product-marketing-context

Trigger phrases

Phrases that activate this skill when typed to Claude Code:

• product context
• set up context
• positioning
• describe my product
• ICP

What it does

product-marketing-context is a Claude Code skill from Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. It’s the foundation skill — it walks you through building .agents/product-marketing-context.md, a structured document with positioning, ICP, differentiation, value props, voice, and competitive frame. Every other Haines marketing skill reads that file before asking questions. The skill activates when you mention “product context”, “set up context”, “positioning”, or “describe my product”.

The output of a session is a populated product-marketing-context.md that subsequent skills read automatically — meaning you stop re-explaining your product, audience, and positioning every time you start a new task.

When to use it

Reach for it when:

• You’re starting a new project and want every Haines skill to share the same foundational context
• Your messaging has drifted across team members and channels and needs a single source of truth
• You’re about to invest a week in marketing work and want the inputs documented before you start

When not to reach for it:

• You only need to run one quick skill once; the overhead exceeds the gain
• Positioning isn’t stable yet — context for shifting positioning ages out fast

Install

The skill is distributed via Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. Install via the repo’s recommended path — copy the product-marketing-context SKILL.md into your project’s .claude/skills/product-marketing-context/ directory, or use the repo’s plugin install if you’ve set it up.

Once installed, the skill activates on the trigger phrases above. Note: this skill creates the context file every other Haines skill expects — running it first is the highest-leverage move in the entire bundle.

What a session looks like

A typical session has three phases:

1. Inputs. Product, ICP (with disqualifiers, not just qualifiers), top three differentiators, top three competitors, voice and tone, current positioning narrative.
2. Synthesis. The skill drafts the context file, asks clarifying questions where the inputs were thin, and pressure-tests the differentiation claims.
3. File write + check. Writes .agents/product-marketing-context.md, lists the other skills that will now consume it, and recommends the first task to run with the context loaded.

The discipline that makes it work: this is positioning work, not data entry. The skill asks for disqualifiers (who you’re not for) because they’re more discriminating than qualifiers.

Receipts

Honest reporting on what product-marketing-context produces and where it has limits:

Where it works well:

• Eliminates the “explain the product again” tax across every other skill — the compounding effect is real
• Disqualifier framing produces sharper ICP definitions than “who’s our ICP” alone
• The context file becomes a useful artifact for onboarding new team members, not just Claude

Where it backfires:

• Stale context files do more harm than no context — the skill recommends a quarterly refresh
• If positioning is genuinely unsettled, locking it into a file prematurely calcifies the wrong thing

Pattern that works: run this skill once, run it again every quarter or after any major positioning shift, and reference it from every other Haines-skill session. The compounding return is the entire reason the bundle is designed this way.

Source and attribution

Originally written by Corey Haines. The canonical SKILL.md and any supporting files live in the product-marketing-context folder of his marketing-skills repository.

License: MIT. You can install, adapt, and redistribute the skill, with attribution preserved.

This page documents the skill from a practitioner’s perspective. For the formal spec and any updates, defer to the source repo.