Audience Impact

When assessing a change, ask: who is on the other end, and how fast does this reach them?

This skill provides a mental model — not an exhaustive ledger. Use it to reason about which audiences a change affects, then load the catalog skills for detailed surface tracing when needed.

How to use this skill

1. Identify which roles and deployment modes the change touches (see definitions below)
2. Look up the change type in the impact propagation table to see how fast and how visibly it reaches each audience
3. Flag any silent impacts explicitly — these slip through review most often
4. If deeper surface tracing is needed, Load: product-surface-areas (customer-facing) or internal-surface-areas (internal subsystems)
5. Use the deliverables table to determine what artifacts the change needs (changeset, docs, migration guide, etc.)

When multiple audiences are affected, address them in pipeline order: immediate impacts first (Contributor), then versioned impacts (Builder — changeset + migration guide), then deployed impacts (Platform User — QA), then infrastructure (Self-hosted — docs). This matches the natural merge → publish → deploy sequence.

Two-axis model

Audiences decompose into two independent axes: