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Agent skill

Retention Engagement

by RefoundAI in RefoundAI/lenny-skills

Help users identify the drivers of long-term retention and implement behavioral mechanics that keep customers coming back.

MITAuto-check passed

Install Retention Engagement

skills CLI
$ npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill retention-engagement -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install RefoundAI/lenny-skills retention-engagement --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/RefoundAI/lenny-skills.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/skills/retention-engagement .claude/skills/retention-engagement && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
retention-engagement
GitHub stars
1.4k
Token cost
~1.3k tokens
SKILL.md length
727 words
Files
3 (incl. references)
Skills in repo
76
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

Help users identify the drivers of long-term retention and implement behavioral mechanics that keep customers coming back.

  • Works in 4 steps: Define metrics - Guide the user in… → Audit friction - Analyze the onboarding… → Design habits - Suggest psychological… → …
  • SKILL.md covers How to Help, Core Principles, Questions to Help Users and Common Mistakes to Flag, plus 2 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Retention Engagement is an agent skill from RefoundAI/lenny-skills. Help users identify the drivers of long-term retention and implement behavioral mechanics that keep customers coming back. This guide focuses on measuring the survival curve of users and optimizing the product environment for high frequency usage.

Its SKILL.md is about 1.3k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. The skill folder holds 3 other files, including reference files (for example `references/artifacts.md` and `references/guest-insights.md`).

The repository describes itself as: 86 product management skills from Lenny's Podcast for Claude Code and AI agents. Hiring, user research, strategy, shipping, and more. The licence is MIT.

Example prompts

  • “/retention-engagement”

Workflow steps

4 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. Define metrics - Guide the user in identifying their specific activation milestones and setting up cohort-based retention tracking.
  2. Audit friction - Analyze the onboarding process and core user flows to eliminate technical and mental hurdles that cause early drop-off.
  3. Design habits - Suggest psychological mechanics like streaks, loss aversion, or mounting value to increase switching costs.
  4. Benchmark performance - Compare current churn and retention rates against industry-specific 'Good' and 'Great' standards to prioritize…

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 13598cc. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Retention Engagement loads about 1.3k tokens when it runs, and up to ~35k if it reads all its reference files. Until then it costs about 67 tokens; SKILL.md has 727 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~67
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.3k
With references · SKILL.md plus every file in references/, read only if the agent opens them
~35k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from RefoundAI/lenny-skills at commit 13598cc, republished under its MIT licence (© RefoundAI). 727 words, ~1,267 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/retention-engagement/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder). This skill also uses 2 other files; get the full folder from GitHub.
name
retention-engagement
description
Help users identify the drivers of long-term retention and implement behavioral mechanics that keep customers coming back. This guide focuses on measuring the survival curve of users and optimizing the product environment for high frequency usage.

Retention and Engagement Mastery

Build sustainable growth by embedding products into workflows and creating compounding user value.

Help the user with retention and engagement mastery using insights from 11 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

  1. Define metrics - Guide the user in identifying their specific activation milestones and setting up cohort-based retention tracking.
  2. Audit friction - Analyze the onboarding process and core user flows to eliminate technical and mental hurdles that cause early drop-off.
  3. Design habits - Suggest psychological mechanics like streaks, loss aversion, or mounting value to increase switching costs.
  4. Benchmark performance - Compare current churn and retention rates against industry-specific 'Good' and 'Great' standards to prioritize interventions.

Core Principles

Retention before monetization

Albert Cheng: "User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one."

Prioritize a foundation of high user retention over aggressive early monetization to ensure sustainable long term growth.

Onboarding as a retention driver

Crystal W: "Well, based on our data about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common, considering customer files are chalked full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave."

Treat the first experience as the most critical point for retention because users are prone to abandon a product at the first sign of friction.

Survival curve measurement

Dan Hockenmaier: "Second would be retention. So at what rate are these customers activating? And then have some kind of basic monthly retention curve. So how long are they staying around? What's the survival rate in each of these? And those kind of stack over time."

Effective retention management requires tracking the long term survival curve of user cohorts rather than just high level active user counts.

Strategic loss aversion

Jackson Shuttleworth: "Streaks is the most impactful feature. We have, right now, over 9 million users with a year plus streak. If you look at the numbers, I think it's been our biggest growth lever. What Duolingo really focuses on is, how do we help users build habits around language learning?"

Use mechanics like streaks to create a sense of progress that users want to protect, providing a powerful motivation to return daily.

The churn ceiling

Jason Cohen: "There's a maximum ceiling of how big you could ever be thanks to cancellations. And when you know what that number is, it's much more real and visceral and scary."

Acknowledge that high churn creates a mathematical limit on business size that no amount of acquisition can solve.

Show full SKILL.md (281 more words)Show less
Mounting loss

Sarah Tavel: "The test for me, of whether you're building a product that has the ingredients to create a retentive product on a micro level, just at the user level, is that the product should get better the more you use it, and you'll have more to lose by leaving it."

Ensure the product becomes more valuable with every use, making the cost of abandoning the platform higher over time.

Questions to Help Users

  • "What is the single action a user must take to realize the core value of your product?"
  • "At what specific point in time does your cohort retention curve usually flatten out?"
  • "Does your product provide utility to a single player before a network or team is established?"
  • "What valuable data or progress would a user lose if they stopped using your product today?"
  • "Is your monthly logo churn rate currently above or below the critical 3 percent threshold?"
  • "Are your retention metrics currently masking the behavior of free users by blending them with paid customers?"

Common Mistakes to Flag

  • Relying on acquisition to fix churn - Marketing cannot overcome the mathematical growth ceiling created by a high cancellation rate.
  • Using noise events for activity - Broad metrics like app opens or screen views inflate active user counts without reflecting genuine value delivery.
  • Ignoring involuntary churn - Failing to distinguish between payment failures and product dissatisfaction leads to ineffective recovery strategies.
  • Delayed activation efforts - Waiting too long to connect a user to value allows them to drop off before they experience the product's benefits.

Deep Dive

For all 50 sourced insights from 11 guests, see references/guest-insights.md

  • Growth Model
  • Acquisition Channels
  • User Onboarding Activation
  • Referrals Word Of Mouth

© RefoundAI, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

SKILL.md and 2 other files (references) in skills/retention-engagement of RefoundAI/lenny-skills.

  • SKILL.md
  • references/artifacts.md
  • references/guest-insights.md

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 13598cc

Compare with similar skills

Retention Engagement next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Retention Engagement compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
Retention Engagement this skillRefoundAI/lenny-skills1.4k—~1.3kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Implementsickn33/agentic-awesome-skills47k5 repos~306Automated safety check: PassMIT
Designing Adversary Engagement With Mitre Engagemukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills34k—~3kAutomated safety check: PassApache-2.0
Implementcodewhale-hq/Codewhale41k—~190Automated safety check: PassMIT
Culture Retentionsickn33/agentic-awesome-skills47k1 repos~3.8kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Driver Retention Planmohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills1.4k—~1.5kAutomated safety check: PassMIT

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Questions about Retention Engagement

What does Retention Engagement do?

Help users identify the drivers of long-term retention and implement behavioral mechanics that keep customers coming back. Retention Engagement is an agent skill from RefoundAI/lenny-skills. Help users identify the drivers of long-term retention and implement behavioral mechanics that keep customers coming back.

How do I install Retention Engagement in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill retention-engagement -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/retention-engagement in RefoundAI/lenny-skills) into .claude/skills/retention-engagement in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Retention Engagement in Codex?

Run `npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill retention-engagement -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/retention-engagement in RefoundAI/lenny-skills) into .agents/skills/retention-engagement in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Retention Engagement in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill retention-engagement -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/retention-engagement, .gemini/skills/retention-engagement, .github/skills/retention-engagement and .opencode/skills/retention-engagement in your project.

What does Retention Engagement need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Retention Engagement is instructions for the agent only.

Does Retention Engagement access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Retention Engagement safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Retention Engagement use?

Retention Engagement is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Retention Engagement use?

About 1.3k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 5.1k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full. Its references folder adds about 34k tokens, read only when the agent opens those files.

What are the alternatives to Retention Engagement?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Retention Engagement: Implement (sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills, 47k stars), Designing Adversary Engagement With Mitre Engage (mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills, 34k stars), Implement (codewhale-hq/Codewhale, 41k stars) and Culture Retention (sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills, 47k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Retention Engagement?

RefoundAI (a GitHub organization) maintains it in RefoundAI/lenny-skills, which has 1,382 GitHub stars. The repository holds 76 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on July 16, 2026.

Source: RefoundAI/lenny-skills on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.