Product & Innovation

Product & Innovation skills for your AI agent.

Ten skills covering the full arc of product work: deciding what to build, deciding whether it worked, and getting people to come back. The Mom Test and Jobs to Be Done handle evidence — how to ask, and what to listen for. Continuous Discovery, Design Sprint and Lean Startup handle the shape of learning: a weekly cadence, a facilitated week, or a designed experiment with the pivot threshold written down first. Lean Analytics picks the number. Inspired and The 37signals Way handle how the work gets organized and capped. Improve Retention and Hooked UX handle what happens after people arrive.

What changes is where your agent starts. Asked to “plan the next quarter,” an unequipped agent produces a feature list with dates. With these it asks what outcome the quarter is accountable for, maps opportunities beneath it, marks which of your interview questions begin with “would you,” names the one metric that would actually change a decision, and tells you the roadmap item everyone agreed on has no stated hypothesis behind it.

10 skills Updated Free & MIT-licensed

Which product skill answers the question I’m stuck on?

Pick by the question you can’t currently answer. Does anyone want this → The Mom Test, which rewrites hypotheticals into questions about last Tuesday and marks which lines in your notes were politeness. Why would they hire it → Jobs to Be Done, for the progress a customer is trying to make. Which of these three ideas → Design Sprint, when you can hold everyone’s calendar for five days and need to end with a decision rather than a workshop write-up. Is the business model real → Lean Startup. How do we stop researching in bursts → Continuous Discovery, for an opportunity solution tree and a weekly interview habit. Which number means anything → Lean Analytics. Why does the team ship features nobody agreed the purpose of → Inspired. Why does every project overrun → The 37signals Way, which cuts scope instead of moving the date. And after people arrive: they do the core action once and stop → Improve Retention; they’d like to return and nothing brings them back → Hooked UX.

Discovery stacks best as a trio — The Mom Test, Jobs to Be Done, Continuous Discovery — because they answer how to ask, what to listen for, and how to keep doing it. Pair whichever you pick with Lean Analytics, or you’ll learn a great deal and still not know whether anything improved.

All 10 Product & Innovation skills

Jobs to Be Done

Competing Against Luck — Clayton Christensen

Jobs to Be Done turns Clayton Christensen’s Competing Against Luck into instructions your AI agent loads on demand. It makes the agent reconstruct the progress a customer was trying to make — the circumstance, the struggle, the functional, social and emotional stakes — then judge every feature against that job rather than against a competitor’s feature list.

  • The Job, Not the Product
  • Circumstances & Struggles
  • Competing Against Nonconsumption

Try “Conduct a JTBD interview analysis for my productivity app using jobs-to-be-done skill”

Hooked UX

Hooked — Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal’s Hooked explains how products become habits, and Hooked UX is the free AI agent skill that puts the model to work. Your agent maps your product onto the four-step cycle — trigger, action, variable reward, investment — names the step your loop is missing, and designs the fix without reaching for another notification.

  • The Hook Model
  • External & Internal Triggers
  • Reducing Friction

Try “Map the Hook cycle for my social media app using hooked-ux skill”

Improve Retention

Tiny Habits — BJ Fogg

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.

  • B=MAP Model
  • Shrink the Behavior
  • Ability Chain

Try “Analyze why users drop off after signup and design habit loops using improve-retention skill”

Lean Startup

The Lean Startup — Eric Ries

Lean Startup is a free AI agent skill built on Eric Ries’s book. It puts Build-Measure-Learn in your agent’s hands: name the leap-of-faith assumption, design the smallest experiment that could disprove it, choose one actionable metric over the flattering ones, and write down the pivot-or-persevere threshold before the experiment is allowed to run.

  • Build-Measure-Learn
  • Minimum Viable Product
  • Validated Learning

Try “Define an MVP scope for my product idea using lean-startup skill”

Design Sprint

Sprint — Jake Knapp

Ask your agent for a Design Sprint and you get Jake Knapp’s five-day process from Sprint, hour by hour: Monday’s map and target, Tuesday’s solo sketching, Wednesday’s Decider, Thursday’s facade prototype, Friday’s five customer interviews. The skill produces the artifacts — sprint questions, prototype brief, five-act interview script — rather than a summary of the method.

  • Map & Target
  • Sketch Solutions
  • Decide

Try “Plan a 5-day design sprint for our new onboarding flow using design-sprint skill”

Continuous Discovery

Continuous Discovery Habits — Teresa Torres

Continuous Discovery installs Teresa Torres’s Continuous Discovery Habits as a practice your agent can actually run — an opportunity solution tree from outcome down through opportunities, solutions and assumption tests, a weekly interview cadence instead of research campaigns, and experiments sized to the risk rather than to the calendar.

  • Opportunity Solution Trees
  • Weekly Customer Interviews
  • Assumption Mapping

Try “Build an opportunity solution tree for our user onboarding outcome using continuous-discovery skill”

Inspired

Inspired — Marty Cagan

Marty Cagan’s Inspired is about how strong product organizations work, and this skill hands that model to your agent: the four risks tackled during discovery before anything is committed to delivery, teams given problems rather than dated feature lists, and a product vision and strategy concrete enough for a team to act on.

  • Empowered Product Teams
  • Product Discovery
  • Four Key Risks

Try “Assess the four key risks for this product idea and suggest discovery activities using inspired-product skill”

The Mom Test

The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick

The Mom Test skill takes Rob Fitzpatrick’s book and makes your agent the person who checks your questions before you ask them — rewriting hypotheticals into questions about last Tuesday, deleting every sentence that mentions your idea, and marking which lines in your notes were compliments dressed up as evidence.

  • The Mom Test Rules
  • Avoiding Bad Data
  • Asking for Commitment

Try “Write interview questions for validating our product idea that follow The Mom Test using mom-test skill”

The 37signals Way

Shape Up — Jason Fried & DHH

The 37signals Way carries Shape Up and the wider Basecamp playbook — Getting Real, Rework — into your agent’s working memory. It shapes work against an appetite instead of estimating it, writes pitches with breadboards and named rabbit holes, plans six-week bets behind a circuit breaker, and cuts scope rather than moving the date.

  • Build Less
  • Shaping the Work
  • Betting & Cycles

Try “Shape a pitch for this feature idea using appetite, breadboard, and risks using 37signals-way skill”

Lean Analytics

Lean Analytics — Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz

Lean Analytics gives your agent the measurement half of the lean toolkit, from Croll and Yoskovitz’s book: choose the One Metric That Matters for your business model and stage, separate numbers that change a decision from ones that only look good in a board deck, and draw a line in the sand with a target, a date and a consequence.

  • Good vs Vanity Metrics
  • One Metric That Matters
  • Metrics by Business Model

Try “Pick the One Metric That Matters for our SaaS at our current stage using lean-analytics skill”

npx skills add wondelai/skills --all --global

This skill is compatible with Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, and other agentskills.io-compatible agents.

Frequently asked questions

Ten is a lot. Which three cover the most ground?

The Mom Test, Jobs to Be Done and Lean Analytics. The first two stop you building confidently on compliments, and the third stops you celebrating a number that only goes up. That trio spans the two failures that waste the most time: shipping something nobody wanted, and not noticing. Everything else in the category refines how you run that loop — as a five-day sprint, a weekly habit, a six-week bet, or an org design.

Do Hooked UX and Improve Retention do the same thing?

They diagnose retention differently, and picking the wrong one wastes a quarter. Improve Retention uses B=MAP and assumes the behavior failed on motivation, ability or prompt — usually ability, so the fix is to shrink the action. Hooked UX assumes people would return if the product gave them a reason, and builds a trigger–action–variable reward–investment loop. If users want to come back and can’t, use Improve Retention. If they can and don’t, use Hooked UX.

I’m a solo founder with no product team. Which of these apply?

Most of them, with one exception. Inspired is written about product organizations — empowered teams, product leadership, discovery-and-delivery structure — and there’s little to apply when you are the whole team. The Mom Test, Jobs to Be Done, Lean Startup and Lean Analytics work at any size. The 37signals Way is arguably better for one person than for a company: appetite instead of estimates, and a hard stop on scope.

Where do these end and the Create an App journey begin?

The journey runs validation and architecture together in a fixed sequence, which is what you want when starting from an idea. These skills are for a live product with a specific unanswered question — week-two retention dropped, a feature everyone requested went unused, the roadmap has no stated outcomes. You reach for one framework, apply it, and get back to work rather than starting a phased program.

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