problem-statement

A user-centered description of a problem that records who is affected, what they are trying to do, what blocks them, why it happens, and how it feels.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to frame product problems, align stakeholders, prepare a product requirements document, and describe user outcomes and barriers.
Why use it?
It keeps teams focused on the user’s actual difficulty instead of jumping straight from a request to a feature. This supports clearer discovery, prioritization, and product requirements.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/derricktang/pm-workflow-plugin/problem-statement
Any agent
npx skills add derricktang/pm-workflow-plugin --skill problem-statement
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/derricktang/pm-workflow-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 44 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,216 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 98% 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 $0.00044 $0.02216
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.01108
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00443
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00222

Measured yesterday against content hash 76a569725248, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

problem-statement 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 yesterday.

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

98% identical to problem-statement — 3 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.

plugins/pm/pm-workflow/skills/problem-statement/SKILL.md · 250 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 250 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

Articulate a problem from the user's perspective using an empathy-driven framework that captures who they are, what they're trying to do, what's blocking them, why, and how it makes them feel. Use this to align stakeholders on the problem before jumping to solutions, and to frame product work around user outcomes rather than feature requests.

This is not a requirements doc—it's a human-centered problem narrative that ensures you're solving a problem worth solving.

Key Concepts

The Problem Framing Framework

Based on Jobs-to-be-Done and empathy mapping, the framework structures problems as:

Problem Framing Narrative:

  • I am: [Describe the persona experiencing the problem]
  • Trying to: [Desired outcomes the persona cares about]
  • But: [Barriers preventing the outcomes]
  • Because: [Root cause of the problem]
  • Which makes me feel: [Emotional impact]

Context & Constraints:

  • [Geographic, technological, time-based, demographic factors]

Final Problem Statement:

  • [Single, concise, empathetic summary]

Why This Structure Works

  • Persona-centric: Forces you to see the problem through the user's eyes
  • Outcome-focused: "Trying to" emphasizes desired results, not tasks
  • Root cause analysis: "Because" pushes past symptoms to underlying issues
  • Emotional validation: "Makes me feel" humanizes the problem and builds empathy
  • Contextual: Constraints acknowledge real-world limitations

Anti-Patterns (What This Is NOT)

  • Not a solution in disguise: "The problem is we lack AI-powered analytics" = sneaking in a solution
  • Not a business problem: "Our revenue is down" isn't a user problem (it's a symptom)
  • Not a feature request: "Users need a dashboard" isn't a problem (what are they trying to do?)
  • Not generic: "Users want better UX" is too vague to be actionable

When to Use This

  • Kicking off discovery or problem validation work
  • Aligning stakeholders before solutioning
  • Socializing a problem with engineering, design, or exec teams
  • When you have feature requests but unclear underlying problems
  • Pitching why a problem is worth solving

Read the full file on GitHub · 250 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. yesterday First seen · 250 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A 76a569725248

Subscribe to this mod's changes

problem-statement is a skill published in the GitHub repository derricktang/pm-workflow-plugin (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 2,216 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 98% identical to problem-statement, differing in 3 lines, and is treated as a copy.