Scaling Claude beyond individual workflows - lessons from our team

Unless you have been living under a rock, you and your organization are probably using AI to some extent. I've seen a lot of posts online where people share their workflows, but what I find lacking is that all of these are centered on individual problems and workflows. Have you thought about how to scale AI across your team and the whole organization? I'd like to share my experience around that and how I did it at my current workplace.

At Freeday, we build AI products that automate the boring tasks for many of our customers, so it's natural that we also want to apply the same recipe to our own organization. For the record, we are a team of 23 people, of which 13 are engineers, and the rest are split among marketing, sales, implementation leads, design, etc. After evaluating many tools, we have settled on using Anthropic/Claude for all our workloads.

Standard AI procedures

Many industries have SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) that define routine tasks across the organization. These are usually well-defined documents that outline the procedure, but more importantly, also have an owner or a department that is in charge of maintaining those documents.

How do we replicate this with AI? That's where skills come in. It's a self-contained set of instructions that teaches AI how to handle specific tasks or workflows. Sounds familiar? Yes, sounds like an SOP!

One of the example skills is our HTML presentations - one of our sales colleagues shared his slide decks on Slack as an HTML file. They became an instant hit because Claude is amazing with these, and they were way easier to update compared to PowerPoint. So we sat down with the marketing team, sprinkled a bit of branding on them, and turned it into a skill.

Other examples include a skill for onboarding a new developer, conducting a sales call, triaging issues, debugging errors, creating tickets, etc. I'm sure if you look around, you'll find plenty of similar things in your company. Anthropic also has a library of skills, along with many folks sharing their skills online.

Skill distribution and management

Now that we have a tool, it's time to start rolling this out across the teams. This is where plugins come in. It's a repository of skills that can be easily installed and distributed across the organization. Here is an example repo of how that looks. We split it per department, where each department is in charge of its own skills. As an individual, you can choose which department skills you want to install, e.g., the engineering team might not need skills from the sales department. For our small organization, having a single repository is fine, but I can imagine a bigger org where each department has a dedicated repo.

I think Anthropic does a great job of targeting organizations. With plugins, we have a centralized place where we can store, maintain, and version our skills. As an organization admin, you have full control of which skills come preinstalled across Claude Code and Claude Cowork. This also includes managing permissions for your MCPs. Our company is ISO 27001 certified, so being able to prove that we have security controls in place goes a long way!

One of the final challenges was how to ensure that everyone can contribute to our skills repository. You must be thinking - not everyone in my organization can code? AI proves us wrong; it's such an amazing enabler. I sat down with folks in sales, marketing, and other departments to show them how they can use Claude Code! Most of them use Cowork on desktop, so switching tabs didn't feel like an unknown territory. We worked together to distinguish the two. Code is solely used for updating/adding skills, but so far, it has worked perfectly. For me, the most important part is that people weren't left out just because they are less tech-savvy.

Gotchas and closing thoughts

Anthropic has 3 products - Chat, Cowork, and Code. In all honesty, this is very confusing for many people. For a multi-billion-dollar company, I'd expect a more streamlined product, but hey, they still provide a lot of value for our team. That being said, the skills/plugins setup I described earlier does not work for the Chat product. You can add skills in Chat via the organization admin UI, which is annoying because you have to copy/paste stuff. By doing this, you also have to duplicate skills and maintain them in 2 places. My honest advice is - don't use Chat, you can achieve the same with Cowork/Code, which is also what everyone in our team does.

It took time to figure all of this out, but Anthropic documentation was a valuable source. I can also recommend their official courses, especially for people starting out with their tools. If you have done something similar in your organization, I'd love to hear about it. This space is evolving fast, and I'm open to learning from other people's experiences. Let's connect via LinkedIn.