Problem Statement

This is for when someone drops a feature request in your lap and you need to back up and figure out what problem you're actually solving. It walks you through a structured framework: who's blocked, what they're trying to do, what's stopping them, the root cause, and how it feels. The output is a one-sentence problem statement you can share with stakeholders before anyone starts building. It's heavy on the Jobs-to-be-Done angle and explicitly calls out anti-patterns like solution smuggling and generic personas. Use it to align teams during discovery or when kicking off a PRD, but only after you've done actual user research, not as a way to dress up assumptions.

skills.sh installs: 2.7K
GitHub stars: 7.9K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add deanpeters/product-manager-skills --skill problem-statement --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Purpose

Articulate a problem from the user's perspective using an empathy-driven framework that captures who they are, what they're trying to do, what's blocking them, why, and how it makes them feel. Use this to align stakeholders on the problem before jumping to solutions, and to frame product work around user outcomes rather than feature requests.

This is not a requirements doc—it's a human-centered problem narrative that ensures you're solving a problem worth solving.

Input

Works best with: Who the user is and what they're struggling to do. Also useful: What's blocking them, why it matters, how it feels, and supporting evidence.

Anything supplied with the invocation itself — text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an appended ARGUMENTS: line — counts as answers already given. Use it and skip whatever it covers; don't re-ask.

Arriving empty-handed? That works too. The skill asks for the user and their goal first — a problem statement without a specific 'who' is a solution looking for cover.

Example invocation: Problem statement: clinic schedulers double-book exam rooms because the calendar doesn't show equipment availability.

SKILL.md on GitHub