pm-root-cause

pm-root-cause is a skill for Claude Code from ljucask/pureinn-product-development. It costs 0 tokens per session (5,217 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided investigation skill for finding the underlying cause of an unexpected change in a live product or business metric, such as higher churn or lower conversion.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate what changed, narrow down where the problem occurs, develop hypotheses, apply the Five Whys method, and identify the cheapest way to confirm the cause.
Why use it?
It separates real problems from measurement errors and tests plausible causes against evidence instead of stopping at the first explanation.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the pureinn-product-development plugin — 51 skills, 1 command shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate what changed, narrow down where the problem occurs, develop hypotheses, apply the Five Whys method, and identify the cheapest way to confirm the cause.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ljucask/pureinn-product-development/pm-root-cause
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 ljucask/pureinn-product-development --skill pm-root-cause
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ljucask/pureinn-product-development

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pureinn-product-development, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 51 skills, 1 command.

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-root-cause

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ljucask/pureinn-product-development/pm-root-cause/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ljucask/pureinn-product-development/pm-root-cause)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ljucask/pureinn-product-development/pm-root-cause"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ljucask/pureinn-product-development/pm-root-cause/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-root-cause

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ljucask/pureinn-product-development/pm-root-cause"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ljucask/pureinn-product-development/pm-root-cause.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,217 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 $0.00000 $0.05217
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.02609
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.01043
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00522

Measured 10d ago against content hash c4e966f252bf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pm-root-cause 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 10d 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.

skills/pm-root-cause/SKILL.md · 357 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 357 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

PM - Root Cause (diagnose an in-flight anomaly)

Agent mode (--agent)

This skill's value is the live dialogue - --agent is not supported. If invoked with --agent, warn once ("this skill needs interactive back-and-forth; agent mode would hollow it out") and proceed interactively.


What this skill does

Something live is behaving unexpectedly - a metric moved, users act strangely, churn spiked, a feature flopped. You describe the symptom; the skill runs a structured investigation and drills to the real root cause, then hands you testable hypotheses and the cheapest way to confirm.

This is in-flight diagnosis, not foundational validation. It differs from the neighbours:

  • pm-problem-validation - is the core problem real (at project start)?
  • pm-stress-test - poke holes in my plan (adversarial, before a room)?
  • pm-root-cause - why is THIS happening now (diagnostic, on a live thing)?

Two modes:

Mode When What it does
Guided investigation (default) You want to find the cause Interactive Socratic drill through the steps: real vs artifact → localize → what changed → candidate causes → 5 Whys → evidence-vs-guess → confirm test
Quick differential You just want the candidate-cause map One pass: for the stated anomaly, the likely causes, their data signature, and exactly what data to pull to confirm/rule out - no long back-and-forth

Data-optional (graceful). If you have analytics, the skill uses it. If not, it still structures the investigation and tells you exactly which data to pull and how to read it.


Hard rule: don't stop at the first plausible cause

The single most common failure of root-cause work is premature closure - grabbing the first believable answer and stopping. This skill actively resists it:

  • Correlation is not causation. Two things moving together is a lead, not a cause. Demand the mechanism ("how exactly did A produce B?").
  • Symptom is not root. "Engineer ran the wrong command" / "a bug" is a symptom - ask what allowed it.
  • Rarely one cause. Complex systems usually need several contributing factors. Ask: if we removed this one factor, would the anomaly still happen?
  • Separate what you KNOW (evidence) from what you GUESS (hypothesis). Never present a guess as a finding. Mark every candidate [EVIDENCE] or [HYPOTHESIS - untested].
  • Before accepting any root cause, run the validation checklist (end of skill).

Read the full file on GitHub · 357 lines

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. 10d ago First seen · 357 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A c4e966f252bf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pm-root-cause is a skill published in the GitHub repository ljucask/pureinn-product-development (2 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 5,217 tokens. 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.

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