# 12 Claude Skills for the Ops Your Design Team Already Runs On 12 free Claude skills for DesignOps: design critique, handoff standards, design system governance, file conventions, request intake, capacity and the handbook. - Page: https://lantern.meet-polar-bear.com/skills/designops-pack - Download: https://lantern.meet-polar-bear.com/skills/designops-pack.zip - Source: https://github.com/polar-bear-org/claude-skills/tree/main/packs/designops-pack - Price: free ## Install in Claude Code ``` /plugin marketplace add polar-bear-org/claude-skills /plugin install designops-pack@polar-bear-skills ``` ## The 12 skills you get One skill writes the map, seven write the standards the team runs on, three handle the work coming in and the people doing it, and the last compiles the lot. ### 1 · Start with the map - **Team Ops Mapper** — use when: You know the ops exist but nobody could write them down, or a quarter has passed since you last looked. Output: How your team works today, written as it is rather than as you wish it were: rituals, handoffs, tools, who decides what, and where it hurts. The first file in the project, and every other skill reads it. On a rerun it checks the standards written since against what is actually happening. ### 2 · Write the standards, one at a time - **Critique Ritual Designer** — use when: Crit is a calendar slot people dread or skip, and feedback lands as opinion. Output: The ritual on paper: cadence, format, who comes, what gets said in which order, the rules for givers and receivers, the objectives work is assessed against, and what happens to it afterwards. Claude designs the ritual; it never attends one. - **Critique Session Preparer** — use when: There is a crit on Thursday and the work needs a proper setup, or the crit just ended and nobody captured it. Output: Before: the objectives, the one question you need answered, what is out of scope today, and a walkthrough cut to three minutes. After: your raw notes turned into the reply your ritual asks for. Never an opinion on the work itself. - **Handoff Standard Writer** — use when: Engineers keep asking what the empty state looks like, and every handoff is different. Output: Your definition of ready for design-to-engineering handoff: what the package contains, every state and edge case, tokens instead of hex values, the motion spec instead of “make it feel smooth” — and the checkpoint conversation written into it, because a checklist with no checkpoint just moves the arguments later. - **Handoff Package Checker** — use when: A feature is about to go to engineering and you want to catch the gaps before they do. Output: One package walked through your standard item by item — present, missing, or unclear — as a list of what the package lacks, never what the designer forgot. It checks completeness against a standard your team wrote, not whether the design is good. - **System Governance Designer** — use when: The system drifts, people detach components, and nobody knows who decides. Output: Governance sized for your team rather than one fifty times larger: a named owner, the short written path a change takes, versioning, a deprecation rule so old things leave, the contribution path, and the decision-record format the next skill uses every time. - **System Change Recorder** — use when: Someone wants to add, change, or retire a component and the team needs a decision it can find later. Output: One proposed change run through your governance path — what exists already, who is affected, whether the coded library moves — and the decision record that outlives it, so next year's “why do we have two card patterns?” has an answer. Claude writes the record; a person makes the call, and the record says so on its first line. - **File Hygiene Standard Writer** — use when: Three files are called final and the new hire cannot find the current one. Output: How your team names, structures, marks, archives and branches its work, across the tools you actually use, on a page that fits on a wall. Every other skill that writes a file takes its names from here. ### 3 · The work coming in, and the people doing it - **Request Intake Designer** — use when: Requests arrive by DM and the lead decides by gut, every Monday. Output: The front door, all three parts: a brief short enough that requesters fill it in, triage rules that reach yes, not yet, or no without a meeting, and the wording that keeps the requester's goodwill when the answer is no — the part design teams lose the most on. - **Capacity Planner** — use when: The quarter looks impossible and you need to decide what moves before the team burns. Output: The arithmetic for a week, month or quarter: the design-days the team has against what the committed work and the intake log are asking for, what has to move, and the wording for the no. Team and stream level, never a per-person load report. - **Designer Onboarding Planner** — use when: Someone starts in two weeks and you want them to learn the team on purpose, not by osmosis. Output: A 30/60/90 plan for one named joiner, built from the standards you have already written: the buddy, their first critique as a participant before their first as a presenter, their first handoff checked by a peer, their first system contribution as a decision record. No measure of how the person is doing. ### 4 · Put it in one place - **Ways of Working Handbook Writer** — use when: You have most of the standards and want the whole thing in one readable place. Output: Everything the team has written, compiled into one document a joiner, a client or an engineer reads in twenty minutes, in the order a person meets the team's work. It carries the version of every standard it compiled, and where two standards disagree it flags the disagreement instead of picking a winner. ## Workflows - **Fix the critique** (Crit is a slot people dread, and the feedback is taste.) Team Ops Mapper → Critique Ritual Designer → Critique Session Preparer - **Fix the handoff** (Engineers keep asking what the empty state looks like.) Handoff Standard Writer → Handoff Package Checker - **Govern the design system** (The system drifts and nobody knows who decides.) System Governance Designer → System Change Recorder - **Sort the incoming work** (Requests arrive by DM and get answered by gut.) Request Intake Designer → Capacity Planner - **Put it in one place** (The standards exist, but in seven separate files.) Ways of Working Handbook Writer → Team Ops Mapper ## The quality bar - Claude designs the rituals and keeps the records; the critique stays human — no skill judges a design, scores a designer, or ranks anyone's work - The map is written as the team works today, not as you wish it worked: you cannot redesign a ritual you have never seen on paper - A standard describes what the team will actually do, not what an ideal team would do, which is what keeps it true a quarter later - The handoff check produces a to-do list, never blame: gaps are what the package lacks, not what the designer forgot - Governance is sized for your team, not copied from a company fifty times larger: a named owner and a short written path beat a review board nobody uses - Every system decision leaves a record, and the record says on its first line that a person made the call - Capacity is planned at team and stream level, never as a per-person load report: hour tracking is the fastest way to turn a planning tool into a performance tool - Onboarding is a plan for the team to keep, not a test for the joiner to pass - Where two standards disagree, the handbook flags it rather than picking a winner: the disagreement is a decision the team has not made yet ## Questions people ask ### What is in the DesignOps pack? 12 Claude skills that write down how a design team works: the ops map, the critique ritual, the handoff standard, system governance, file hygiene, request intake, capacity, designer onboarding and the ways of working handbook. ### How do I install these Claude skills? In Claude Code, two lines install all 12 at once. In Claude.ai or Claude Desktop, download the zip, open Settings, Skills, Add, and upload the skills you want. Either way it takes about five minutes. ### Do I need Claude Code to use them? No. The skills work in Claude.ai, Claude Desktop and Claude Code. In the app you upload them yourself; in Claude Code one command installs the whole pack. ### Do the skills work with ChatGPT or other assistants? They are built as Claude Skills, and installing them is a Claude feature. Each one is a plain Markdown file, so you can read it and reuse the method elsewhere, but it will not load and trigger by itself outside Claude. ### Will Claude judge our designs or our designers? No. Claude designs the rituals and keeps the records, and the critique stays human. No skill judges a design, scores a designer, or ranks anyone's work. Capacity is planned at team and stream level, never per person. ### Is the pack free? Yes. It is free to use inside your company and in client work, and not for resale. There is no signup: the download and the install command are on this page. ## About Written by Polar Bear (https://meet-polar-bear.com/). Published on Lantern (https://lantern.meet-polar-bear.com/), which turns your notes, documents and call transcripts into social post drafts you review and publish.