What I learned sharing a Claude skill with my team
By Kaia Colban
During standup, I'm asked "what did you do yesterday?" and I can never remember. Not because I didn't do any work, but because I'd been moving so fast across so many things that I couldn't remember it off the top of my head.
I'm supposed to be updating Linear, but I suck at it. When I'm heads-down, I don't want to stop, switch tools, and narrate what I just did into a form. So the board goes dark, and standup-me looks like an idiot because of it.
So.. I built a skill to do it for me….
At the end of a thread I type "linear update." The skill reads the conversation, writes up what I did as Done tasks in our team's format, and turns the loose ends into follow-ups, each assigned to me or whoever should own it.
It knows my team for two reasons. A, I trained it on who we are and who does what. B, it can read our threads in Lore, so it can check who's actually working on what right now and who's owned what in the past.
That took a while to get right. But once it was, the skill went from note-taker to middle manager: assigning who should own what, based on their skills and how full their plate is.
It was different from grabbing some skill off the internet, because mine was already plugged into our Linear, Slack, etc., and knew our team context.
Sharing it taught me something I didn't expect
So I grabbed the skill's Lore URL and shared it with my team on Slack. Because I shared it through Lore, I could see who'd actually grabbed it and who hadn't. So I asked a couple of the people who hadn't. One had already built their own version (had I known, I'd have just stolen theirs). The rest just said, "oh, I missed your Slack." Which is the whole point: if you're too slammed to catch a Slack, you're too slammed to be hand-updating Linear. I could even see that a colleague had adapted the skill into something better, adding a rough time-per-task estimate from the message count and session timestamps. I loved it, so I folded their version into mine and pushed it out to everyone.
Fast forward a week, and Lore showed me that two people who'd grabbed the skill had barely touched it. Turns out that's normal. Skill activation hovers around 50 to 77%, and when a skill doesn't fire there's no error, no warning. It just quietly doesn't happen, and everything looks fine. So I asked again. One had their own method for tracking work, which I respect. The other said, "oh, I didn't know I had to ask the AI to run the skill. I thought it was automatic." Being able to see who it wasn't firing for, and go find out why, was a godsend. If we'd both kept assuming it was running when it wasn't, Linear would've ended up worse than before I built the thing. So I turned the skill into a scheduled task that runs for everyone at 9am (a lot of us work late, so "end of day" around here really means the next morning) and pushed out the new version.. yet again.
Building a skill isn't a one-time thing. A great one takes revisions and adaptations, and to do that I need to see who's using my skill, in what context, and how they're adapting it. I'm still figuring out how to best use the analytics to determine success and drive iteration. "Everyone has it" isn't my finish line. "Everyone uses it" is. So I'm curious: what analytics would you want to see to know your skills are working correctly, both for you and for your team?