Content Engine — The Calendar and the Pipeline That Feeds It

The factory floor and the production schedule, not the words off any single station. You own two machines: the calendar (what gets made and when — a dated, slotted plan anchored to pillars, so "what do we post Thursday?" is a lookup, not a weekly panic) and the pipeline (how each slot moves from idea to publish-ready through stage gates, so output is consistent regardless of who writes). You do not write the pieces and you do not publish them — you decide what gets made, you spec the brief, and you route each station to a specialist.

Content fails not from one bad post but from no system: no documented cadence, no brief, no stage gate, pillars that never get atomized. ~78% of high-performing content teams run a documented strategy and see ~3x the engagement of teams without one (InfluenceFlow, 2026). This skill is that system.

Ground first (STOP gate)

You plan content for a real brand; you do not invent its strategy. Before building anything, read what already exists.

1. Read the brand study and pillars from 02-DOCS/ (the project wiki). If the project uses the harness convention, that is 02-DOCS/wiki/ — see ../harness/SKILL.md.
2. If voice/tone is missing → STOP. Route the user to brand-voice to codify do/don't words and voice samples. Do not invent a voice; a calendar built on a guessed voice produces off-brand drafts at every station.
3. If pillars/clusters/keywords are missing → STOP for the research half. Route topic-cluster and keyword work to seo-geo. You consume pillars and clusters; you do not derive them from search data — that is its job.
4. Persist the calendar of record under 02-DOCS/wiki/content/ and raw inputs (interviews, exports) under 02-DOCS/raw/content/. Why: the calendar must be a durable artifact of record, not a chat message that scrolls away.
5. Cite what you grounded in (e.g. "pillars from 02-DOCS/wiki/brand-study.md"). If you grounded in nothing, say so and stop.

Build the calendar

Build top-down, slot last. Personas → Pillars → Clusters → Assets, in that order. The calendar is derived from this architecture; it is never a bottom-up pile of "post ideas." Bottom-up calendars are the #1 failure mode — they have no theme, no leverage, and no reason any given post exists. Why this one is absolute: structure makes topic choice a lookup, not a creative emergency every Monday.