There's no shortage of agent skills for development and design output, but what about how you approach your project? How you work with a team and how you deliver value. This skill is your coach for the soft skills of shipping great design work.
It's grounded in the thoughtbot Playbook, blog posts, and the decades of experience from our design team.
| Who is this for? | What does it do? |
|---|---|
| Any designer working with a team to ship a product or feature. The skill is modeled around the four phases of a typical MVP project from design sprint to launch but can be used for any type of project. | The skill will review the process you and your team have followed, identify any gaps or risks, and help you develop the soft skills that are critical to delivering excellent design work and successful products. |
There are two ways the skill can be used...
Paste meeting notes, standup summaries, or a sprint recap and the skill will review your approach.
For more comprehensive feedback, trigger the skill with a prompt like...
- "Let's do a project check-in"
- "How am I doing on this project?"
- "Are we following good process?"
- "What are we missing?"
- "I want to reflect on how this project is going"
Then the skill will prompt you with a set of questions to learn more about your process and provide recommendations.
The skill evaluates how well you and the team are following a set of global principals along with other principals and practices that are specific to the four general phases of a project (sprint, week 1, active sprint cadence, wrap up/ship)
Global principles
- Find and communicate your niche on the team
- Be a good partner to dev and PM
- Be the voice of the user
- Solve a problem the client didn't know they had
- Practice continuous validation and derisking
- Think about your value: clarity, risk reduction, future vision, product intuition
- Move fluidly between discovery and delivery
This is an Agent Skill — a plain-markdown file that works with any AI assistant capable of reading skill files, including Claude, ChatGPT, and coding agents like Codex, Cursor, and Gemini CLI.
If you use a terminal-based agent, install with one command:
npx skills add thoughtbot/design-process-coach
By default this installs to the current project. Use flags to target a specific agent or scope:
npx skills add thoughtbot/design-process-coach --agent claude-code --global
npx skills add thoughtbot/design-process-coach --agent codex --global
npx skills add thoughtbot/design-process-coach --agent cursor
Once installed, invoke it with /design-process-coach, or trigger it automatically by pasting meeting notes and asking for an evaluation.
No install step needed. Choose whichever fits your workflow:
- One-off use — paste this repo's link into a conversation and ask ChatGPT to read the
SKILL.md, or paste the contents ofSKILL.mddirectly. - Reusable setup — create a Custom GPT (or add to a Project's custom instructions) and paste the contents of
SKILL.mdas its instructions. It will then apply the evaluation automatically whenever you share notes.
Upload the .skill file via Settings → Capabilities → Skills, or paste this repo's link into a conversation and ask Claude to read the SKILL.md.
Download SKILL.md and place it in your agent's skills directory:
- Claude Code —
~/.claude/skills/design-process-coach/SKILL.md(global) or.claude/skills/design-process-coach/SKILL.md(project) - Codex —
~/.codex/skills/design-process-coach/SKILL.md - Cursor —
~/.cursor/skills/design-process-coach/SKILL.md
For any other assistant, paste the contents of SKILL.md into a system prompt, custom instructions, or the conversation directly.
If you installed with npx, update anytime:
npx skills update
For manual installs, re-download SKILL.md and replace your local copy. Watch the repo or check the releases page to know when updates are available.
This skill is maintained by thoughtbot. We are passionate about open source software and helping teams ship maintainable, well-tested software.
See thoughtbot's other projects.
The names and logos for thoughtbot are trademarks of thoughtbot, inc.