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.
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.
Who does this change affect and how does it reach them? Maps audiences (roles × deployment modes) to impact propagation — immediate, next-publish, next-deploy, or silent. Use when planning, implementing, or reviewing a change to understand blast radius by audience. Complements product-surface-areas and internal-surface-areas (which catalog what exists; this skill tells you who cares). Triggers: who is affected, blast radius, breaking change, audience, persona, impact analysis, changeset needed, docs needed. Source: inkeep/agents.