playing-to-win

playing-to-win is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills. It costs 201 tokens per session (2,103 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley's Playing to Win strategy framework. It organizes strategy around choices about the goal, target market, way to win, required abilities, and management systems.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write or review strategy, choose markets, define competitive advantage, or clarify what winning means.
Why use it?
It helps turn broad ambitions into a connected set of choices instead of a list of plans.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to write or review strategy, choose markets, define competitive advantage, or clarify what winning means.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/playing-to-win
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 marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills --skill playing-to-win
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 playing-to-win

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/playing-to-win/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/playing-to-win)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/playing-to-win"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/playing-to-win/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 playing-to-win

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/playing-to-win"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/playing-to-win.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 201 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,103 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 $0.00201 $0.02103
Opus 5 $0.00101 $0.01052
Sonnet 5 $0.00040 $0.00421
Haiku 4.5 $0.00020 $0.00210

Measured 11d ago against content hash cca0b731fe86, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

playing-to-win 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.

skills/playing-to-win/SKILL.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Playing to Win

Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley's 5-question integrated cascade for strategy — distilled from the 2013 book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works (Harvard Business Review Press) plus 12+ years of Martin's post-book refinements in HBR, his Medium "Playing to Win / Practitioner Insights" series, and podcast interviews (including Lenny Rachitsky, 2024).

This skill helps you think in the cascade, not just recite it. It's opinionated because Martin is opinionated: strategy is an integrated set of choices, not a checklist. Applying one question without the others isn't Playing to Win — it's the thing Martin spends most of his airtime critiquing.

When this skill activates

Use this skill when the user is:

  • Drafting or critiquing a strategy document (theirs or someone else's).
  • Deciding whether/how to enter a market, launch a product, or move into a new segment.
  • Working out what "winning" means for their company, product, or team.
  • Struggling to articulate their competitive edge or unfair advantage.
  • Confused about the difference between strategy and planning (a distinction Martin cares about deeply).
  • Doing annual planning or strategy reviews.
  • Reviewing an offsite output that "looks like strategy" but might not be.

Do NOT use this skill when:

  • The user is pre-product/market fit as a startup founder — Martin himself says the cascade is not the right tool for pre-PMF search (his words in Lenny's podcast, 2024). Suggest a lean/discovery frame instead.
  • The user is asking a purely operational or execution question ("how do we ship faster?"). Martin explicitly separates strategy from ops.
  • The user's question is really about culture, hiring, or organizational design without a competitive-choice angle.
  • The user just wants a summary of Playing to Win. Give the book link and don't run the cascade.

If the user's situation is ambiguous, ask one clarifying question before applying the cascade.

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 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. 11d ago First seen · 87 lines · 201 tokens per session scan A cca0b731fe86

Subscribe to this mod's changes

playing-to-win is a skill published in the GitHub repository marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 201 tokens to every session and 2,103 once invoked, about $0.0010 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

Other skills, from other repositories

acquire-skills

Find and install skills for what you're doing — tech or reasoning gaps. Matches activity and tech context to relevant skills. Use when entering unfamiliar tech, stuck on a reasoning challenge, or no skill fits.

martineserios/thebrana · 45 tokens

find-skills

Helps users discover and install agent skills when they ask questions like "how do I do X", "find a skill for X", "is there a skill that can...", or express interest in extending capabilities. This skill should be used when the user is looking for functionality that might exist as an installable skill.

rexleimo/aios · 67 tokens

endpoint-discovery

Discovers URLs, endpoints, and paths from web applications using katana, gospider, and gau. Use when needing to enumerate application endpoints, find hidden paths, gather historical URLs, or map web application structure during reconnaissance.

zebbern/termstack · 50 tokens

param-miner

Discover hidden HTTP parameters in web applications that could reveal hidden functionality or vulnerabilities. Use when testing APIs, when looking for hidden parameters like admin or debug, or when the user mentions parameter discovery.

zebbern/termstack · 42 tokens

git-workflow

This skill should be used when the user asks to "create git commit", "manage branches", "follow git workflow", "use Conventional Commits", "handle merge conflicts", or asks about git branching strategies, version control best practices, pull request workflows. Provides comprehensive Git workflow guidance for team…

Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar · 64 tokens

daily-paper-generator

Use when the user asks to generate daily paper digests on a general topic. This skill supports both arXiv and bioRxiv (or either one), then produces structured Chinese/English summaries for selected papers.

Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar · 47 tokens