How to use Claude Projects and Skills to Monitor your Product’s Health
🧠 New year, new systems. A step-by-step guide to building a reusable product health system with Claude Projects and Skills. Knowledge Series #96
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Claude Projects is a feature that’s often overshadowed by other Anthropic tools like Claude Code and the newly released Skills which is set to become an open standard for the industry. What many people don’t realise though, is that you can combine Projects with features like Skills to build powerful, re-usable systems at work.
Since its release, Projects has quietly gained a bunch of new capabilities which now make it a pretty formidable tool for managing your interactions with Claude across various different use cases.
The start of the year is a time when product teams and companies take a step back to assess their performance and re-evaluate some of the goals that may have been set in the previous year. And in this Knowledge Series, we’ll explore how you can use Claude Projects to help with this by building a re-usable health check system to diagnose your performance today and manage your product’s health on an ongoing basis.
If you’ve not used Claude Projects before or are interested in understanding a bit more about how it can work alongside Claude Skills in a product context then this Knowledge Series should help.
Coming up:
What is Claude Projects and why is it useful for product teams?
A breakdown of Claude Projects’ most important functionality
How to use Projects to manage critical product / company health indicators, including:
Business / commercial health
Strategic health
UX health
User data and geolocation
Value proposition
How to use Projects together with new capabilities like Claude Skills to create shareable documents and decks using your product health metrics
Downloadable prompts, templates and examples you can use
What is Claude Projects?
Projects lets you create a self-contained space for you or your team to come back to over time. A Project has its own dedicated chat history, a knowledge base of uploaded documents and custom instructions that Claude will consider every time it generates a response.
You can also combine Projects with newer abilities like Skills and Claude for Excel to create artifacts from the output of your Projects that you can share with stakeholders and colleagues.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the various pieces and how they work. A project has two key characteristics when you first create it: a name and a description:
These can be edited later but in this example I’ve gone ahead and created one for our Product Health project.
Once you’ve created a Project, you’ll see the Projects home screen which includes the main chat interface and chat history of all your chat along with your custom instructions and files / data sources that are relevant to this project:
We’ll use this as the basis for our product health check where we’ll include custom instructions along with some sample prompts and file upload suggestions you can use but before we dig into that, let’s first explore the concept of a product health check and each of the various different health indicators you can use to monitor it.
The concept of a Product Health check explained
One of the biggest challenges that product people (and others) face when they’re tasked with crafting a product strategy or OKR set for the year ahead is figuring out where exactly to start. A health check gives you a snapshot of where things stand across multiple dimensions today with a view to using this to craft your product’s future strategy.
This is especially valuable when joining a new company or taking over a product, but regular health checks (quarterly or biannually) keep you grounded even when you’ve been working on the same product for years.
The Five Indicators of Product Health
Here’s a snapshot of some of the core metrics / indicators that product teams can measure when assessing their product’s health. We’ll use this as the basis of our Claude Project and Skills set up later:
You can tailor this in any way you like but I’ve stuck to this structure for the purposes of this Knowledge Series. We’ll run through some prompts you can use to build your own product health visualization later, too.
This example includes five different product health indicators:
User data fundamentals
Value proposition clarity
UX health
Business / commercial health
Strategic health
1. User Data Fundamentals
Before looking at more specific or complex metrics, it’s helpful to just focus on some of the basic user data fundamentals to ground the rest of your health.
Here are some examples of these basic fundamentals that we’ll use for our Claude Project:
Total visitors -> Active users -> Paying users (the conversion funnel)
Geolocation breakdown - where are users actually coming from? This directly impacts monetization strategy; if most users are in markets with lower purchasing power, your conversion assumptions may need revisiting.
Device distribution - desktop vs. mobile vs. tablet usage patterns, and whether your product is actually optimized for how people access it.
2. Value Proposition Clarity
For assessing the health of your value proposition, consider two critical questions:
Do users understand what we’re offering? If your own team can’t articulate the value prop clearly, customers won’t either.
Do they actually want it? Measure through PMF indicators: Very Disappointed score, NPS, LTV, CAC
VC firm Sequoia Capital’s classic piece on some of the metrics you can assess for product health is always useful to refer to to help structure your thinking, too.
3. UX Health
Here you can focus on top tasks or the most important actions users need to complete to get value from your product.
Key metrics for assessment can include things like:
Task completion rates
Conversion rates on critical journeys (signup, login, payment, value discovery)
Friction indicators: form validation errors, rage clicks, server-side errors
4. Business/Commercial Health
On commercial / business health, consider some of the following questions (again, not an exhaustive list by any means but some examples to help steer our Claude Project):
Is our monetization strategy clear and testable?
Are our revenues growing or shrinking?
What do our sales teams say about closing deals and market opportunity?
Is the company internally aware of macro trends and competitive threats?
5. Strategic Health
Signs of good strategic health include a clear vision, decisions that align with it and the ability to say no to opportunities that don’t fit.
Consider using the five types of differentiation to assess how differentiated your product is. The five main types include: Features, Policies, UX, Pricing, Performance. Can we articulate which ones we’re competing on?
The example template also includes a slot for “sustainable advantages” - the hard-to-copy strengths that let a product keep outperforming alternatives over time, not just win short-term feature races.
How to build your Product Health Project in Claude
Now let’s head back to Claude to start creating our Project based on these health indicators.
There are two main ways you can approach this: you can either create a single Project that includes everything you need in one place or you can set up specific Projects for each of the 5 areas and then create a “Super Project” that acts as your health checker.
We’ll look at both of these but first, let’s go through the single Project approach which is the easiest of the two to maintain over time. We’ll look at how to set this up along with some practical prompts you can use and file structures to make it easier for Claude Projects to understand which asset relates to which area of product health.
Approach 1: Using a single Claude Project
First, create your Project and give it a name and description. Once your Project is set up, we’ll need to give the Project some custom instructions. As a quick reminder, custom instructions are project‑specific guidelines that tell Claude how to behave, what context to assume, and how to format its outputs across all conversations in that project.
Here’s a sample prompt you can use to explain to Claude what role they should take and how exactly they should respond: