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Ideal Customer Profile

Identify the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) from research data with demographics, behaviors, JTBD, and needs. Use when defining your ICP, analyzing PMF survey data, or understanding who your best customers are.

By phuryn
26k2.7kUpdated 1 month agoMIT

Skill Content

# Ideal Customer Profile

## Overview
Identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) from research and survey data. This skill synthesizes customer research to define the customer most likely to find value, retain, and expand with your product.

## When to Use
- Defining ICP from product-market fit survey data
- Targeting high-value customer segments
- Analyzing customer success and expansion patterns
- Prioritizing sales and marketing efforts
- Evaluating new customer opportunities for fit
- Refining target market definition

## ICP Framework Components

### Demographics
Who are they from a firmographic and personal perspective?
- Company size (employees, revenue)
- Industry or vertical
- Geographic location
- Job title and department
- Years of experience in role
- Education and background
- Organizational structure and reporting

### Behaviors
How do they work and make decisions?
- How they discover and evaluate solutions
- Buying process and decision-making timeline
- Technical literacy and product adoption speed
- Collaboration style (solo decision vs committee)
- Change management and adoption style
- Tool switching frequency
- Community involvement and peer influence

### Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)
What are they trying to accomplish?
- Primary job/goal they're trying to achieve
- Secondary jobs that support the primary job
- Emotional jobs (how they want to feel)
- Social jobs (status and perception)
- Jobs they avoid or want to eliminate
- Frequency and importance of each job
- Success metrics for completing job

### Needs and Pain Points
What problems does your product solve?
- Specific pain points they experience
- Current workarounds and limitations
- Impact on productivity or outcomes
- Cost or time burden of the problem
- Emotional frustration levels
- Barriers to solving the problem
- Available budget to solve
- Competing priorities

## How It Works

### Step 1: Gather Customer Data
Collect research about actual and potential customers:
- Product-market fit survey responses
- Customer interview transcripts
- Trial or freemium user behavior data
- Customer feedback and support tickets
- Churn analysis and customer lifecycle data
- Win/loss analysis from sales
- Competitor customer analysis

### Step 2: Segment by Value
Identify customer cohorts and their value:
- Highest LTV (lifetime value) customers
- Fastest time-to-value customers
- Lowest churn rate customers
- Highest expansion/upsell customers
- Most enthusiastic/engaged customers
- Best reference/case study potential
- Most aligned with product vision

### Step 3: Profile Demographics
Extract firmographic patterns:
- Common company sizes (employee count, revenue)
- Industry verticals and sub-verticals
- Geographic concentrations
- Typical department and reporting structure
- Budget holders and budget available
- Company stage (startup, growth, enterprise)
- Company culture indicators

### Step 4: Identify Behaviors
Map decision-making and adoption patterns:
- How they discovered your product (channel)
- Evaluation process and timeline
- Key stakeholders in decision
- Obstacles during sales process
- Product adoption speed and breadth
- Team involvement in onboarding
- Frequency of feature usage
- Support and service needs

### Step 5: Define JTBD
Articulate what they're trying to accomplish:
- Primary job/goal (functional job)
- Emotional dimensions (how they want to feel)
- Social dimensions (team and stakeholder impact)
- Success metrics (how they measure success)
- Context and constraints (when, where, with whom)
- Competing jobs and priorities
- Importance ranking of various jobs

### Step 6: Document Pain Points and Needs
Synthesize specific problem areas:
- Before state (current situation and frustrations)
- Desired after state (ideal future state)
- Gap size and impact quantification
- Emotional dimensions of the problem
- Resource constraints preventing solutions
- Skepticism or hesitations
- Success criteria for solution

## Input Format
Use $ARGUMENTS to pass:
- Research data (surveys, interviews, transcripts)
- Customer success/metrics data
- Product usage analytics
- Sales activity and win/loss data
- Existing customer database
- Competitive intelligence

## Output
A comprehensive ICP definition including:
- Firmographic profile (company size, industry, location)
- Behavioral profile (buying patterns, adoption style)
- Complete JTBD mapping (functional, emotional, social jobs)
- Top 5-7 pain points and specific needs
- Quantified impact metrics (cost of problem, value of solution)
- Decision-making process and key stakeholders
- Typical customer journey and timeline
- Go-to-market implications and messaging
- Disqualification criteria (who is NOT a good fit)
- High-value segment within ICP (ideal-of-the-ideal)

## Framework
Based on Jobs to Be Done theory by Clayton Christensen and customer profiling methodology. Combines behavioral data with motivational insights to define actionable customer profiles.

## Tips
- Use quantitative and qualitative data together
- Interview 10+ high-value customers for pattern identification
- Look for non-obvious demographic patterns (outliers can be high-value)
- Define both ideal ICP and acceptable secondary segments
- Revisit ICP quarterly as you gather more customer data
- Use ICP to evaluate all new sales opportunities
- Share ICP across entire organization (marketing, sales, product)
- Remember: ICP should drive focus, not exclude all others

---

### Further Reading

- [5 GTM Principles You Should Know as a PM](https://www.productcompass.pm/p/5-gtm-principles-with-frameworks-templates)
- [How to Design a Value Proposition Customers Can't Resist?](https://www.productcompass.pm/p/how-to-design-value-proposition-template)

How to use

  1. Copy the skill content above
  2. Create a .claude/skills/pm-skills-ideal-customer-profile directory in your project (or ~/.claude/skills/pm-skills-ideal-customer-profile to use it in every project)
  3. Save the content as .claude/skills/pm-skills-ideal-customer-profile/SKILL.md
  4. Claude Code loads it automatically when the task matches, or run /pm-skills-ideal-customer-profile to invoke it directly

GitHub stars License: MIT PRs Welcome Tests Companion: pm-skills Companion: burnstop Companion: claude-usage

PM Skills Marketplace: The AI Operating System for Better Product Decisions

68 PM skills and 42 chained workflows across 9 plugins. Claude Code, Cowork, and more. From discovery to strategy, execution, launch, growth, and shipping AI-built code.

PM Skills marketplace: skills, commands, and all 9 plugins at a glance

Designed for Claude Code and Cowork. Skills compatible with other AI assistants.

Start Here

New idea? → /discover
Need strategic clarity? → /strategy
Writing a PRD? → /write-prd
Planning a launch? → /plan-launch
Defining metrics? → /north-star

If this project helps you, ⭐ the repo.

Why PM Skills Marketplace?

Generic AI gives you text. PM Skills Marketplace gives you structure.

Each skill encodes a proven PM framework — discovery, assumption mapping, prioritization, strategy — and walks you through it step by step. You get the rigor of Teresa Torres, Marty Cagan, and Alberto Savoia built into your daily workflow, not sitting on a bookshelf.

The result: better product decisions, not just faster documents.

How It Works (Skills, Commands, Plugins)

Example prompts: a skill and two commands (/write-prd, /ship-check) in action

Skills are the building blocks of the marketplace. Each skill gives Claude domain knowledge, analytical frameworks, or a guided workflow for a specific PM task. Some skills also work as reusable foundations that multiple commands share.

Skills are loaded automatically when relevant to the conversation — no explicit invocation needed. If needed (e.g., prioritizing skills over general knowledge), you can force loading skills with /plugin-name:skill-name or /skill-name (Claude will add the prefix).

Commands are user-triggered workflows invoked with /command-name. They chain one or more skills into an end-to-end process. For example, /discover chains four skills together: brainstorm-ideas → identify-assumptions → prioritize-assumptions → brainstorm-experiments.

Plugins group related skills and commands into installable packages. Each plugin covers a PM domain — discovery, strategy, execution, and so on. Installing the marketplace gives you all 9 plugins at once.

Commands use skills. Some skills serve multiple commands. Some skills (like prioritization-frameworks or opportunity-solution-tree) are standalone references that Claude draws on whenever relevant — no command needed.

Commands are designed to flow into each other, matching the PM workflow. After any command completes, it suggests relevant next commands — just follow the prompts.

Installation

Claude Cowork (recommended for non-developers)

  1. Open Customize (bottom-left)
  2. Go to Browse pluginsPersonal+
  3. Select Add marketplace from GitHub
  4. Enter: phuryn/pm-skills

All 9 plugins install automatically. You get both commands (/discover, /strategy, etc.) and skills.

Installing PM Skills in Claude Cowork

Claude Code (CLI)

# Step 1: Add the marketplace
claude plugin marketplace add phuryn/pm-skills

# Step 2: Install individual plugins
claude plugin install pm-toolkit@pm-skills
claude plugin install pm-product-strategy@pm-skills
claude plugin install pm-product-discovery@pm-skills 
claude plugin install pm-market-research@pm-skills 
claude plugin install pm-data-analytics@pm-skills
claude plugin install pm-marketing-growth@pm-skills
claude plugin install pm-go-to-market@pm-skills
claude plugin install pm-execution@pm-skills
claude plugin install pm-ai-shipping@pm-skills

Codex CLI (OpenAI)

Codex reads the same plugin marketplace file as Claude Code, so you can install PM Skills natively — no conversion or file-copying needed:

# Step 1: Add the marketplace
codex plugin marketplace add phuryn/pm-skills

# Step 2: Install the plugins you want
codex plugin add pm-toolkit@pm-skills
codex plugin add pm-product-strategy@pm-skills
codex plugin add pm-product-discovery@pm-skills
codex plugin add pm-market-research@pm-skills
codex plugin add pm-data-analytics@pm-skills
codex plugin add pm-marketing-growth@pm-skills
codex plugin add pm-go-to-market@pm-skills
codex plugin add pm-execution@pm-skills
codex plugin add pm-ai-shipping@pm-skills

What you get: every skill (the PM frameworks), available to Codex and invocable by name. Install whole plugins rather than cherry-picking individual skills — a workflow usually relies on several skills that ship together.

What's different from Claude Code: the /slash commands (/discover, /write-prd, …) install but don't run as Codex slash commands — Codex plugins don't expose commands. To run a workflow, just describe the steps in plain language, for example:

Run product discovery on [your idea]: brainstorm options, map assumptions, prioritize the risky ones, then design experiments — pause between each step.

Optional — let Codex turn the workflows into skills. Because the command files ship inside each installed plugin, you can ask Codex to convert the ones you use most:

Read the command files in the pm-execution plugin and create equivalent Codex skills for the workflows I use most often.

This is a best-effort, model-driven conversion (some Claude-specific command syntax won't translate), but it's a quick way to get the guided workflows on Codex without leaving the CLI.

Other AI assistants (skills only)

The skills/*/SKILL.md files follow the universal skill format and work with any tool that reads it. Commands (/slash-commands) are Claude-specific.

ToolHow to useWhat works
Gemini CLICopy skill folders to .gemini/skills/Skills only
OpenCodeCopy skill folders to .opencode/skills/Skills only
CursorCopy skill folders to .cursor/skills/Skills only
KiroCopy skill folders to .kiro/skills/Skills only
# Example: copy all skills for OpenCode (project-level)
for plugin in pm-*/; do
  mkdir -p .opencode/skills/
  cp -r "$plugin/skills/"* .opencode/skills/ 2>/dev/null
done

# Example: copy all skills for Gemini CLI (global)
for plugin in pm-*/; do
  cp -r "$plugin/skills/"* ~/.gemini/skills/ 2>/dev/null
done

Available Plugins

<details> <summary><strong>1. pm-product-discovery</strong> — Ideation, experiments, assumption testing, OSTs, interviews (13 skills, 5 commands)</summary>

Skills (13):

  • brainstorm-ideas-existing — Multi-perspective ideation for existing products (PM, Designer, Engineer)
  • brainstorm-ideas-new — Ideation for new products in initial discovery
  • brainstorm-experiments-existing — Design experiments to test assumptions for existing products
  • brainstorm-experiments-new — Design lean startup pretotypes for new products (Alberto Savoia)
  • identify-assumptions-existing — Identify risky assumptions across Value, Usability, Viability, and Feasibility
  • identify-assumptions-new — Identify risky assumptions across 8 risk categories including Go-to-Market, Strategy, and Team
  • prioritize-assumptions — Prioritize assumptions using an Impact × Risk matrix with experiment suggestions
  • prioritize-features — Prioritize a feature backlog based on impact, effort, risk, and strategic alignment
  • analyze-feature-requests — Analyze and categorize customer feature requests by theme and strategic fit
  • opportunity-solution-tree — Build an Opportunity Solution Tree (Teresa Torres) — outcome → opportunities → solutions → experiments
  • interview-script — Create a structured customer interview script with JTBD probing questions
  • summarize-interview — Summarize an interview transcript into JTBD, satisfaction signals, and action items
  • metrics-dashboard — Design a product metrics dashboard with North Star, input metrics, and alert thresholds

Commands (5):

  • /discover — Full discovery cycle: ideation → assumption mapping → prioritization → experiment design
  • /brainstorm — Multi-perspective ideation (ideas|experiments × existing|new)
  • /triage-requests — Analyze and prioritize a batch of feature requests
  • /interview — Prepare an interview script or summarize a transcript (prep|summarize)
  • /setup-metrics — Design a product metrics dashboard

Examples:

Skills:

  • What are the riskiest assumptions for our AI writing assistant idea?
  • Help me build an Opportunity Solution Tree for improving user activation
  • Prioritize these 12 feature requests from our enterprise customers [attach CSV]

Commands:

  • /discover AI-powered meeting summarizer for remote teams
  • /brainstorm experiments existing — We need to reduce churn in our onboarding flow
  • /interview prep — We're interviewing enterprise buyers about their procurement workflow
</details> <details> <summary><strong>2. pm-product-strategy</strong> — Vision, business models, pricing, competitive landscape (12 skills, 5 commands)</summary>

Product strategy, vision, business models, pricing, and macro environment analysis. Covers the full strategic toolkit from vision crafting through competitive landscape scanning.

Skills (12):

  • product-strategy — Comprehensive 9-section Product Strategy Canvas (vision → defensibility)
  • startup-canvas — Startup Canvas combining Product Strategy (9 sections) + Business Model — an alternative to BMC and Lean Canvas for new products
  • product-vision — Craft an inspiring, achievable, and emotional product vision
  • value-proposition — 6-part JTBD value proposition (Who, Why, What before, How, What after, Alternatives)
  • lean-canvas — Lean Canvas business model for startups and new products
  • business-model — Business Model Canvas with all 9 building blocks
  • monetization-strategy — Brainstorm 3–5 monetization strategies with validation experiments
  • pricing-strategy — Pricing models, competitive analysis, willingness-to-pay, and price elasticity
  • swot-analysis — SWOT analysis with actionable recommendations
  • pestle-analysis — Macro environment: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental
  • porters-five-forces — Competitive forces analysis (rivalry, suppliers, buyers, substitutes, new entrants)
  • ansoff-matrix — Growth strategy mapping across markets and products

Commands (5):

  • /strategy — Create a complete 9-section Product Strategy Canvas
  • /business-model — Explore business models (lean|full|startup|value-prop|all)
  • /value-proposition — Design a value proposition using the 6-part JTBD template
  • /market-scan — Macro environment analysis combining SWOT + PESTLE + Porter's + Ansoff
  • /pricing — Design a pricing strategy with competitive analysis and experiments

Examples:

Skills:

  • Compare Lean Canvas vs Business Model Canvas vs Startup Canvas for my marketplace startup
  • Design a value proposition for our AI writing assistant targeting non-native English speakers
  • Run a Porter's Five Forces analysis for the project management SaaS market

Commands:

  • `/strategy B2B project manage

View source on GitHub