September 2026 · 8 min read · 12 skills, free

12 Claude Skills for the Ops Your Design Team Already Runs On

Start with the map of how your team works today, then write one standard at a time: the critique ritual, the handoff, system governance, file conventions, intake, capacity, onboarding. The last skill compiles the lot into a handbook your team wrote.

01What these skills are

The ops your team already has, written down and runnable

Every design team of 20 to 200 people already has DesignOps. It has a critique ritual, a handoff standard, a governance model and an intake process. The problem is that they live in two heads and nobody can point at them.

One line holds through all of it: Claude designs the rituals and keeps the records, but the critique stays human.

No skill in this pack judges a design, scores a designer, or ranks anyone's work. The handoff check lists what a package lacks, and the capacity plan works at team and stream level.

Mechanically, each skill is one folder with a SKILL.md file. Five write a standard once, four run per instance, and three run on a cadence. Each reads what the ones before it wrote, from one Claude Project per design team.

Download all 12 skills

One zip: ready-to-install skill zips and readable SKILL.md files. No templates to fill in — the skills read each other's output by file name. Free, no signup. The same 12 skills live in our open repo, if you would rather read them before you install them.

Download the zip Browse on GitHub

Install in Claude Code

Two lines, and every skill in the pack loads at once.

/plugin marketplace add polar-bear-org/claude-skills
/plugin install designops-pack@polar-bear-skills

Using Claude on the web instead? Download the zip above and upload each skill from its install folder under Customize → Skills.

02The catalog

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

03How to use it

Pick the workflow that matches your week

Team Ops Mapper runs first and writes the map every other skill reads. Then the standards, in whatever order hurts most.

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

04Setup guide

Install it in five minutes

In Claude Code · two lines

/plugin marketplace add polar-bear-org/claude-skills
/plugin install designops-pack@polar-bear-skills

In Claude.ai or Claude Desktop · seven clicks

Download the pack, then open Settings
Unzip the pack: its skills folder holds all 12 skills. In Claude, click your name at the bottom left, then Settings.
Download the zip
Open Skills and click Add
Under Customize, choose Skills. Click Add, then Upload a skill.
Drop in a skill file
Drag the skill's file into the box, or click to browse. You can add several at once.
Pick the skill from the pack
In the pack folder, open skills, then the skill you want, and select its SKILL.md — team-ops-mapper is a good first one.
Check the preview and upload
Claude shows the skill's name and what it does. Click Upload.
Make sure it is switched on
The skill opens on its own page. Its toggle should be on.
Try it in a new chat
Type / and the skill's name, then say what you need.

Then try one

Run team-ops-mapper on how our design team works today: [paste your notes here]

Run handoff-package-checker on this feature's handoff package: [paste it here]

Run capacity-planner on this quarter's intake log: [paste it here]

Lantern for DesignOps

Turn how your design team works into posts worth reading

Lantern drafts a week of posts from your notes and call transcripts, in your voice. You review them and publish the ones you like.

100 free credits, about ten posts. No card needed.

Try for free

05Quick reference

Where to start

Your situation	Skill to run
Our process is a mess and nobody knows where to start	Team Ops Mapper
Crit is a slot people dread, and the feedback is taste	Critique Ritual Designer
You are presenting on Thursday and need the room's question	Critique Session Preparer
Engineers keep asking what the empty state looks like	Handoff Standard Writer
A feature goes to engineering tomorrow	Handoff Package Checker
The system drifts and nobody knows who decides	System Governance Designer
Someone wants to add a component to the library	System Change Recorder
Three files are called final and the new hire is lost	File Hygiene Standard Writer
Requests arrive by DM and get answered by gut	Request Intake Designer
The quarter looks impossible and something has to move	Capacity Planner
A designer starts in two weeks	Designer Onboarding Planner
The standards exist, but in seven separate files	Ways of Working Handbook Writer

06Standards

The quality bar

Every skill in the pack holds the same standard, the one we hold when we write down how a team works:

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

07FAQ

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.

08Who made this

Lantern, by Polar Bear

These skills were written by Polar Bear, a people ops consultancy that runs its own company on Claude. The pack is free, and the same skills are open on GitHub.

Lantern is Polar Bear's content workspace. It turns your notes, documents and call transcripts into drafts for LinkedIn and other networks. You review them and publish the ones you like.