thinking-jobs-to-be-done

thinking-jobs-to-be-done is a skill for Claude Code from tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills. It costs 40 tokens per session (799 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A Jobs to Be Done framework for deciding what users are trying to accomplish and why they adopt or ignore a product feature. It focuses on the situation, desired progress, outcome, and competing workarounds.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose what to build, explain weak feature adoption, compare alternatives such as manual work or spreadsheets, and identify gaps that need further user research.
Why use it?
It helps teams prioritize real user problems instead of choosing work based only on feature lists or assumptions, while requiring evidence such as tickets, analytics, or product behavior.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter.

Part of the cc-thinking-skills plugin — 28 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to choose what to build, explain weak feature adoption, compare alternatives such as manual work or spreadsheets, and identify gaps that need further user research.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-jobs-to-be-done
About the project

Claude Code Thinking Skills is a catalogue of 28 portable skills that give coding agents structured procedures for reasoning about decisions, diagnosis, risk, strategy, and related problems. It is intended for Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor, and other tools that support Agent Skills.

tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills · 1,306 stars · on GitHub

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 tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills --skill thinking-jobs-to-be-done
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cc-thinking-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 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 thinking-jobs-to-be-done

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-jobs-to-be-done/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-jobs-to-be-done)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-jobs-to-be-done"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-jobs-to-be-done/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 thinking-jobs-to-be-done

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-jobs-to-be-done"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-jobs-to-be-done.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 799 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. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 12 Mar 2026
  • Snyk pass 12 Mar 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00040 $0.00799
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00400
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00160
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00080

Measured 12d ago against content hash bfeb61a07611, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

thinking-jobs-to-be-done 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.

skills/thinking-jobs-to-be-done/SKILL.md · 57 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 57 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Jobs to Be Done

Core rule: users hire solutions for progress in a situation. Prioritize the job, forces, outcome, and competing workaround—not the feature list.

When to Use

  • Choosing what to build, cut, or prioritize when user need is unclear
  • Explaining low adoption of a shipped feature
  • Mapping competition beyond same-category products (email, spreadsheets, manual work, non-consumption)
  • Positioning or research when the progress sought is contested

Requires at least one evidence source: PRD/spec, tickets, support/sales notes, analytics/logs, or current product behavior. If none exist, name the research gap; do not invent quotes.

When NOT to Use

  • Pure execution once the job is known (bug fix, schema, CI, performance)—implement, do not rediscover the job
  • Retro-justifying a decision already locked—framework theater
  • Infrastructure/internal work with no end-user progress decision
  • When the open question is only how to implement a settled job

Procedure

  1. Name performers and circumstance. Who hires a solution, in what trigger situation, how often, and with what stakes. Prefer primary performers with daily high-stakes jobs over rare secondary ones.
  2. State the job, not the solution. Frame: When [circumstance], I want to [progress], so I can [outcome]. Reject solution-shaped statements ("use Slack", "add a dashboard"). Capture functional, emotional, and social dimensions only if evidence supports them.
  3. Map forces and switch. From artifacts: what push made the old way fail, what pull the new progress offers, what anxiety blocks switching, what habit keeps the status quo. List what they hire today—including non-software and non-consumption.
  4. Define done and outcome metrics. How the performer knows the job is finished. List outcomes to minimize and maximize (time-to-progress, rework, confidence, surprises). Prefer frequent, poorly served jobs over rare, adequately worked-around ones.
  5. Score candidates against the job. For each feature/priority: which job step it serves, performer share, frequency, quality of alternatives. Promote high-frequency underserved dimensions; demote polished work for well-served or low-stakes jobs.
  6. Strongest countercase. State the best case that the stated job is wrong (wrong performer, vanity metric, process-is-the-job, competition is actually non-consumption). If the countercase fits evidence better, revise the job before recommending build.
  7. Stop. Stop when one primary job statement, competing set, and outcome metrics are evidence-backed enough to change a build/position decision—or when artifacts cannot answer and research is the only next step.

Read the full file on GitHub · 57 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. 12d ago First seen · 57 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A bfeb61a07611

Subscribe to this mod's changes

thinking-jobs-to-be-done is a skill published in the GitHub repository tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills (1,306 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 799 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 2026-08-30.

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