How To Use Claude Skills Effectively: Our AI Tip Of The Month

This month, we’re spotlighting a brand new tool we’ve started using at mmtm: Claude Skills.

Like most growing teams, we have very specific, well-honed ways of doing things. How we write meeting notes. How we review code. How our blog posts are structured and styled. Until recently, that’s been a major problem for AI tools - they’re powerful, but hard to teach your preferred way of working.

What Is Claude? 🤔

Claude is an AI assistant from Anthropic - great at writing, analysis, and coding. But out of the box, it doesn’t know your business, tone, standards - your internal “this is how we do things” rules.

That’s where Claude Skills come in.

We’ve been experimenting with them and already seeing better outputs, far less friction, and meaningful time savings.

What Are Claude Skills? 🤖

Think of Skills as onboarding documents for an AI teammate.

You define how a task should be done once - the format, tone, structure, rules - and Claude applies it consistently whenever that task comes up.

No more rewriting paragraphs of context with every prompt! 🙌

This feels like a pretty large shift, AI is fitting into our workflows, rather than forcing us to adapt to it.

Best Uses Of Claude Skills 🎯

Here are three ways we’ve found work well with Skills:

1️⃣ Meeting Summary Skill

After calls, we upload the raw transcript (from Granola) and Claude produces a Slack-ready summary in our format - we like bullet points and concise follow-up actions and it does it really well. What used to take 10 minutes now takes 1!

2️⃣ Code Review Skill

We trained Claude on our coding standards. When writing code, and its feedback now aligns with how we actually build software. This means we can ask a simple question and get a simple answer that makes sense in context without having to wage a word war with it.

We still review code, but this Skill's great for catching things before we spend time reviewing it ourselves.

3️⃣ SEO Skill

We like to write our content ourselves, but this Skill is really useful for making sure we're being SEO-savvy about it. This post, for example, was initially proposed by our SEO Skill (which has taken over from our previous 'Vibe Marketing' workflow).

We fed Claude our blog post back catalogue, LinkedIn posts, and website - it now understands our tone, structure, and positioning to make good content and keyword recommendations. The output isn’t always perfect, but much better than before.

How To Create A Custom Claude Skill 🔧

Good news: you don’t need to be technical, and you don’t need to write anything by hand. Claude can build the Skill for you:

Enable Skills

In Claude, go to Settings → Capabilities → Skills and make sure Skills are enabled.

Then turn on the Skill-Creator skill - this is what Claude uses to build other skills.
Open a Fresh Chat

Open a fresh chat and ask Claude to use the Skill-Creator to help you create a new Skill.
Describe what you want the Skill to do

Explain the task clearly and the output you expect (for example, applying a company writing style or formatting documents). Be specific. Claude may ask clarifying questions.
Download the Skill file Claude creates

Claude will generate the full Skill file and a short README explaining what it does. Download the Skill file to your computer.
Upload, turn on, and test

Go back to Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload Skill, upload the file, and make sure it’s toggled on. Test it in a new chat by asking Claude to use the Skill by name. If needed, tweak it and re-upload.

Minor Criticisms ⚖️

Skills require a paid Claude plan, and the first version of your Skill will need iteration. Team-wide sharing could also be smoother (though Anthropic are actively improving this). But these are minor trade-offs.

Ready To Try It? 🚀

Our advice: pick one repetitive task you do every week and turn it into a Skill. The time savings should add up fast.

And if you’d rather see this in action, we’re happy to walk you through how mmtm uses Claude Skills day-to-day - or even build custom Skills for your team.

👉 Get in touch and we’ll show you what’s possible.