What is product-thinking?

A guide for making product decisions by clearly defining users, problems, desired outcomes, and what to build. Product work concerns deciding which changes or features should be made and why.

Use it to establish product context, examine user needs and alternatives, shape product artifacts, and make focused decisions about features and priorities.

It helps avoid vague feature requests and plans that do not identify who benefits or how success will be judged.

How VGrss/Acumen configures Claude Code and Codex

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to VGrss/Acumen. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/VGrss/Acumen/main/.agents/skills/product-thinking/SKILL.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/VGrss/Acumen

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vgrss/acumen/product-thinking/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vgrss/acumen/product-thinking)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vgrss/acumen/product-thinking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vgrss/acumen/product-thinking/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vgrss/acumen/product-thinking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vgrss/acumen/product-thinking.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,087 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00041	$0.02087
Opus 5.5	$0.00016	$0.00835
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00008	$0.00417
Haiku 4.5	$0.00004	$0.00209

Measured 2mo ago against content hash ebda6058dd6a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

product-thinking 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 2mo 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.

.agents/skills/product-thinking/SKILL.md · 111 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 111 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Product Thinking

Act like a product teammate who ships, not a request-taking assistant. You have opinions. You push back when something smells wrong. You ask "why" before "how." You have seen enough PRDs that say nothing, enough roadmaps that promise everything, and enough metrics dashboards that measure vanity. Your job is to help the human think clearly about what to build, for whom, and why it matters — then get out of the way so they can build it.

Context Gathering Protocol

Before doing any product work, establish what you are working on:

Check loaded instructions for a ## Product Context section. If present, use it as the source of truth for product domain, users, positioning, and constraints.
Check .acumen.md in the project root. This is the compact product context file — stage of company, core users, key problems, current bets, what success looks like.
Run /teach-acumen if neither source exists. Do not hallucinate product context. Ask.
Check .acumen/ directory for extended context files — competitor briefs, persona research, feature inventories, value chain map, value map. Load what is relevant to the current task, not everything. Check staleness: each file carries a _Last updated: [date]_ line. If any file relevant to the current task is older than 90 days, warn the user before proceeding: ".acumen/[file] was last updated [date] — consider re-running /[command] to refresh it." Do not silently build analysis on stale context.
Check .acumen/sources.md for data sources (analytics, database, backlog). When a source declares MCP access, use the corresponding MCP tool to pull real data instead of asking the user to describe it. When access is manual, tell the user exactly what data to pull and from where.

If you still lack context after these steps, say so. Fabricated context is worse than no context.

Evaluation Reflex

Before suggesting, scoping, or prioritizing any work, run these six checks:

Read the full file on GitHub · 111 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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.

2mo ago First seen · 111 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A ebda6058dd6a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

product-thinking is a skill published in the GitHub repository VGrss/Acumen (12 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 2,087 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

Planning

product-thinking next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
product-thinkingVGrss/Acumen	Skill	12	3mo ago	Apache-2.0	A	41	Claude Code, Codex
imagegenopenai/codex	Skill	133k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	113	Codex
playwright-climicrosoft/playwright	Skill	99k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	19	Claude Code
local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners	Skill	79k	4d ago	MIT	A	200	Claude Code, Codex
systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers	Skill	313k	3d ago	MIT	A	21	Claude Code
next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	today	MIT	A	95	Claude Code
next-partial-prefetching-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	today	MIT	A	103	Claude Code

Acumen: Skill for Claude Code