pm-challenger

pm-challenger is a skill for Claude Code from jeffclark/product-skill-helm. It costs 38 tokens per session (2,212 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review method for challenging product-management documents before they are produced. It uses assigned reviewer perspectives to question assumptions and unclear requirements.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before creating brainstorming documents, product requirements, user stories, go-to-market plans, or analytics artifacts.
Why use it?
It exposes scope problems and missing clarity early, before they become part of a product plan or other document.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the helm plugin — 1 skill, 4 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it before creating brainstorming documents, product requirements, user stories, go-to-market plans, or analytics artifacts.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jeffclark/product-skill-helm/pm-challenger
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 jeffclark/product-skill-helm --skill pm-challenger
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jeffclark/product-skill-helm

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install helm, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill, 4 agents.

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 pm-challenger

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffclark/product-skill-helm/pm-challenger/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffclark/product-skill-helm/pm-challenger)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffclark/product-skill-helm/pm-challenger"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffclark/product-skill-helm/pm-challenger/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 pm-challenger

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffclark/product-skill-helm/pm-challenger"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffclark/product-skill-helm/pm-challenger.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,212 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 original No closer match found 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 $0.00038 $0.02212
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.01106
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00442
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00221

Measured 9d ago against content hash 0b4baae007d8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pm-challenger 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 9d 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.

plugins/helm/skills/pm-challenger/SKILL.md · 203 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 203 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Persona Panel

Before running any challenger review, load the assigned persona file for the current artifact phase. The persona governs Q&A questions, review voice, flag angles, skip response, and override acknowledgment. No persona-specific content lives in this file.

Phase Persona File Reviewer
Brainstorm references/persona-graham.md Paul Graham
PRD references/persona-cagan.md + references/persona-jobs.md Marty Cagan + Steve Jobs (parallel)
Stories references/persona-cagan.md Marty Cagan
GTM references/persona-graham.md Paul Graham
Analytics references/persona-bezos.md Jeff Bezos

When loading Cagan's persona, prepend the current phase: Phase: PRD or Phase: Stories. At PRD, Cagan does not flag simplicity or precision issues — those belong to Jobs.

PM Challenger

The challenger layer runs before every PM artifact. Its job: surface problems before they get baked into deliverables, not after. It questions assumptions, flags scope creep, and demands clarity on vague requirements — then hands back to the PM to decide.

The challenger does not refuse. It flags, explains, and offers a resolution path. The PM makes every final call.

When to Challenge

Run a challenger review before generating any artifact (PRD, stories, GTM plan, analytics plan, brainstorm output). Do not skip it even if the topic seems simple.

Mandatory triggers — always flag these, no exceptions:

  • More than 3 unrelated use cases in a single feature description
  • Success criteria missing or unmeasurable ("users should find it useful")
  • No target user identified or target user is "everyone"
  • Feature modifies core user data with no mention of migration or rollback
  • GTM plan with no launch sequencing or rollout strategy
  • Analytics plan with no primary metric

The Four Flag Categories

SCOPE CREEP — The feature is trying to do more than one thing. Multiple independent jobs bundled together inflate complexity without proportional value.

Read the full file on GitHub · 203 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 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. 9d ago First seen · 203 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A 0b4baae007d8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pm-challenger is a skill published in the GitHub repository jeffclark/product-skill-helm (5 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 2,212 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Related

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