problem-framing

problem-framing is a skill for Claude Code from Avyayalaya/pm-skills-arsenal. It costs 103 tokens per session (20,509 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of problem-framing, MIT.

A structured method for defining a problem, including who has it, why it matters, its constraints, and which parts should be addressed first.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create a Problem Definition Document before product discovery, competitive analysis, specification writing, or metric design.
Why use it?
It prevents teams from treating a vague request or proposed feature as the real problem without checking the underlying need.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Codex.

Part of the pm-skills plugin — 12 skills, 1 hook, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it to create a Problem Definition Document before product discovery, competitive analysis, specification writing, or metric design.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/avyayalaya/pm-skills-arsenal/problem-framing
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Avyayalaya/pm-skills-arsenal --skill problem-framing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Avyayalaya/pm-skills-arsenal

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pm-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills, 1 hook, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for problem-framing

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avyayalaya/pm-skills-arsenal/problem-framing/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/avyayalaya/pm-skills-arsenal/problem-framing)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/avyayalaya/pm-skills-arsenal/problem-framing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avyayalaya/pm-skills-arsenal/problem-framing/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for problem-framing

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/avyayalaya/pm-skills-arsenal/problem-framing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avyayalaya/pm-skills-arsenal/problem-framing.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 103 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 20,509 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 97% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00103 $0.20509
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.10254
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.04102
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.02051

Measured 11d ago against content hash 36587cd86af7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

problem-framing scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

97% identical to problem-framing — 113 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/problem-framing/SKILL.md · 1,213 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 1,213 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

Produce a Problem Definition Document — a structured artifact that decomposes a vague or assumed problem into an evidence-graded problem statement with identified stakeholders, quantified opportunity size, mapped constraints, and prioritized sub-problems. This is the upstream skill that feeds every downstream PM activity: Discovery, Competitive Analysis, Spec Writing, and Metric Design. The output is not a brief or a pitch — it is a rigorous decomposition that forces the question "What exactly are we solving and for whom?" to be answered with evidence, not assumption.

When to Use / When NOT to Use

Use this skill when:

  • A stakeholder says "we should build X" and you need to determine whether X solves a real problem
  • You have a vague problem area ("user retention is bad") that needs decomposition into solvable sub-problems
  • Multiple teams disagree on what the real problem is — you need a shared, evidence-graded definition
  • You are starting a new product initiative and need to define the problem space before Discovery or Competitive Analysis
  • A feature request arrives disguised as a problem statement and you need to peel back to the actual user pain
  • You need to prioritize across multiple candidate problems with limited resources
  • An existing product is underperforming and nobody agrees on why

Do NOT use this skill when:

  • The problem is already well-defined and validated — you need a spec, not more framing (use Spec Writing)
  • You need to understand the competitive landscape (use Competitive & Market Analysis — that skill consumes this one's output)
  • You need to design metrics for an already-defined feature (use Metric Design & Experimentation)
  • You need to run user research — this skill identifies what research to do, not how to do it (use Discovery & Research)
  • The "problem" is a technical bug with a known root cause (use your bug tracker)

Anti-inputs (what this skill does NOT handle):

  • Solution design or feature specification (-> Spec Writing skill)
  • User research methodology and interview design (-> Discovery & Research skill)
  • Competitive positioning (-> Competitive & Market Analysis skill)
  • Metric hierarchy and experiment design (-> Metric Design & Experimentation skill)
  • Organizational change management (this is product problem framing, not org design)

Read the full file on GitHub · 1,213 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 1,213 lines · 103 tokens per session scan A 36587cd86af7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

problem-framing is a skill published in the GitHub repository Avyayalaya/pm-skills-arsenal (6 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 103 tokens to every session and 20,509 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 97% identical to problem-framing, differing in 113 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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