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What Are Plugins?

Plugins turn Claude into a specialist for your role, team, and company. Each plugin bundles skills, slash commands, and connectors for a specific job function — giving Claude the expertise and tools to deliver professional work tailored to how your team operates. Out of the box, plugins provide Claude with strong starting points for any role. The real power comes when you customize them for your company — your tools, your terminology, your processes — so Claude works like it was built for your team.

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How Plugins Work

Every plugin follows the same simple structure: 
plugin-name/
├── .claude-plugin/plugin.json   # Manifest
├── .mcp.json                    # Tool connections
├── commands/                    # Slash commands you invoke explicitly
└── skills/                      # Domain knowledge Claude draws on automatically

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Skills

Skills encode domain expertise, best practices, and step-by-step workflows Claude needs to give you useful help. Claude draws on skills automatically when relevant. For example, a sales plugin might include skills for:
  • Call preparation
  • Account research
  • Drafting personalized outreach
  • Competitive intelligence

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Commands

Commands are explicit actions you trigger with slash commands (e.g., /finance:reconciliation, /product-management:write-spec). They’re useful for structured workflows that you initiate on demand.

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Connectors

Connectors wire Claude to external tools your role depends on — CRMs, project trackers, data warehouses, design tools, and more — via MCP servers. These connections let Claude read and write data directly from the tools you already use.

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What Makes Plugins Powerful

Every component is file-based — markdown and JSON, no code, no infrastructure, no build steps. This means:
  • Easy to create: Write markdown files with instructions and metadata
  • Easy to customize: Edit text files to match your company’s workflows
  • Easy to share: Package as a .plugin file and share with your team
  • Version controllable: Store in git and track changes over time

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Your First Plugin

There are three ways to get started:
1

Install from Marketplace

The fastest way to start is installing an existing plugin from the Plugin Marketplace. These plugins are production-ready and cover common job functions like sales, product management, finance, and more.
2

Customize an Existing Plugin

After installing a plugin, you can customize it for your organization using the cowork-plugin-management plugin. This guides you through replacing generic placeholders with your specific tools and processes.
3

Build from Scratch

For unique workflows or roles not covered by existing plugins, you can build a new plugin from scratch. The plugin structure is simple and well-documented.

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Quick Example

Here’s what a minimal plugin looks like:
.claude-plugin/plugin.json
{
  "name": "sales",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "Prospect, craft outreach, and build deal strategy faster.",
  "author": {
    "name": "Your Company"
  }
}
That’s it for the manifest! Add skills and commands by creating markdown files in their respective directories.

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Making Plugins Yours

These plugins become much more useful when you customize them for how your company actually works:
  • Swap connectors: Edit .mcp.json to point at your specific tool stack
  • Add company context: Drop your terminology, org structure, and processes into skill files
  • Adjust workflows: Modify instructions to match how your team actually does things
  • Build new plugins: Create plugins for roles and workflows we haven’t covered yet
As your team builds and shares plugins, Claude becomes a cross-functional expert. The context you define gets baked into every relevant interaction.

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Next Steps

Plugin Structure

Deep dive into the files and directories that make up a plugin

Creating Skills

Learn how to write skills that give Claude domain expertise

Creating Commands

Build slash commands for structured workflows

Adding MCP Servers

Connect Claude to your external tools and services

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