Customer Research Interview

What it does

Customer interviews fail by producing agreement. Ask whether a problem is painful and everyone says yes. This skill asks about what happened instead of what people think, extracts the language customers actually use, and writes the result into the shared ICP file so every other skill in the catalog gets sharper from it.

When to use it

• talk to my customers
• messaging research
• why do people buy from us
• customer interviews
• voice of customer

What it needs from you

• customers: who to talk to, ideally recent buyers and recent losses
• questions: what you are trying to decide
• transcripts: the interviews, once they exist

How it works

1. Decide what the research changes before writing a question. Research that would not change a decision produces a document nobody uses.
2. Interview recent buyers and recent losses. Losses tell you more and are the group nobody calls.
3. Ask about events, not opinions. What were you doing the week you started looking, rather than what matters to you in a vendor.
4. Trace the trigger. Almost every purchase has a specific event behind it, and that event is the signal you should be targeting.
5. Capture exact language. The words a customer uses for the problem are worth more than the summary of what they meant, and they belong in the copy verbatim.
6. Stop when the answers repeat. Five interviews that agree are more useful than fifteen that were run to feel thorough.
7. Write the findings into ICP.md: the trigger events, the language, and the exclusions the losses revealed.

What you get back

The interview guide, the trigger events found, the verbatim language bank, the pattern across losses, and the updated ICP block ready to write to the file.

The quality bar

• The decision the research informs is stated before the questions are written
• Losses are included, not only buyers
• Questions ask about events rather than opinions
• Language is captured verbatim
• The output is written back into ICP.md

Where it runs

• Claude Code
• Codex CLI
• Cursor
• MCP-compatible agents