Improve Retention
Behavior design for user retention using B=MAP
Improve user retention by designing tiny habits using BJ Fogg's B=MAP model. This skill teaches your AI agent to reduce friction, boost motivation, and add prompts that make your product a natural part of users' daily routines.
Tiny Habits
npx skills add wondelai/skills/improve-retention --global This skill is compatible with Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, and other agentskills.io-compatible agents.
What is the Improve Retention skill?
Improve Retention packages BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits, and the B=MAP model behind it, as a skill your agent loads when usage is sliding. Every behavior that failed to happen gets blamed on exactly one of three things — motivation, ability or prompt — and the fix is usually to shrink the action until it survives a bad day.
Key concepts from Tiny Habits your agent applies
B=MAP Model
Behavior happens when Motivation, Ability, and Prompt converge at the same moment.
Shrink the Behavior
Make the target action so small it's impossible to fail — then celebrate the tiny win.
Ability Chain
Identify the weakest link: time, money, physical effort, mental effort, or routine disruption.
Prompt Design
Place prompts where motivation and ability are highest — after an existing habit or key moment.
Celebration & Shine
Create an immediate positive emotion after the behavior to wire the habit into the brain.
When to use Improve Retention — and when not to
Reach for it when
- Activation looks fine and week-two retention does not: people complete the core action once, then quietly stop.
- Your reminder emails go out at nine in the morning to everyone, whether or not that is a moment anyone could act.
- The core action takes eleven minutes and a decision, and you keep trying to solve that with more encouragement.
- You are about to ship a streak counter without knowing whether the blocker is effort, timing or wanting to at all.
Reach for something else when
- People leave because the product never did the job they hired it for — restart with Jobs to Be Done.
- You want a compounding engagement cycle with variable rewards and investment, not one behavior made easier — use Hooked UX.
- The action fails because the screen is confusing rather than effortful — UX Heuristics finds usability faults faster.
- You need to know which retention number to watch and what counts as good at your stage — that is Lean Analytics.
Example prompts for the Improve Retention skill
Analyze why users drop off after signup and design habit loops using improve-retention skill
Retention analysisApply B=MAP to improve daily active usage of our app using improve-retention skill
EngagementDesign prompts that catch users at their highest motivation using improve-retention skill
Notification designReduce friction in our core workflow using the Ability Chain using improve-retention skill
UX optimizationImprove Retention vs the other Product & Innovation skills
All 10 Product & Innovation skills are free and install the same way — the only question is which framework fits the job in front of you.
| Skill | Based on | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs to Be Done | Competing Against Luck — Clayton Christensen | JTBD framework for product innovation |
| Hooked UX | Hooked — Nir Eyal | Habit-forming product design |
| Improve Retention | Tiny Habits — BJ Fogg | Behavior design for user retention using B=MAP |
| Lean Startup | The Lean Startup — Eric Ries | Build-Measure-Learn methodology |
| Design Sprint | Sprint — Jake Knapp | 5-day process for validating ideas through prototyping |
| Continuous Discovery | Continuous Discovery Habits — Teresa Torres | Habits for continuous product discovery |
| Inspired | Inspired — Marty Cagan | Building products customers love |
| The Mom Test | The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick | Customer conversations that reveal the truth |
| The 37signals Way | Shape Up — Jason Fried & DHH | Lean, opinionated product development from Getting Real to Shape Up |
| Lean Analytics | Lean Analytics — Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz | Startup metrics and the One Metric That Matters |
Frequently asked questions
How do I install the Improve Retention skill?
Run npx skills add wondelai/skills/improve-retention --global. It takes about 30 seconds and needs no account. The Improve Retention skill then works in Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — anything that reads the open agentskills.io format — and your agent loads it on its own when a task calls for it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the source is at https://github.com/wondelai/skills.
Which book is the Improve Retention skill based on?
It packages Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg — founder of Stanford Behavior Design Lab. The skill distils the book's method into instructions your agent follows while it works, covering b=map model, shrink the behavior and ability chain. It sits in the Product & Innovation part of the library.
Isn’t this the same as the Hooked UX skill?
No, and the difference is diagnostic. B=MAP says a behavior occurs only when motivation, ability and a prompt converge at the same moment — so when it does not occur, precisely one of three things is missing and you go and fix that one. It is a model for behaviors that are failing, including ones that have never happened. Hooked starts from a behavior that already happens and engineers its recurrence. Different questions, and answering them in the wrong order is why so many retention projects ship a streak nobody wanted.
Why shrink the behavior instead of motivating people harder?
Because motivation is the least reliable of the three inputs. It spikes and crashes on a schedule you do not control, so any plan that requires a motivated user is a plan that works on good days only. Ability you can engineer permanently. Fogg’s Ability Chain names five links — time, money, physical effort, mental effort, and disruption to routine — and only the weakest one matters, so there is normally a single thing to fix rather than five. Shrink until the action survives a distracted Tuesday.
Tiny Habits is about personal habits — does it translate to a product?
Mostly, and the translation is what the skill does. The book’s examples are flossing and push-ups, but the mechanics port cleanly: a prompt is a notification or an existing screen, ability is your flow’s cost in time and thought, and the anchor — after I do X, I will do Y — becomes attaching your action to something the user already does. The element teams drop is celebration. Fogg argues immediate positive emotion is what wires the habit, which in software means a fast, legible confirmation rather than a silent toast.
Will this fix churn?
Only the behavioral half of it. It works on users who intend to come back and do not — forgetting, friction, bad timing — and does nothing for users who have decided the product is not worth returning to. Read your exit surveys first: “I forgot” and “too much hassle” are behavior design problems, “I did not need it” is a demand problem, and treating the second as the first buys you one month and costs you a quarter.
Guides that use this skill
Install Improve Retention
Free, open-source, and ready in 30 seconds.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/improve-retention --global MIT Licensed · Works with Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent & other agentskills.io agents · No account needed
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