Kevin Payne

Kevin PayneOct 30, 2026

Team AI skills need two keys before they go live. On a GTM team I supported, a few people started building their own AI skills. They were fast. And every skill went live the moment it was saved. So on October 22, I proposed a release path with 2 roles and 1 handoff: 1. The builder interviews the person who runs the process. The real steps are in their head. 2. The builder saves the skill as a draft and stops. 3. A separate platform owner runs the draft on the owner's own examples. 4. Only the platform owner publishes, or sends it back with the example that failed. Step 1 is the one people skip under deadline. It's also the one that catches the wrong approver or the stale field. I don't have results yet. It's a proposal. But I know the failure it prevents. A skill looks finished, runs confidently and encodes the wrong process. The person who builds it shouldn't be the person who ships it. Who publishes AI skills on your team right now, the builder or someone else?

Kevin PayneOct 28, 2026

We built the list. Outbound still nearly stalled. The gap was what to say to each industry, and one approved matrix closed it before any copy got written. In a Series A SaaS operator role, I sat in the call where this surfaced. The research was easy to pull. Knowing which hooks mattered to a buyer was not, so one person shortlisted and I marked each one yes or no. Then the order: hook first, story second, product last. Sends capped at 100 a day, with a delivery check a week after launch. The cheat sheet below has the setup to copy. Which column of your outbound plan has no owner yet: story, feature, or hook?

Kevin PayneOct 27, 2026

Viktor read 229 deals in under 10 minutes, then told me what he could not measure. He asked to add three fields to my Notion before he'd call it a report. I'm Kevin Payne, a GTM engineer. I run The Operator Stack, a consulting and content practice that lives on a sponsorship pipeline. I started by asking Viktor questions. Then I handed him the whole Friday pipeline review, read-only, with one rule: if you can't find a field, say so. His first stuck-deal check was a false start. He used last edited date as a stand-in, and all 147 open deals showed the day I loaded the database. Nothing looked stuck. Then it clicked. He said plainly: I can't measure this. Notion doesn't record stage changes. No Owner field. No Paid date. 99 Applied deals had no next step or date. He proposed Stage Changed, Paid Date and Owner. I approved the card. Nothing else in Notion changed, and the report now runs Fridays at 8am Pacific. viktor.com is an AI employee that lives in Slack and Microsoft Teams, connects to 9,800+ tools, and proposes while the human approves. In partnership with Viktor. Hire Viktor for your team. $100 in credits included. Full link in first comment. #AIemployee #RevOps #GTM Paid Partnership