problem-framing

problem-framing is a skill for Claude Code from stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills. It costs 61 tokens per session (1,086 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A discovery aid that turns a client's request into a testable statement of the problem, especially when the client has already suggested a solution.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to clarify client needs, separate problems from solutions, and create a basis for checking whether an idea is true.
Why use it?
It helps prevent teams from building a proposed solution before confirming the real problem or desired outcome.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the discovery-phase plugin — 25 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to clarify client needs, separate problems from solutions, and create a basis for checking whether an idea is true.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/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 stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills --skill problem-framing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install discovery-phase, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 25 skills.

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/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/problem-framing/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/problem-framing)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/problem-framing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/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/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/problem-framing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/problem-framing.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 61 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,086 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 $0.00061 $0.01086
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00543
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00217
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00109

Measured 12d ago against content hash 514b19d33c91, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, 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 12d 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/discovery-phase/skills/problem-framing/SKILL.md · 78 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 78 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Problem Framing

Part of the discovery-phase skill pack · discovery group · reads discovery-context.md (run profile-builder first if missing).

Turns whatever the client said into a testable, falsifiable hypothesis. If the client already proposed a solution (very common in outsourcing), this skill un-pitches it back into a problem statement before anything downstream runs.

Step 1 — Read discovery context

Read discovery-context.md (sections 1. Client, 2. Product / Initiative). If section 2 says the client already proposed a solution, flag it — this skill will need to extract the underlying problem from that solution rather than starting clean.

If discovery-context.md is missing, ask the BA inline: "(a) client name + sector; (b) what's being explored in one line; (c) did the client propose the solution or did the agency?" — tag any unverified canvas field as [ASSUMED]. Never block; recommend profile-builder for high-stakes work.

Step 2 — Forbid solution-speak (mid-skill rule)

Apply this rule throughout: any phrasing like "build X", "add Y feature", "implement Z" is intercepted and reframed as "what outcome would X produce, and why is that outcome missing today?"

This applies even to the client's own framing. If the discovery-context says they want "an AI assistant", the canvas asks: "What job is the AI assistant supposed to do, and what's broken about how that job gets done today?"

Step 3 — Fill the canvas

Walk the BA through the canvas. Each section is 1-3 sentences max.

  1. Problem statement — who has the problem, in what context, what outcome they're not getting
  2. Why now — what changed in the world / market / client's business that makes this worth solving this quarter
  3. Target user — role, segment, size; if B2B, name the buyer AND the end user if different (often same in SMB, different in enterprise)
  4. Current workaround — how the user solves this today (Excel, manual ops, a competitor, contractors, doing nothing)
  5. Success signal — metric + direction + rough magnitude (NOT a feature; a behavior or outcome)
  6. Out of scope — explicit exclusions
  7. Open questions — 3-5 items research must answer

Read the full file on GitHub · 78 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 12d ago First seen · 78 lines · 61 tokens per session scan A 514b19d33c91

Subscribe to this mod's changes

problem-framing is a skill published in the GitHub repository stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills (1 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 61 tokens to every session and 1,086 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

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