Plane — Team Behavior Observatory

A behavioral observation layer on top of Plane's project-tracking API. This skill does not wrap Plane CRUD — mcp__plane already does that and you should call it directly for ticket entry, status changes, etc.

Instead, this skill answers behavioral questions about how a team is actually performing under pressure: cycle velocity vs. plan, ownership churn, reviewer gate strength, priority drift, and cross-project load. Each question is answered by a compound command that synthesizes data across multiple Plane endpoints — observations no single endpoint exposes.

Overview

The NOI (references/noi.md) is the design anchor: Plane is a team behavior observatory. Five compound commands derive from that framing:

1. /plane-cycle-velocity — does cycle close-out match cycle planning?
2. /plane-stale-tickets — which In Progress tickets are quietly failing under shared ownership?
3. /plane-reviewer-gate-strength — which reviewers gate-keep harder than the spec demands?
4. /plane-priority-drift — does the team plan high-priority work but ship low-priority work?
5. /plane-cross-project-load — which engineers are spread across too many active projects?

None of these are answerable from any single Plane API call. Each requires cross-endpoint synthesis. That synthesis is the value.

Prerequisites

• mcp_plane MCP server installed and configured (env vars PLANEAPIKEY, PLANEWORKSPACESLUG, PLANEAPIHOSTURL)
• A Plane workspace with at least one project, cycle, and active issues (otherwise the commands return informative empty states)

Authentication

This skill does not handle credentials directly. Auth is delegated to the MCP server. See references/api-surface.md for the env-var setup; if mcp__plane returns an auth error, the skill surfaces the error verbatim and instructs the user to verify their token.

Instructions

Mode detection

Determine user intent from their prompt:

• Compound query mode (default): user asks about cycle health, team behavior, stale tickets, reviewer patterns, priority drift, or workload distribution → route to plane-analyst agent (see agents/plane-analyst.md) which orchestrates the compound commands.
• API help mode: user asks "how do I query X in Plane" or "what endpoint does Y" → route to plane-expert agent (see agents/plane-expert.md) which answers from references/api-surface.md without firing live API calls.
• Skill metadata: user asks "what does this skill do" / "explain p