The team skills library

From my skills to our skills

This lesson gives the org a skills library: a private repo, installed on every machine, with named owners and a graduation bar. Right now your best skills live in one project, or worse, in your personal folder. The team move is a single shared library everyone installs, so when one person improves the call-notes skill, fourteen people get the improvement. It is also the law of the course at team scale: when anyone does a task twice and encodes the skill, nobody in the org does it a third time.

You already know the simplest sharing: project skills in .claude/skills/, committed to git. That is right for project-specific procedures. For org-wide skills - the ones every project needs - the proper distribution format is a plugin.

Plugins: how a skill library ships

A plugin is a folder that bundles skills - and optionally hooks, agents, and tool connections - with a small manifest. Teams publish plugins through a marketplace, which despite the name is usually just a git repo your org controls. Install once, update by pulling.

acme-skills/
  .claude-plugin/
    plugin.json          # name, version, description
  skills/
    call-notes/
      SKILL.md
      template.md
    weekly-report/
      SKILL.md
    lead-cleanup/
      SKILL.md

• Scaffold with: claude plugin init
• Test locally before publishing: claude --plugin-dir ./acme-skills
• Iterate without restarting: /reload-plugins
• Installed plugin skills are namespaced - /acme-skills:call-notes - so they never collide with project skills.
• Score it before you ship it: claude plugin eval runs a plugin's eval suite against a no-plugin baseline, so 'the skill helps' becomes a number instead of a feeling.
• A plugin can also carry hooks, subagents, MCP servers and saved workflows, so the team guardrails from lesson three ship in the same install as the skills.

Three public marketplaces are worth browsing before building, because someone may have already built your wheel: the official one (claude-plugins-official, pre-registered), the community one (add anthropics/claude-plugins-community, install with @claude-community), and Anthropic's skills repo (anthropics/skills, which provides the document skills and skill-creator). Your team's library, though, lives in your own private repo, and plugins you enable on claude.ai sync down to every teammate's install automatically.

Stand up the library

The whole setup is an hour of work for whoever runs point, and from then on distribution is solved permanently.

1. Create a git repo named like acme-skills in your org's GitHub. Private.
2. Scaffold the plugin structure with claude plugin init - or have Claude set it up: it knows the format.
3. Move your two or three proven skills in - only ones that passed the three-clean-runs bar from lesson two. The library is for graduates, not drafts.
4. Each teammate adds the repo as a marketplace and installs: /plugin marketplace add acme/acme-skills, then /plugin install acme-skills@<marketplace-name> (the name comes from the marketplace manifest, not the repo). Plugins enabled on the org's claude.ai account sync down to every install on their own.
5. Updates flow when the repo updates - improving a skill means merging a change, not re-sending instructions to fifteen people.

Ownership and review - lightweight, but real

A shared library without ownership becomes a junk drawer by month three. The fix costs almost nothing if you install it on day one:

• Every shared skill has one named owner - the person who fixes drift and reviews changes. Names in the frontmatter or README, not 'the team'.
• Changes go through review: a second person reads the diff before merge. Skills are executable instructions for everyone, which makes them exactly as worthy of review as any shared process.
• The graduation bar in writing: three clean runs on real inputs, verification section included, side effects locked behind disable-model-invocation. Same bar for entry and for staying.
• Once a month, prune. A skill nobody ran in eight weeks gets archived. A library people trust is curated, not hoarded.

The five starter skills every org needs

Seed the library with these five - they are the ones we deploy with nearly every client, because every org has the underlying chore:

• meeting-notes - transcript in; structured notes, decisions, and owned action items out.
• weekly-report - assemble the recurring status update from project folders and exports, in your format.
• data-cleanup - dedupe, normalize, and validate a spreadsheet export, with before-and-after counts.
• doc-draft - first draft of your most common document type, from your template, in your voice.
• client-onboarding (or new-hire-onboarding) - execute your checklist: folders created, docs generated, kickoff materials prepped.

Before assigning each one, check the library: SkillsMP and the plugin marketplaces almost certainly have a meeting-notes or data-cleanup skill to start from, and adapt beats author. Install the closest match, read it end to end - including any scripts, since it is code you didn't write - and rework it to your templates and conventions. The graduation bar is the same either way; it does not care whether the first draft came from your head or from GitHub.

Build them as a team exercise: one skill per person or pair, built to the checklist, cold-tested by someone else, then merged. A 5-person team finishes the starter library in a week, and demos it as part of the capstone.

Do this now

Sources and further reading

• SkillsMP - check before assigning a build
• Agent Skills - the open standard
• Claude Code documentation