Build Your Own Skills for Claude

Build Your Own Skills for Claude

The third session in the series. A 60-minute working session on Claude skills — what they are, how they work, and how to build your own. Skills are folders of instructions Claude reads when relevant; they turn a repeated request into a one-line trigger.

Audience: anyone who uses Claude.ai or Cowork. No coding required.

Topics covered

  • What a skill is — the definition, why it matters, and the two kinds (task-consistency vs. workflow + MCP).
  • Inside a skill — folder structure, SKILL.md anatomy, the magic description line, progressive disclosure, and optional folders.
  • Get one. Share yours. — scopes (bundled / personal / shared / org-provisioned) and the two paths to install and to share.
  • A real skill, under the hood — a full case study of /salesforce-churn-check: architecture, SKILL.md snippets, the output a CSM gets back, and why references and scripts earn their place.
  • The workflow, start to ship — build → smoke test (4 checks) → peer review (critique + comparison prompts) → iterate → distribute.
  • What’s next — the internal org skills already live, plus a 4-question thinking model for building your own.

The throughline: the body of a good skill is just a polished prompt — which is exactly what Workshop #2 set up.

Slides