exec-quality-narrative

Overview

QA leaders usually walk into a QBR with the data inverted: twelve slides of metrics building toward a conclusion on slide thirteen. Executives read in the opposite direction. The Minto Pyramid Principle (Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking, ISBN 978-0273710516) prescribes that "ideas should be communicated in a pyramid format in which ideas are organized top-down, starting with a main idea", with groupings under it that are MECE - mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive - because, per Minto, one "can't derive an idea from a grouping unless the ideas in the grouping are logically the same, and in logical order" (Barbara Minto, Wikipedia). The book's opening device is SCQA: Situation, Complication, Question, Answer - state the stable context, the thing that changed, the question that raises, and the answer immediately.

This skill applies that structure to quality data your existing test tooling already produces: the answer at the top, two to four MECE support groups under it, every number citing the artifact it came from.

When to use

A QBR, board update, or exec quality review is scheduled and the inputs (digests, KPI tables, OKR grades) exist but read as data, not narrative.
Leadership asks "is quality getting better or worse?" and the honest answer needs structure plus evidence rather than a dashboard link.
A quality investment ask (headcount, tooling, time) needs an exec-shaped argument built on the quarter's evidence.

Do not use this skill to:

Compute the underlying metrics - the qa-manager agent (this plugin) computes single-team digests from CI and tracker data, and quality-status-digest Part 2 rolls teams into a portfolio review. This skill starts where they end.
Draft next quarter's commitments - OKR drafting is out of scope; the narrative may end by pointing at the team's OKR set, not by inventing one.
Report to engineering peers. The audience here holds budget, not backlogs; a sprint-level test report is a different artifact.