Cost: All-in cost including hidden costs — build (opportunity cost, ramp, failure risk), buy (premium, integration, retention), JV (governance overhead, split economics), partner (margin share, dependency cost).
- Control: Degree of control over roadmap, IP, talent, and customer relationship. Build = full; Buy = full post-close; JV = shared; Partner = limited.
- Strategic Importance Fit: Does the ownership model match how core the capability is? Owning a non-core capability wastes capital; renting a core one cedes the future.
- Execution Risk: Probability the pathway actually delivers — build execution risk, integration/culture risk (buy), governance deadlock risk (JV), dependency and misalignment risk (partner).
Present as a scoring table: rows = pathways, columns = the 5 criteria + a weighted total.
Step 3: Apply Decision Weights
Weight the 5 criteria based on the strategic context (default weights, adjust and state assumptions):
- Strategic Importance Fit — 30%
- Time-to-Capability — 25%
- Execution Risk — 20%
- Total Cost — 15%
- Control — 10%
If the capability is core, raise Control and Strategic Importance Fit weights. If time pressure is acute, raise Time-to-Capability. Compute a weighted score per pathway and rank them.
Step 4: Pressure-Test the Leading Pathway
For the top-ranked pathway, run a fast red-team:
- Build: Do we have the talent to build this, or are we assuming we can hire it? What's the real ramp?
- Buy: Is there a viable target at a rational price? What's the integration and retention risk? Is this "acqui-hire" or genuine asset acquisition?
- Partner: Does the partner's incentive stay aligned as we scale? What happens if they get acquired or exit?
- JV: Who controls decision rights? What's the deadlock resolution? What's the exit/unwind path?
Note any condition under which the recommendation would flip to the second-ranked option — the decision's sensitivity.
Step 5: Specify the Deal Structure
For the recommended pathway, provide concrete structuring guidance:
- Build: Team composition, budget phasing, first milestone, and a kill/pivot checkpoint
- Buy: Target profile, valuation logic, earn-out vs. all-cash considerations, retention terms for key talent, integration approach (absorb vs. hold separate)
- Partner: Exclusivity vs. non-exclusive, economic split, IP ownership, term length, and off-ramp
- JV: Ownership split, governance and board structure, capital contributions, decision rights, and unwind mechanics
Step 6: Write the Decision-Defense Summary
A 3–4 sentence recommendation the executive can carry into a board or investment committee: the pathway, the single most important reason, the primary risk being accepted, and the trigger that would reverse it.
Output Format
- Structure: Gap definition → scoring table → weighted ranking → red-team of the leader → deal structure → decision-defense summary
- Length: 1,000–1,400 words
- Format: Prose framing with a central scoring/weighting table; deal structure as labeled bullets
- Sections: Capability Gap Definition → Pathway Scoring Table → Weighted Recommendation → Pressure Test → Recommended Deal Structure → Decision-Defense Summary
- Tone: Corporate development principal — decisive, capital-allocation minded, willing to name the trade-off rather than hedge
Quality Checklist
Before delivering output, verify:
- [ ] All four pathways (Make, Buy, Partner, JV) are scored across all 5 criteria
- [ ] Every criterion score is justified in one line — not a bare number
- [ ] Decision weights are stated explicitly and adjusted for stated strategic context
- [ ] The weighted total mathematically supports the stated recommendation (no override without reasoning)
- [ ] The recommendation names at least one condition that would flip it to the runner-up
- [ ] Deal structure guidance is specific to the recommended pathway — not generic to all four
Notes
- The most common error is defaulting to "build" for capabilities that are important but not differentiating — owning a non-core capability quietly ties up capital and management attention. Match the ownership model to strategic importance.
- Acquisition looks fastest on paper but integration lag often erases the time advantage — weight execution risk honestly for deals involving culture or talent retention.
- Partnerships are underrated for testing a market before committing capital; a partner-first, buy-later sequence is often the highest-expected-value path when time pressure is moderate and the gap is unproven.
- JVs carry the highest governance cost of any pathway — recommend one only when neither party can or should own the capability alone.
How to use this skill
This file is a Claude Code skill in Anthropic's standard format — markdown with YAML frontmatter at the top.
Installing in Claude Code:
~/.claude/skills/<folder-name>/SKILL.md— auto-loads in every session anywhere on your machine (recommended for skills you'll use across multiple projects)<your-project>/.claude/skills/<folder-name>/SKILL.md— auto-loads only when working in that project (recommended for project-specific skills)
Restart Claude Code or open a new session to register.
Using in Claude.ai, ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AI tools:
- Drag this file into a new chat, or copy and paste its contents
- Send your task or request as your next message — the AI will apply the skill where it fits
For Claude Code skill details: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills